Gordon Bunshaft And Som

This nuanced portrait of Gordon Bunshaft and his work for the architecture firm SOM explores his role in defining the built aesthetic of corporate America.

Carol Herselle Krinsky's analysis of Bunshaft's work is the first complete study of this important and at times difficult architect

Surveys thirty of the most iconic buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the legendary American architecture firm, since its founding in 1936.

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff, which is available for the first time in the United States, is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered--the row house--which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world's great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay, and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.

The first book to reevaluate the evocative and polarizing work of one of midcentury America’s most significant architects Born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle, Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) became one of the towering figures of midcentury architecture, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. His self-proclaimed humanist designs merged the modern materials and functional considerations of postwar American architecture with traditional elements such as arches and colonnades. Yamasaki’s celebrated and iconic projects of the 1950s and ’60s, including the Lambert–St. Louis Airport and the U.S. Science Pavilion in Seattle, garnered popular acclaim. Despite this initial success, Yamasaki’s reputation began to decline in the 1970s with the mixed critical reception of the World Trade Center in New York, one of the most publicized projects in the world at the time, and the spectacular failure of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Apartments, which came to symbolize the flaws of midcentury urban renewal policy. And as architecture moved in a more critical direction influenced by postmodern theory, Yamasaki seemed increasingly old-fashioned. In the first book to examine Yamasaki’s life and career, Dale Allen Gyure draws on a wealth of previously unpublished archival material, and nearly 200 images, to contextualize his work against the framework of midcentury modernism and explore his initial successes, his personal struggles—including with racism—and the tension his work ultimately found in the divide between popular and critical taste.

Legendary architecture practice SOM presents 40+ of their most transformative works in the sixth and latest volume, SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is one of the most influential architecture studios in the world, with a body of work that includes some of the most important buildings and urban designs of our time. SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019 is the sixth and latest volume in the series to cover every era of SOM’s history, from the iconic Modernist works of the 1950s to the projects of today. Documenting SOM’s global body of work—which ranges from a prototype for a biophilic breathing wall to the new headquarters for NATO in Brussels—SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019 demonstrates how SOM has come to hold its unparalleled position as a steward of international architecture. This new volume details SOM’s approach to designing impactful, complex projects in a globalized world—an approach which marries a deep bench of global expertise with a commitment to honoring culture and people in the communities where SOM works. In this volume, explore SOM’s mission to address the most urgent challenge of our time: climate change. Working in pursuit of a zero-carbon built world, SOM’s designers are pioneering new approaches to adaptive reuse, cultivating emerging technologies including machine learning, inventing new tools to optimize building performance, and beyond. Organized chronologically, the monograph encompasses SOM’s most significant projects of the past decade, across all building types and locations, highlighting the studio’s unique ability to design and execute complex, technical, and efficient structures. The roster includes Burj Khalifa—the tallest building in the world, Manhattan Loft Gardens, a new vertical community in London, the twisting Ningbo Bank of China headquarters, the ‘floating cube’ new Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles, the master plan for the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, the reimagined Strand Theatre in San Francisco, Chicago’s Optimo Hat Company Headquarters, Denver Union Station, and of course, One World Trade Center. Through in-depth essays, architecture writer and critic Sam Lubell dives into SOM’s radically rigorous approach to design in today’s complex world, exploring the unique ideas cultivated within the studio and how those ideas are transformed into transformative spaces across the globe. As with the previous five volumes in the series, renowned design studio Pentagram led the book’s design in collaboration with SOM. Featuring 500 images, the book includes thorough profiles and never-before-published photographs, plans, and drawings of the studio’s most recent works.

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University celebrates its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition and with this book that is itself a celebration of a great architectural monument of modernism photographed by Richard Cheek. This striking building contains a stunning collection of collections, examples from which were photographed by Stan Godlewski, and this celebratory volume also contains a portfolio of photographs taken at the time of the dedication forty years ago by Ezra Stoller and a handful of historic photographs from collections here. The text has a number of essays that together capture the many resourses that constitute this library distinguished throughout the world for its collections and for its support of research and publications and teaching. Following an introductory essay by Barbara A. Shailor written from the perspective of one who came to join the staff as a graduate student employed to catalogue ancient manuscripts. This she did for two decades before leaving for university teaching and a deanship before returning here recently as director. The history of the design, construction, and impact of the building is acheived in a critical and appreciative essay by Patrick L. Pinnell, practicing architect and planner, who carries the story from the selection of Gordon Bunshaft as architect to the present place of this magnificent building at the center of te Yale Campus. Next comes a memoir by Marjorie G. Wynne about the days before there was a Beinecke Library when the rare books and manuscripts were in the Rare Book Room at Sterling Library until she and that collection crossed the street forty yearsago. Following these are essays about the individual strengths of the collections that together are the Beinecke's chief joys. Robert G. Babcock describes early manuscripts and books while the modern counterparts are featured by Vincent Giroud who also contributed an essay on music in the Beinecke. A brief section on playing cards by Timothy G. Young is included. Patricia C. Willis discusses the Collection of American Literature and Stephen Parks describes the Osborn Collection. German Literature is treated by Christa Sammons and George A. Miles treats the Western Americana Collection. The Beinecke Library is all this and more, perhaps the most distinguished gathering of literary and historic material of any private university in the Americas and perhaps in the world. Supported wholly from endowments and managed as a financially independent unit within the Yale library system, it serves a broad community of users. It has an active fellowship program bringing researchers from across the campus and across the world to this repository of printed books and manuscripts as well as extensive collections of maps, prints, photographs, and drawings in the fields of language, literature, history, religion, philosophy, art, music, economics, and the natural sciences. The book itself is a cause for celebration, designed by Greer Allen and composed and printed to the high standards that he earlier had exercised as University Printer. The result of all of these efforts is a triumph of text and illustrations combined in a generous format to delight the eye and the mind.