In a somewhat combative 1957 interview, a flinty and surprisingly conventional Mike Wallace interrogates an unwavering yet ever-thoughtful Frank Lloyd Wright.
Twelve Ways Of Looking At Frank Lloyd Wright
In his New York Review of Books commentary, excerpted below, Martin Filler speaks to the wealth of new material out on Frank Lloyd Wright, including two current exhibitions and four new books. You can read the full review in the August 17 issue, or read it on site at nybooks.com
1.
Few things are more satisfying in the arts than unjustly forgotten figures at last accorded a rightful place in the canon, as has happened in recent decades with such neglected but worthy twentieth-century architects as the Slovenian Jože Plečnik, the Austrian Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Austrian-Swedish Josef Frank, and the Italian-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi, among others. Then there are the perennially celebrated artists who are so important that they must be presented anew to each successive generation, a daunting task for museums, especially encyclopedic ones that are expected to revisit the major masters over and over again while finding fresh reasons for their relevance. [Read more…]
The World Trade Center’s Grand Architectural Failure
In his commentary preceding a review of three new books in The New York Review of Books, excerpted below, Martin Filler speaks to a failure of imagination and architecture at Manhattan’s Ground Zero. You can read the full review in the March 9 issue, or read it on site at nybooks.com
No urban design project in modern American experience has aroused such high expectations and intense scrutiny as the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City. It has taken fifteen years since the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001, for the principal structures of this sixteen-acre parcel in Lower Manhattan to be completed. In a field where time is money in a very direct sense (because of interest payments on the vast sums borrowed to finance big construction schemes), such a long gestation period usually signifies not judicious deliberation on the part of planners, developers, designers, engineers, and contractors, but rather economic, political, or bureaucratic problems that can impede a speedy and cost-efficient conclusion. [Read more…]