Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture & Design

Critic and artist Abrams compiles 26 of her astute profiles, primarily from Blueprint and I.D. magazine, of leading architects, designers, and digital media gurus (Michael Bloomberg, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Phyllis Lambert, among others) in this erudite collection. Abrams employs interviews of her accomplished subjects (published from 1982 to 2006) to, as she says, “get beyond press release platitudes, to dig into the ideas, theories, and even emotions.” She considers human-scale encounters with the works, such as how she sees Gehry’s buildings as “aggregated sculptural units,” while the pieces he’s designed for museums instead “mushroom into proto-buildings [to be] explored.” Reflecting on the ways that design choices have become shorthand in cultural discussions, she analyzes Disney’s 1980s-era business architecture, and how Disneyland “has entered the vernacular as a term denoting pastiche, simulation... and all that is superficial and artificial about America.” The volume helpfully contains a postscript of short bios on profile subjects (majority men, indicative of the period covered), as well as select reproductions of the original layouts of the profiles with portraits in their respective journals. This droll, insightful survey of key figures in the field is an essential resource for students and professionals, as well as any creative thinkers cogitating on what they might build next. [em](Oct.) [/em]