Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The skyscraper is the building type that dominates our cities, absorbs vast amounts of capital in design, construction and maintenance, and houses large numbers of people in offices and apartments. Ada Louise Huxtable--America's most acclaimed architecture critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Prize Fellow--offers here an energetic defense of cities and a brilliant consideration of the skyscraper as art, as business, as the product of politics and speculation.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In her customary penetrating and quotable style, Huxtable takes an overview of a visible symbol for 20th-century progress-the skyscraper. The result of a two-year study, this work is a significant contribution to the artistic sorting-out process that will accelerate as the year 2000 approaches. Issues raised here will continue to absorb commentators on the humanities. Huxtable pins to the wall those architects who fail to come to grips with the dilemmas created by forests of tall buildings. Her regret at seeing a major architectural form of our culture trivialized by idiosyncracy is backed by considerable reflection and effective conclusions. Four phases of skyscraper development are cited: functional, eclectic, modern, and postmodern. These provide a loose organization for the essay-type text. By including early and late nomenclature, most of the geographical diversity and most major monuments are covered. The choices might not encourage unanimity, but they provide invaluable guideposts to structural and aesthetic relationships. Subscribers to New Criterion may have read portions of this work in the November 1982 issue, but the book is not to be missed by any library. Many out-of-the-ordinary photographs are included as well as good details. Both academic and public libraries, all levels.-P.N. Holder, Austin Peay State University

Kirkus Book Review

A strong critical stand on the skyscraper's historical modes and its present, anarchic state. Huxtable made her name as the New York Times' learned, fighting architecture critic; an exponent of modernism with an eye for nuance, and an advocate of social responsibility. The present work, expanded from a lecture series and written as a MacArthur Fellow (which, she notes, freed her for study), is grounded in modernist-postmodernist combat--for Huxtable, ""Today's skyscraper stands at a crossroads. . . between architecture as mission and architecture as style""--but it also takes important steps, illustrated page by page, toward a new critical synthesis. Huxtable divides skyscraper-history into four phases: the functional, in which ""architecture was the servant of engineering"" and business (the utilitarian classics of the Chicago school); the eclectic, which produced ""skilled academic exercises"" and spectacular monuments (exemplified, in the reconsideration of recent years, by New York's 1890s-1920s buildings); and the modern, which Huxtable divides into the austere, reformist ""modern"" proper and the decorative, conservative ""modernistic"" (now dubbed Art Deco)--and about which she writes commandingly. There is the recognition that ""modern architecture aimed too high and promised too much, in defiance of too many natural laws""; there is the assertion that Mies (criticized for structural sleight-of-hand) was no more striving for strict functionalism than Louis Sullivan (long criticized for decorative detail)--both are denied their ""poetic license""; there is-the claim--backed by pages of abutting facades--that the benighted glass box, born of the Miesian skyscraper, had produced a superb urban vernacular, ""probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house."" Huxtable then moves ""beyond modernism"" (through complex transitional structures by Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Kevin Roche) to ""the stylistic phenomenon known as postmodernism."" But her quotable strictures (""they are preoccupied with making reputations and images,"" ""the unfashionable and unspeakable are suddenly in vogue""), even her deeper probings (""they seem to express a social and political conservatism. . . a parvenu old-tie, antiliberal snobbism of the new, and young, far Right""), are secondary, in achieving a new aesthetic and social perspective, to the fine-tuned assessments of 1980s work, in a variety of postmodernist modes, with which the book concludes. It's an eclectic, dramatic exercise itself--searching and engaged in all directions. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.