BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : The Armchair Architect

Books about design and architecture continue to flow from the publishing houses at a dazzling rate and are so seductively designed that, esoteric as they often are, they compete very effectively with such mainstream necessities as CD compilations and neckties as gift selections. If the graphic designers who do these books were architects, what a beautiful world we would live in.

The more obscure the subject the more fabulous the cover. This being the case, my prize for the most exquisite and abstract cover design, if I had one to offer, would go to “Hans Scharoun,” with its graphic image of a swatch of gold-anodized aluminum cladding from the exterior of the architect’s Berlin Philharmonic concert hall. This incidentally is a monograph by Peter Blundell Jones, who has made a career-long study of this important but relatively obscure German modernist, best known for that innovative concert hall (1963), whose theater-in-the-round plan has been widely adopted by many architects, including Frank Gehry for the Disney auditorium in Los Angeles. The chapter dealing with his concert-hall designs is involving; however much of his other work is dry and definitely of appeal only to architects. Yet who would not want--or better still, need--this book on their coffee table?

The last 30 years or so have been a rich and turbulent period in American architecture. We have witnessed such riveting events as the death and rebirth of modernism; the birth, adulation, and demise of postmodernism; and a rekindling of futuristic visions with high-tech (chiefly in Europe, unfortunately) and deconstructivism. There has been much (some might say too much) polemicizing over style issues, and plenty of useful debate over the responsibilities of architects in this rapidly changing society. All of this and more is addressed in the immaculately researched “Architecture in North America Since 1960,” with excellent critical text by Alexander Tzonis, Liane LeFaivre and Richard Diamond.

Disappointingly, it has been an era that has yielded few masterpieces on this continent. The book begins on a high note with Louis Kahn’s rigorous medical research laboratory in Philadelphia and ends on another one: Frank Gehry’s expressionistic Weisman Art Museum. As expected, the authors cover a variety of projects. Some, like the Trump and IBM towers in New York, Kresge College at Santa Cruz and Michael Graves’ Portland Building are less than wonderful, but were presumably chosen because they have historical relevance or were in some way influential or emblematic of their period.

Few masterpieces? Sadly--Gehry excepted--most of the envelope-pushing during these recent decades has been effected by the Europeans and the Japanese, and particularly by the British high-tech movement, which has taken modernism along a new and logical path, producing some brilliant architecture en route. On a different note, a rich and lively vein of revivalist architecture has surfaced in recent years, of which only one project, the popular Seaside community in Florida, was thought worthy of inclusion--architectural historians are all modernists at heart.

Another charming Phaidon monograph, “C.F.A, Voysey,” is well-written and attractively produced. English architect Voysey began his career at the tail-end of the Arts and Crafts movement, and shared its advocacy of simplicity and honesty in design with a distaste for anything foreign. His design vocabulary consequently included homebred Tudor and Gothic, and excluded imported classicism. The house designs for which he is best known were abstracted versions of Tudor cottages, stripped of all ornamentation but still romantic in feeling. Windows were often extended into broad horizontal bands that prefigured modernism.

Later, when neoclassicism came into vogue and demand for Tudor and Gothic evaporated, the inflexible Voysey suddenly found his career languishing, and it was no consolation for him when he found himself eulogized, late in life, as a major harbinger of the modern movement (as he is still regarded today). Instead, he was horrified that he should be, in his words, “held responsible” for a movement that he detested. His other legacy, also not of his choosing: the thousands of debased, scaled-down Voyseyesque villas that are a familiar sight in British suburbia.

From the built to the unbuilt comes “The Work of Antonio Sant ‘Elia.” Famous for a handful of visionary drawings of futuristic cityscapes and industrial plants, Antonio Sant ‘Elia died in World War I at the age of 26. In this definitive account of Sant ‘Elia’s brief life and career, Meyer describes his allegiance to the Futurist movement and shows the influences that inform his radical designs: symbolism, art nouveau, and the Vienna Secession, as well as his fascination with industrial architecture. Meyer also describes his life as a socialist, and subsequent attempts by the Fascists to resurrect his buried career, in the decades after his death, as a somewhat mythical precursor of Fascist-approved Italian modernism.

The ornamental use of tile is “As old as knowledge, as universal as learning,” according to the promotional blurb from a British tile manufacturer that appears in the opening pages of a beautifully produced volume, The Decorative Tile in Architecture and Interiors.” Tiles were indeed produced as early as the 4th Millennium BC in Egypt, and photographs in the opening chapter reveal the restored Ishtar Gate (580 BC) from the city of Babylon, framed by a colorful frieze depicting lions in a glazed ceramic tile relief.

This elegant book explores the use of decorative tile around the world, which reached an early zenith in the Islamic countries from the 7th Century onward. The authors show how the Industrial Revolution transformed the market for tile work with a multitude of new techniques.

The British authors understandably focused heavily on home-grown examples. However, if they had ventured further west it is possible that a few of the less-vivid portraits of Victorian interiors would have been sacrificed for images of the inventively tiled Adamson House at Malibu, now the Malibu Tile Museum. This was once the showcase for the Malibu Tile Company, whose tiles memorably brightened bathrooms and kitchens all over the American Southwest earlier in the century.

Also from Phaidon, a company that is setting new standards of design for coffee-table books, is “Moorish Style,” by Miles Danby. This time they have exceeded themselves: Every spread is a delight. Exploring the rich theme of Orientalism, the author investigates, in early chapters, the roots of this style from Mogul India and Ottoman Turkey to Moorish Spain.

One of California’s most interesting architects from the first half of the 20th Century is featured in a revised and updated edition of “Julia Morgan, Architect.” Well-placed to profit by the reconstruction of San Francisco following the earthquake of 1906, Morgan’s long and successful career was launched with work for Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of Morgan’s most famous client, William Randolph Hearst. Despite having designed more than 700 built structures (many of which have been sadly demolished), she remains Hearst’s architect in the minds of many, due to the impressive construction at San Simeon; the haunting Wyntoon, which was the Hearst family’s retreat in Northern California; the Marion Davies beach house in Santa Monica; and the stylish headquarters of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

There is something very special, and very rare, about houses created as a unified design statement (from architecture to fabrics to silverware). The Greene and Greene-designed Gamble House in Pasadena is a local example. Equally important historically is the house built by architect Eliel Saarinen, with help from his family. “Saarinen House and Garden: A Total Work of Art,” celebrates the recent renovation of the house, and the restoration of its exquisite interiors and garden.

The house was built at Cranbrook in the 1920s by Saarinen with help from his fabric designer wife, Loja, and his architect son, Eero. It was created very much in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, which Saarinen’s early career in Finland had embraced. Since Saarinen’s death in 1950, the house served as home to the Academy of Architecture’s president and suffered progressive alterations. Attractive new photography by Balthazar Korab captures the spirit of the newly restored house and its furnishings, and compare interestingly with black-and-white photos taken in 1930 for Architectural Record and a pair of before-restoration photos of the dining room.

Two attractive books document aspects of American rural life. “The Architecture of the Shakers” is the definitive study of Shaker architecture. Author Julia Nicoletta eloquently evokes a communal lifestyle of high religious and social ideals that survived for more than 200 years. Founded by a group of Shaking Quakers, as they were known in the old country, arrived from England in 1774, this dedicated community created dwellings, farm buildings and meeting houses of great beauty and simplicity. Sadly, the Shakers’ ideal of celibacy came to a logical conclusion, and their tightly organized religious communities were destined to close, one by one, from more than 19 settlements and 3,600 members, to the single survivor today, composed of only eight adult members, in Maine.

This book, beautifully photographed by Bret Morgan, is an important, and haunting, record of the buildings the Shakers left behind and demonstrates the relevance of their legacy in the evolution of American design and architecture.

“Farm: The Vernacular Tradition of Working Buildings” is a well-illustrated look at a wide variety of farm buildings here and in Europe, and a reminder that for the early immigrant farmer--used to close-knit rural communities in Europe--America was a vast, lonely place requiring self-reliance and new farming disciplines. Beginning with a 17th-Century timber-framed house that originally stood in Hartlebury Parish in Worcestershire, England, and has now been moved to Staunton, Va., the author takes us through a history of farming structures in various regional styles. The photographs, mostly by Paul Rocheleau are full of atmosphere and weathered architectural details.

Beautiful as conventional books about architecture often are, they seldom provide enough visual information to make you feel that you have “been there.” You are left wanting more. “Behind Facades” by Paul Draper and Trewin Copplestone from Macmillan is a cleverly produced book about five well-known buildings that extends the reader’s visual information significantly beyond that provided by the usual layout, limited as this is to a plan, if you are lucky, and a set of photos.

The five buildings: Saint Peter’s Church, Monticello, Buckingham Palace, the Paris Opera and Neuschwanstein are each presented on an opening spread as an attractively rendered (not photographed) facade. This opens up to present either a fold out double-gatefold of a principle interior space or a spectacular axonometric that cuts through exterior and interior walls to reveal, as with Monticello and the Paris Opera, the relationship of rooms, corridors and staircases. The text is well-written and includes a brief, lively history of each project.

With photographs by her husband Terrence Moore, Suzi Moore’s “Under the Sun: Desert Style and Architecture” takes us to Southern Spain, North Africa, Mexico and the American Southwest in a survey of desert living, showing ways to live in harmony with a potentially hostile environment without resorting to air conditioning.

There are two problems: the book shows only a few of the many sophisticated passive solar energy design ideas that have been introduced by architects in the Southwest. More focus on these is needed and less space given to images of interiors. Not helping is the fact that photographer Moore is clearly more at home with exteriors and landscapes than he is with interiors.

Designed for the growing market of people who work at home are “Making the Most of Work Spaces” by Lorrie Mack and “For Your Home, Home Offices” by Lisa Sholnih from Friedman / Fairfax. These are two well-produced books. Most of “Work Spaces” has chapters dedicated to practical concerns such as planning, storage, equipment and lighting, however there is a sameness to a lot of the work areas, which look as if they are part of one, rather contemporary, house. “For Your Home, Home Offices” is really just a picture book with enlarged captions, but it shows more variety of styles of interiors, making it easier for a reader with perhaps an older house to benefit from the broader range of possibilities.

Full of festive gilt, an ideal book for the Christmas season is “The Louvre: An Architectural History.” As Pierre Rosenberg, the president directeur of the Musee du Louvre, points out in his introduction to this stunning book, the word “Louvre” means to most people simply a famous museum--a repository for such familiar treasures as the “Mona Lisa,” “Winged Victory,” and the “Venus de Milo.”

In this new book we are presented with a different Louvre. Recent expansions and reorganizations of the museum, as well as the construction of the I.M. Pei pyramid, have drawn attention to the remarkable building complex itself. Visitors can now explore the subterranean remains of the original Louvre--a 12th-Century medieval fortress on top of which Pierre Lescot built the magnificent Renaissance style Palais du Louvre. Later additions present equally grand examples of French Baroque, classicist and neoclassicist styles. Napoleon III made further additions in the Second Empire style, and the Pei pyramid is an equally significant gesture representing our own century.

Each of these manifestations are revealed in this lavish book, which was designed in large format so we can enjoy spread after spread of opulent finishes, magnificent craftsmanship and architecture on the grand scale.

****

C.F.A. VOYSEY, By Wendy Hitchmough (Phaidon: $60; 240 pp.)

THE LOUVRE: An Architectural History, By Keiichi Tahara and Genevieve Brese (The Vendome Press: $75; 224 pp.)

THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING: A History, By John Tuarnac (Scribner: $60; 282 pp.)

JULIA MORGAN, ARCHITECT. Revised and updated edition . By Sara Holmes Boutelle, color photography by Richard Barnes (Abbeville $35, 271 pp.)

SAARINEN HOUSE AND GARDEN: A Total Work of Art. Edited by Gregory Wittkopp (Abrams / Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum: $49.95; 176 pp.)

FARM: The Vernacular Tradition of Working Buildings, By David Larkin (The Monacelli Press: $60; 240 pp.)

THE DECORATIVE TILE IN ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIORS, By Tony Herbert and Kathryn Huggins (Phaidon: $60; 234 pp.)

MOORISH STYLE, By Miles Danby (Phaidon: $60; 188 pp.)

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE SHAKERS, By Julia Nicoletta, photography by Bret Morgan, foreword by Robert P. Emlen (The Countryman Press / Woodstock Vt.: $40; 175 pp.)

UNDER THE SUN: Desert Style and Architecture, By Suzi Moore, photographs by Terrence Moore (Bulfinch: $45; 248 pp.)

ARCHITECTURE IN NORTH AMERICA SINCE 1960, By Alexander Tzonis, Liane LeFaivre and Richard Diamond (Bulfinch: $64; 312 pp.)

BEHIND FACADES: A Dramatic Cutaway Look Into Five of the World’s Architectural Treasures--Featuring Panoramic Foldouts, By Paul Draper and Trewin Copplestone (MacMillan: $25; 80 pp.)

ALVAR AALTO, by Richard Weston (Phaidon: $60; 240 pp.)

HANS SCHAROUN, By Peter Blundell Jones (Phaidon: $75; 240 pp.)

MAKING THE MOST OF WORK SPACES, By Lorrie Mack (Rizzoli: $35; 80 pp.)

THE WORK OF ANTONIO SANT ‘ELIA, By Esther da Costa Meyer (Yale: $65; 249 pp.)

FOR YOUR HOME, HOME OFFICES, By Lisa Sholnih (Friedman / Fairfax: $29.95; 188 pp.)