Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus

August 31, 2020
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 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.

October 1, 2020

Since 1980, UK expat Janet Abrams has crossed the Atlantic countless times to observe the arts and design scene, first for the outsider monthly Blueprint, and later for The Independent, Punch, and the New York Times. Collected here are 26 narrative essays, all of manageably moderate length, all from 1982-2006. Readers are thus teletransported into an architectural design zeitgeist surrounding the turn of the last millennium: postmodernism rejected, "Starchitects" rising, and everyone a critic (notably Prince Charles, who memorably labeled a National Gallery addition a "monstrous carbuncle"). Internationalism flourished, with digital tools making it easier to design in one continent and build on another. We meet craftspeople and technocrats--with de rigueur appearances by biggies like Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Philip Johnson--and laudably, eight women among an otherwise hypermasculine domain. Abrams's style is appealingly waggish--one admiring portrait begins with "Andree Putman has a habit of losing things..."--and largely from a pre-internet time, when tar pits of jargon like "built environment" were happily less common. In bemoaning how nowadays building designs seem to be determined more by algorithms than inspiration, this retrospective carries a torch of justifiable nostalgia. VERDICT Long-form, tangy treats for all observers.--Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L.

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