cover image No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept

No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept

Peter Blake. Alfred A. Knopf, $27.5 (347pp) ISBN 978-0-394-54896-8

This vivid, delightfully opinionated memoir is a scathing critique of the co-optation of modern architecture by the super rich who lack taste. As an idealistic architect in the 1940s and '50s, Blake ( The Master Builders ) saw himself as part of a modernist movement whose mass-produced, modular esthetic could help improve the human condition, alleviate excessive urbanization and build healthy communities. But modernism, he contends, once a politically committed, democratic movement, has degenerated into mere style, and he's equally scornful of postmodernism, deconstructionism and other fads. Blake, who apprenticed with Louis Kahn, was from 1948 to 1950 a curator of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (which he calls ``elitist'') and later served as editor-in-chief of Architectural Forum. His personal insider's history is replete with candid close-ups of Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jackson Pollock, Le Corbusier, Bertrand Russell, Buckminster Fuller and many others. Photos. (Oct.)