cover image Postmodern Visions: Drawings, Paintings, and Models by Contemporary Architects

Postmodern Visions: Drawings, Paintings, and Models by Contemporary Architects

. Abbeville Press, $55 (357pp) ISBN 978-0-89659-569-9

Arranged alphabetically by architect, this dazzling repository of plans and designs, most never realized, may change readers' conceptions of Postmodernism. Familiar practitioners such as Robert Venturi, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi are here, with their loaded geometrical forms and recycled historical styles. Scores of less well known architects show great diversity in their drawings, watercolors, blueprints and doodles of dream cities. Thomas Gordon Smith's beautiful, brightly colored California villas mingle references to Roman temples and the Baroque. Rob Krier's gleaming white Berlin apartment block conjures up Viennese architecture. Milanese visionary Massimo Scolari imagines ghostly pyramids and airborne terraces in the form of wings. Some Postmodernists rethink old styles in a new democratic context, for example, Moore's college campus modeled on a folk village and Venturi's Philadelphia apartment house featuring communal rooms for the elderly. With 616 illustrations, many in color, this album, originally published in Germany, will intrigue and reward the thoughtful reader. January 6