Twentieth-Century American Architecture: The Buildings and Their Makers

A well-written, interesting guide to the major architects, with humanizing details about their lives, and insightful, non-jargonish discussion of the changes in building during the 20th century. Photos are B & W, but clear.

Carter Wiseman’s Twentieth-Century American Architecture: The Buildings and Their Makers offers readers an exhaustive study of the landmark buildings and the master architects who designed them that characterized a century of American architecture. Wiseman includes much more in addition to this, as his purview extends before the twentieth century to provide additional context and introduce the birth of American architectural ideas, as well as across the Atlantic Ocean to give credence to the works of European architects whose influence cannot be denied, even by Americans who wanted to break from Europe. Wiseman writes, “American architecture could separate itself from Europe no more than American politics could separate itself from Greece or the Magna Carta” (138). Yet the book is focused on America, and Wiseman admits to many of his limitations in the introduction to his work resulting from this concentration. For example, he acknowledges that he excludes the work of Americans abroad as well as foreign architects working in the U.S., not because their ideas and their work mattered little, but because he wanted to capture the architecture milieu of the United States. By setting that goal, the work, Wiseman claims, inevitably places much emphasis on New York City and the progeny of elite architectural schools on the East Coast.Twentieth-Century American Architecture includes all of the big names of the architecture world that a reader would expect to see: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Phillip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Frank Gehry, among many others. Rather than focusing only on their significance and casting them as irreproachable architectural geniuses, Wiseman shows how they, and their buildings, are products of the cultural, economic, and political climate of their times whose works needs to be evaluated a such. He uses these easily recognizable names and landmarks like the Seagram Building, Fallingwater, and the Vanna Venturi House, to advance the “most insistent theme of the book…the integrative ability of a diverse and constantly changing society that has become steadily more mature in its cultural judgments” (10). The book traces the transition from architecture inspired by the European architectural vocabulary and appreciation of historical elements, like the works of McKim, Mead & White, to a rejection of ornamentation in favor of structural and sculptural forms by the mid-20th century, encapsulated in Mies van der Rohe’s buildings. In another turn, Frank Lloyd Wright spearheaded a ‘new romanticism’ that rejected “the chilly rationalism of the Modernist pioneers” (167) and Kahn reintroduced ornamental elements to Modernism, earning much affection from Wiseman who writes that “his was a unique synthesis, and it remains unequaled” (200).One of the most illuminating parts of the book is Wiseman’s discussion of the relationship between the architecture community and historic preservation. Wiseman comments on the contradictory nature of preservation whereby Americans, who largely considered the ‘new’ better than the ‘old,’ were asked to preserve relics of the past. He also explains that American preservation was a grassroots movement that did not find its origins in the European academy, unlike Modernist architecture. The book highlights important benchmarks and components of the preservation movement, including Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (1965), zoning ordinances, air rights, adaptive use, and tax credits, but a small criticism is that Wiseman perhaps misunderstands the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which did not “stipulat[e] that major historic works of architecture must be preserved” (214).Throughout the book, Wiseman weaves together the political and cultural histories behind architecture campaigns, remarking on the motives and objectives that introduced new waves of architectural styles. By doing so, he places American architects’ work as responsive and reactive to its social and cultural climate. For example, he explains how Robert Venturi’s approach to architecture in the 1960s was shaped by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam sentiment, and student protest movements. Overall, Wiseman offers a complex and comprehensive book that depicts the overarching political, social, and cultural histories inscribed in American architecture by examining the influential works and architectural philosophies of American’s leading architects of the twentieth century.

I completely agree with other reviewers that this is an excellent text - informative, engaging, highly readable, even for non-specialists.Sadly, the quality of the photos - essential in this kind of book - is poor in the copy I purchased from my local bookstore in early 2014. I was told that the publisher, Norton, has turned the book over to a so-called print-on-demand manufacturer. Somehow, in the process, the photos were reduced to muddy, streaked images. Better than nothing, but a far cry from the clear, crisp images you want in a book like this. Try to find an early edition, possibly the hardcover, which I believe has color photos.

This book, by a former architecture critic for New York Magazine who has taught at Yale, engagingly sums up many of the key buildings an architectural Odyssean is likely to see and should see, putting them in the context of their eras and leavening his observations with judicious skepticism about fads.

If you confuse Louis Kahn with Albert Kahn (like I do) or wonder what comes after Post-Modernism, this book is for you. A marvel of economical, elegant writing and cut-to-the-point analysis. -- Gordon Bock (co-author of The Vintage House, former editor of Old-House Journal)