History & Criticism - Architecture, Individual Architects & Buildings, General & Miscellaneous Architecture, Geographic Locations - Architecture, Architectural Time Periods & Styles, Artists, Architects & Photographers - Biography
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Overview
For more than half a century, Peter Blake has lived in the mainstream of contemporary architecture and art. As writer, magazine editor, critic, and practicing architect, he has numbered among his friends and acquaintances (and occasionally enemies) virtually all of the major figures of modern architecture, and a good many famous artists as well. In this crisp and lively memoir, he brings them - and the time he shared with them - vividly and memorably to life. The anecdotes are memorable. Here is Frank Lloyd Wright (regarded by Blake as a perfect example of "the Artist as Ham," though he greatly admired his buildings) exploding at the discovery of young Blake's savage review of his Autobiography ... Bertrand Russell trying to escape visitors by hiding up a tree in Pennsylvania, as he calmly puffs away on his pipe ... Buckminster Fuller tap-dancing on a drafting table to demonstrate the metrical affinity between bebop and a new mathematical system he is working on ... Mies van der Rohe at work, stolidly gazing at a model of an ITT building while assistants scurry around making alterations ... Marcel Breuer telling how he invented his famous chair ... Philip Johnson delightedly answering a solemn question about heat loss from a visitor to his glass house: "The heat loss is absolutely tremendous" - and beaming from ear to ear. But No Place Like Utopia also has a deeper theme: how modern architecture, born and raised between the wars and after with a strong sense of social and political idealism, in the 1960s gradually fell back into its ancient role as an elitist pursuit dedicated to flattering the rich and powerful. Only now, as Blake makes clear, can we see the beginnings of a return to its original principles. From the push-and-pull of politics, culminating in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy period, to heady days in the magazine business, first with Architectural Forum and then with the brilliant but ultimately doomed Architecture Plus, Peter Blake has always beEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
Architect Blake's memoir of the heady days of architectural modernism includes his views of many of the profession's best-known innovators. (Sept.)Library Journal
A practicing architect as well as an architectural critic, editor, and educator, Blake's half-century association with the Museum of Modern Art and the Architectural Forum placed him in the perfect position to observe, work with, and comment on the great figures of 20th-century architecture. Now Blake ( Form Follows Fiasco , LJ 9/15/77. o.p.; The Master Builders , LJ 11/15/60) has written an insightful and illuminating memoir of his life, including his observations on the development and--as he sees it--the selling out of the International Style. Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi, and Philip Johnson are just some of the major figures discussed with honesty and intelligence. Along the way, Blake analyzes why the International Style, rooted in the European Socialism of the early 20th century, came to be embraced by the leaders of American Capitalism. Though proud of his own Socialist slant, Blake condemns communism's crimes against both humanity and aesthetics as harshly as he condemns capitalism's battering of humanity in that most important of areas, the built environment. Highly recommended for collections of architecture and design and for general readers interested in those fields.-- Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institution Libs . , Washington, D.C.Kirkus Reviews
In a personal tour of modern architecture and the colorful, eccentric, clannish men (all men)—mostly displaced Europeans—responsible for it, Blake (Curator for Architecture and Industrial Design/Museum of Modern Art; Form Follows Fiasco, 1977, etc.—not reviewed) recovers the energy, vision, and dedication that he says characterized the profession in the decades following WW II. Born in Germany, educated in England, Blake acquired his credentials in the conservative tradition of the University of Pennsylvania, under the tutelage of the puckish Louis Kahn. Sent on tour by Architectural Forum after WW II, he met the century's most influential architectural and design talents: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson, et al. Living in Manhattan, Blake also met artists and photographers, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Piet Mondrian, and Alexey Brodovitch, art director for Harper's Bazaar. The author conveys the creative heat, high temperament, and inevitable politics that prevailed at luncheons with these artists and in their experimental houses on Long Island and in Connecticut, where the best and brightest argued that architects could offer social solutions to poverty, overpopulation, and fascism, and that architecture was responsible for the quality of the environment, even the future of mankind. But in 1963, laments Blake, idealism turned to careerism when, in order to satisfy a client, the redesigned Pan Am building was allowed to deface the Manhattan skyline. Gradually, says the author, more and more good people began to do bad work for the people who would pay the bills,and—in place of the silent, unassuming purity of the past—there arose a generation of "postmodern poseurs" and "massive outpourings of gobbledygook." Blake's writing, like the architecture he admires, is simple, functional, humane, and profound, restoring with clarity and conviction the "First Principles" of modernism—which he celebrates in the conclusion of this powerful and outspoken book. (Ninety illustrations)Book Details
Published
September 1, 1993
Publisher
Alfred a Knopf
Pages
347
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780394548968