Volume 30, Number 19 · December 8, 1983
After Modern Architecture
By Ada Louise Huxtable
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
De Stijl, 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia
edited by Mildred Friedman
Abbeville Press, 255 pp., $39.95; $24.95 (paper)
House X
by Peter Eisenman
Rizzoli, 168 pp., $35.00; $25.00 (paper)
Architecture Today
by Charles Jencks, with a contribution by William Chaitkin
Harry N. Abrams, 359 pp., $65.00
James Stirling: An Architectural Design Profile
by James Stirling, by Robert Maxwell
Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press, 103 pp., $14.95 (paper)
A Tower for Louisville: The Humana Competition
edited by Peter Arnell, edited by Ted Bickford
Rizzoli, 119 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Two words characterize the architectural scene today: dynamic and disquieting. It is not the degree or kind of change that is unsettling, or the heat of the debate between the modernists and the post-modernists; change and controversy are an indication of a vital and lively art. The high ratio between unsolved problems and unfulfilled promise is a mark of a transitional period. Certainly no other art approaches the art of building today in its scale and diversity, its extraordinary impact on lives and places; and no other art faces the enormous and shattering challenges that have followed the liberation of architecture from modernist doctrine, or has invested equivalent energies in redefining that highly debatable doctrine. The one universal conclusion is that something significant is happening.
Review, 6314 words
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