GIFT BOOKS : ARCHITECTURE : Buildings with Beautiful Bodies, Books with Lovely Limbs

It is an ancient equation: a book is a building. The cover opens and closes like a door. There is frequently an architectural frontispiece or a decorative portico in which the book’s title is set like a firm’s name carved on the lintel. In the entry, we may find a table of contents. At the back there is often an index or directory: furniture is on the fourth floor between towels and rugs. A book is customarily referred to as a volume, and some volumes are built of stories, the way poems are often composed of dwellings which Italians call stanzas. Occasionally, the text may be arranged in columns. The term “text” emerges like a bird from the same nest as “technical” and “texture.” It refers to the craft of built form. That’s why an architect is a master builder: he covers, contains, and controls.

A book is like a building in ways that go beyond simply sharing a back or front, or having bays and bellies. Although books are made of pages--most of which are covered with lines or columns of type representing a lengthy spool of words which the reader is at liberty to unroll at her will and leisure--these words, these lines, these pages, exist together and as continuously as the walls and floors and windows of buildings do.

A building can be experienced only a bit at a time, but unless we have an imperious guide, we can linger as long as we like in a favorite room to enjoy the fall of light like a lovely line of verse upon a wall, or repeat a passage, enter an open upstairs window like a burglar dressed as Santa, or feed late at night as Dagwood does on the juicy parts. Moreover, even if a book is a stack of pages sewn or glued at one end so as to flop over easily and lie flat, these pages support one another, fan out into the section which is coming next, lead the reader’s eye and mind, as narrative does, down corridors dim with distant meanings. When you tip an open book over to preserve your place, it assumes the shape of a pitched roof. Look inside and read all the people.

Like houses along a street, books rest in library rows. The sound of their incessant quarrels will be heard only by the volumes to be built later. Within the book, like an inhabited building, there is a consciousness expressed in concepts, a consciousness we readers vivify so we feel and dream and desire as it does, and the image in the glossy colored photograph is what we see when we look outside.

When Christmas comes around, and we are looking for gifts to please or impress friends, what sort of object shall we offer them? What better than a building with a beautiful body, a book with lovely limbs and Technicolor views?

Books about architecture are indirectly about themselves, and, like our bodies and the characters they contain, are made of tensions and irresolutions, accords and contradictions, as when a book about prisons clangs its cover behind you, or a discussion of poverty is richly garbed and extravagantly gabled. Customarily, such volumes try to combine, by force or persuasion, four snakily competitive graphic systems: a text, which will be normally torn, itself, between a commitment to its subject and the ambitions of its author--to be witty, to be arty, to be wise; a sprinkle of diagrams and drawings, which will want to be revelatory, instructive and clear, while also being appealing, decorative, and advanced; a mighty parade of pictures which will not be certain what they should be doing--documenting a bunch of built objects, making a facade and its architect look good, or celebrating instead their own beautiful selves; and, not at all least, the book itself, weighty enough in the hand to be worth the price, yet not too heavy to hold, creating an arena where margins will vie with text for prominence, placement will dominate the diagrams and pictures, and design will overcome content in order to gain the approval of Caesar’s thumb.

However, to hedge my metaphor like a questionable bet, sometimes a book is more like a motorcar, a sightseeing bus in fact; and we all know how annoying such tours are, with a bored guide droning through a poorly adjusted mike about the scenes we are passing too swiftly to take in, trying to make out beyond the smeary glass the house the robo-voice says the Feds rented to spy on Bertold Brecht when the notorious Left-Leaner lived in L.A.; but then how else will we get to glimpse the houses of the stars and enjoy a little gossip like sweet Muzak on the way?

James Steele’s LOS ANGELES ARCHITECTURE: The Contemporary Condition (Phaidon: $49.95; 240 pp.) the first of our body/building/books, takes us on a visit to the city’s freshly famous public objects, each looking like a toy just unwrapped, and so fresh the pigeon’s haven’t pooped them into the urban texture yet; but don’t expect the exquisite Schindler house on King’s Road to look the way it does here, if you visit it on your own, since this is a special tour whose press agent views can be had only between these covers.

Steele’s clear and cogent commentary is squeezed into narrow columns of teeny type to accommodate the large and glamorous photos which Tim Street-Porter and various architectural offices have provided, while in the captions, equally pinched, the type loses even its timid serifs. The compositional contrast becomes almost poignant when you realize, while reading, that the commentary is trying to create just that historical continuity and wider communal view which promo photos cannot of course provide. Nevertheless it is a good ride with a good guide, and not merely a little look-see at the mansions of Wright, Schindler, Morphosis, and Gehry, but at many others besides.

The presentation of the text in Alan Hess’ hugely entertaining and informative VIVA LAS VEGAS: After-Hours Architecture (Chronicle Books: $18.95; 128 pp.) is every bit as mimsily done, but there is more of it, and the balance between the book’s illustrations and its printed matter is far better, since the photographs are not exclusively of full-breasted-or-black bearded newborns sprung from the brow of Zeus, but document the history of the Strip, following it from its crossroads infancy into its gaudy youth and flamboyant middle-age, as the chronicle of the piracies of Bugsy Siegel, Wilbur Clark, Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorian, and countless other tycoons continues: a development which resembles a desert road down which dough-re-me once tumbled like the weed, and over which, now, money dryly streams, blown by greed’s sour commercial breath. If cities are women, then Las Vegas is a whore in a neon nightie. Who could resist the lure of her story, which answers every customer’s question: how did a callow country girl like you get into this business? Her answer is, of course, that she turned out a lot better than she might have--she could be turning tricks at a truck stop.

If Las Vegas is, on one view, a demonstration of how nothing would have been better than something, desert preferable to the Dunes, Rizzoli’s sumptuous FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: The Masterworks (Rizzoli: $60; 311 pp.) is a what-a-whiz turn by the Star of the penciled Page and Oriental Screen himself, for here are 38 of the master’s greatest roles, each richly re-shot and brightened up as if Ted Turner had tinted them himself. These handsome photographs make even some of Wright’s later work, which has often looked a little soggy to this eye, seem firm and merely ripe. This is Book as holy shrine, and you can place it appropriately in any modest niche your hovel has, where it will glow with Wright’s genius, while attesting to the good taste of its giver as well as the good luck of the getter.

The text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer is helpful without being hackneyed, and reverential without being drippy. Moreover, we know that the wonders we see through this book/body’s eyes are not lies of fine photography, but there in triplicate, for they are also and inadvertently a denunciation of our time: in cities of so many unreal, unworthy, ramshackle things, in countrysides of comfortable banality, and suburbs composed of massfabs cowering on their slabs, these images bitterly remind us how we adjust more easily to the squalid than to the sublime, prefer the pretty to the beautiful, and common falsehood to the simplest truth.

Alvin Rosenbaum’s USONIA: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Design for America (The Preservation Press: $29.95; 216 pp.) does a very good job of making clear, concrete, and even persuasive, Wright’s frequently ridiculed schemes for the design and production of replicable housing in an un-urban city. This handsome, very brief book huffs and puffs itself up in a rather happy way, its large light print like planted rows dividing the page into wide stripes of white. There’s no shrinking of type here out of fear of competing illustrations which are decently sized when they appear, sometimes drawn or domestic, always black and white.

Rosenbaum grew up in a Usonian house built for his parents by Wright in 1940. He combines his remembrances of what life was like there with a little history of the principles of the house’s construction, Wright’s vision of a Broadacre City, and connects this in an appealing way to Henry Ford’s own utopian dreams and FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge Depression driven Federal land development around Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals. The wedding is wonderfully insightful and does a good deal to rescue many of these notions from the realm of nonsense where they’ve been consigned. The decentralized city of Wright’s dream is now not only feasible, it may be technologically as well as morally necessary, since the density apparently demanded by “high” culture, and the civility possible only in small communities (as it is often argued), might conceivably be served by the wireless roads of modern electronics.

Peter Blake’s gossipacious recollection of modernism’s high-rise old times, NO PLACE LIKE UTOPIA: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 384 pp.), has harsh words for Frank Lloyd Wright’s public persona, hardly surprising, since a severe judgment is surely deserved; but I suspect that Blake, with his admirable ideals and sweet dreams for architecture could never square the uncompromising character of Wright’s monumental work with his nearly certifiable megalomania; so if he can’t find unfair things to say about Wright’s buildings, he will console himself by disparaging the ideas behind them, and the building skills these structures are so often said to manifest.

Blake managed to Boswell himself into every significant architectural circle that got drawn anywhere near him, except for Wright’s, and his description of their encounters is amusing, as are most of his memories of MOMA, and the account of his editorial tenure at “Architectural Forum,” as well a stint at its successor, “Architecture Plus.” Blake’s recollections of Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Mies, Marcel Breuer or Charles Eames (to name only a few of the figures of fame and fortune--Gropius, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei--who waltz through these pages), are both rich and tart and appear generally fair. He is closed-mouthed concerning his private life and modest about his own work, though both his books and his buildings are given more space than his wives; but I suspect that the center of his life was to be at the center of the lives of others--so it certainly seems--and that his strong suit was to know and be known by, which put him in the perfect place for an editor, curator, and critic to be.

Deyan Sudjic’s THE 100 MILE CITY (Harcourt Brace: $18.95; 320 pp.) is the most important book in my little holiday bag, though that’s not because it has a great bod or blue eyes or paper slick as ice. Like Peter Blake’s book, its design is a little clunky, though if you like left margins you’ll love it. This is a volume whose text actually has a floor plan. Moving back and forth between its principal cities (London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo), Sudjic’s data-dotted but swift prose picks out determining points of urban interest and influence--such as theme parks and malls, airports and public housing (unfortunately, he fails to discuss jails and the collapse of the Court House)--and he has fascinating and continuously persuasive things to say about their formation, nature, and implications.

Sudjic, while he puts down the pluses like a good boy, has an unsentimental heart, a hard eye, and an acidulous tongue, as well as the good sense to know that bad news provokes the best prose. He has (I think properly) little patience with Jane Jacobs’ pieties, or for pillow-headed cures for urban ills like “making communities,” and no time for the utopian controls which Peter Blake misses in our post-mod mess, and none for the damaging hope that good architecture will make good citizens, or the nostalgic soaks in formaldehyde which delight some preservationists.

He believes that it is the nature of the city to be both sick and well, ugly and handsome, exhilarating and frightening, simultaneously in decline and development, full of vice, spotted by virtue, displaying every age and income, as well, these days, as every hair crimp, skin tone, vocal cord, and courtship custom, at once brash and naive and world-weary, obnoxious and seductive. He sees much of the future of our cities in L.A. without becoming arrogantly French. He believes that you can’t step into the same city twice, and has no wish to turn its tumultuous stream into a dull and peacefully obedient canal.

Perhaps books aren’t like buildings, after all; perhaps they are more like cities, and maybe what we should look for in the good ones is that vibrancy of line, that tension between display and design, image and idea, manner and message, outlook and insight--oh yes--that ceaseless confusion of treasure and trash, which signifies an ongoing life.