Martin Filler

Beauty and Utility

“A well-executed building or inviting public space can bring people together in ways that strengthen our communal values and at the same time make us more aware of our individuality.”

Whips and Vines

Recent books and exhibitions reveal that behind its undulating lines and swirling excesses, Art Nouveau was far more complex and nuanced than we once believed.

Xanadu’s Architect

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

Burkina Faso’s Master Builder

Africa’s first Pritzker Prize winner, Francis Kéré, has a small yet remarkably original and cohesive body of work and a commitment to fostering social and democratic values through architecture.

A Garden City in Queens

After nearly a century Sunnyside Gardens remains a model of how to create and sustain affordable urban housing.

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

Reckoning with Nazism in Occupied Norway

Planning an Aryan Paradise

The Nazis had ambitious plans for reshaping Norwegian architecture and infrastructure.

Life in a Glass House

What went wrong between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dr. Edith Farnsworth over the six years they worked to create the Farnsworth house?

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

Now, to go with the airport-terminal style of the Taniguchi building, we have a combination of corporate bank branch and provincial convention center.

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.