Martin Filler

Eileen Gray’s Infinite Possibilities

Modernism, Inc.

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Trump’s Towering Folly on Federal Architecture

The effective ban on modern architecture commissioned by the US government that Trump proposes is horrifyingly reminiscent of Hitler’s insistence that public buildings in the Third Reich hew to the Classical tradition.

The Ceaseless Innovation of Duane Michals

Duane Michals is something of a superannuated Huck Finn, an incorrigibly subversive and inimitably American scamp always lighting out for new creative territories.

Megalo-MoMA

On the museum’s latest building project

The Unsinkable Modernist

Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus

The ‘Bold Vagaries’ of Frank Furness

I.M. Pei: Establishment Modernism Lite

I.M. Pei was always adept at spinning rationales about why a particular design of his was not only logical but inevitable. He favored iconography that aimed to soothe and impress.

The Godfather

Mark Lamster’s ‘The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century’

A Gilded Age at Architectural Digest

Snobbish New Yorkers may have snickered at the glitziness Paige Rense favored in the pages of Architectural Digest, but the rest of America lapped it up. Love it or loathe it, her approach conveyed an impressively unified vision and it did indeed make AD’s parent company, Knapp Communications, pots of money.

Robert Venturi: Visionary of Main Street

Rather than being ironic and condescending, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s commercial and quotidian borrowings represented their belief that “Main Street is almost all right,” and that there is much to be learned from popular taste. Their support of a more egalitarian, inclusive approach to high-style architecture might have been their most important accomplishment.

Paris, Texas

Wagner’s Wonder Woman

So vivid are my memories of the incomparable Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson—by general consent the foremost female Wagner exponent in the second half of the twentieth century—that it came as a shock to realize that this year is her centennial.

Whirling Mechanical Precisionism

“Cult of the Machine” tries to draw parallels between the simultaneously celebratory and anxious ethos that inspired Precisionism and present-day concerns about the impact of electronic technology on society.

Architectural Tragedies

Matta-Clark's Cutting Edge

For all the weightiness that surrounds the issues Matta-Clark addressed—power and poverty, permanence and decay—there remains a surprising lightness of spirit to his legacy, and a reckless élan still inhabits what we know of his work.

Between Nouveau and Deco

“Wiener Werkstätte, 1903–1932: The Luxury of Beauty” at the Neue Galerie

12 Ways of Looking at Frank Lloyd Wright

“Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” at MoMA

Louis Kahn’s Mystic Monumentality

The architect pared down his schemes to their most irreducible essentials