by Jon Lackman | 23 September 2010 | Architecture, Books
It’s not too often that authors of university-press books are interviewed in The New York Times. I belatedly noticed this Q&A from July with “American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture” author Alice T. Friedman. Apparently it was her use of the word “glamour” in her title that did the trick. But then she had to disabuse them of the idea that she was simply “rehabilitating glamour”:
You are rehabilitating glamour — I like that!
It’s less directed than that. I am a historian. My goal was to link a group of disparate architectural works and explain why they looked the way they did, and in the process reveal the complexity in the definition of modern architecture. It’s not just rational problem-solving and engineering-based. It’s much more about stories, pleasure and mystery.
Read an excerpt of Friedman’s book, the chapter on Eero Saarinen, whom she does proclaim rehabilitated:
From the early 1960s until the current revival of popular appreciation and scholarly interest in Saarinen’s architecture, his reputation, and the fate of many of his most significant projects, hung in the balance with little hope of recognition or respect … His glamorous American modernism, his accommodations of capitalism and its goals, his wife Aline and her commitment to “public relations” — to say nothing of his uncanny success at winning competitions — all of these were held against him … The “trouble with Eero,” [Reyner] Banham concluded, is “he’s such a damned good architect.” With the passage of nearly a half-century since his death, and the brilliant restoration of many of his most extraordinary buildings, it is now clear that most observers, if not yet all, are inclined to agree.
