Modern Living, Great Fortune & New York Streetscapes

Blueprints for Modern Living

Essays by Reyner Banham, Dolores Hayden, Thomas Hine, Thomas S. Hines, Esther McCoy, Helen Searing, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and Kevin Starr. One of Southern California's most significant contributions to modern architecture was the Case Study House program sponsored by John Entenza's Art & Architecture magazine. Between 1945 and 1966, thirty-six experimental prototypes were designed and the majority built. Featuring some of the most important architects of the region and generation - including Charles Eames, Craig Ellwood, A. Quincy Jones, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra, and Raphael Soriano-the program reflected the modernist goal of reinventing the house as a way of redefining living. A number of the essayists in the book suggest that what made the houses distinctive and influential was not so much their International Style modernism as how that style was domesticated and scaled to the single-family house and how it forecast what came to be known as the California lifestyle. In addition to the eight main essays, the book, which was based on a 1989-1990 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, contains entries by the exhibition curator, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and research assistant Amelia Jones on the thirty-six Case Study projects, documentation of six projects commissioned by MOCA, biographies of the thirty architects involved in the program, and a wealth of photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models.
Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses by Elizabeth A. T. Smith
MIT Press, ISBN 0262692139

Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

Everything about the conception and creation of Rockefeller Center was outsized and wildly improbable. Launched in the teeth of the Depression, the most ambitious construction project since the Pyramids was the unintended result of a philanthropic gesture gone awry. But when it was finished, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s accidental adventure redefined the very nature of an American city. In this hugely appealing book, Daniel Okrent weaves together the themes of money, politics, art, architecture, business, and society to tell the story of the majestic suite of buildings that came to dominate the heart of midtown Manhattan and with it, for a time, the heart of the world. Richly detailed, frequently surprising, and consistently entertaining, Great Fortune brings this compelling saga to vivid life.
At the center of Daniel Okrent's riveting story are four remarkable individuals: John D. Rockefeller Jr., the timid son of the world's richest man, whose greatest accomplishment was a venture he never intended; his son Nelson, who before the age of twenty-five demonstrated his talent, his charm, and his ruthless ambition, shoving aside his older brother and an all-star roster of professionals to take control of this enormous enterprise; the rude, vain, and dazzlingly creative real estate genius John R. Todd, who could make an architect whimper in pain; and Raymond Hood, a scamp, a provocateur, a drinker - and the greatest skyscraper designer America has ever known.
Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent
Viking, 2003

New York Streetscapes

The Chrysler Building's secret spire was the trump card in a match between two architects. Writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery sailed paper airplanes out the window of his apartment building on Central Park South. Ernest Vernon, the longtime butler for Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant Jr., wept entirely alone in the church during his master's funeral service. These are only a sampling of the unforgettable stories told by New York historian Christopher Gray in New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan's Significant Buildings and Landmarks. Gray's engaging writing treats architecture not as complex theory, but as a human condition. Christopher Gray examines not only intriguing buildings and sites throughout Manhattan but more importantly the memorable lives of the people who built and inhabited old New York. Within these pages are gathered about two hundred of Christopher Gray's best Streetscapes columns originally printed in the New York Times. Here readers will discover a history of Gotham that will forever change the way they walk the city's streets.
New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan's Significant Buildings and Landmarks by Christopher Gray
Harry N. Abrams, 2003

City in the Sky

More than a year after the nation began mourning the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center, it became clear that something else was being mourned: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York, and possibly America, ever produced - magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe. Their builders were possessed of a singular determination to create wonders of capitalism as well as engineering, refusing to admit defeat before natural forces, economics, or politics. No one knows the history of the towers better than New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton. In a vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, the authors re-create David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan, the spirited opposition of local storeowners and powerful politicians, the bold structural innovations that later determined who lived and died, master builder Guy Tozzoli's last desperate view of the towers on September 11, and the charged and chaotic recovery that could have unraveled the secrets of the buildings' collapse but instead has left some enduring mysteries.
City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center by James Glanz, Eric Lipton
Henry Holt & Company, 2003

History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals

No mere survey of famous buildings, Kostof's History examines an inclusive spectrum of manmade structures: prehistoric huts and the TVA, the pyramids at Giza and the Rome railway station, the ziggurat and the department store. Indeed, Kostof considered every building worthy of attention, every structure or shelter a potential source of insight, whether it be the prehistoric hunting camps at Terra Amata, or the caves at Lascaux with their magnificent paintings, or a twenty-story hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The Second Edition features a new concluding chapter, "Designing the Fin-de-Siecle," based on Kostof's last lecture notes and prepared by Castillo, as well as an all-new sixteen-page color section. Many of the original line drawings by Richard Tobias, as well as some fifty photographs, have also been updated or replaced, for improved clarity.
History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals by Spiro Kostof, Greg Castillo
Oxford University Press, 1995

Architectural Detailing: Function, Constructibility, Aesthetics

Describes systematically and in readily usable form the principles by which good architectural details are designed. The principles are laid out in 83 brief but profusely illustrated ``detail patterns''. The first section examines each of the patterns and illustrates several instances of its use. The latter part demonstrates the execution of these patterns in the design of key details for three different buildings types. Extensively illustrated.
Architectural Detailing: Function, Constructibility, Aesthetics by Edward Allen
John Wiley & Sons, 1992

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