Book Reviews

Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art

STANFORD ANDERSON, editor
Princeton Architectural Press, 2004
272 pages, illustrated
$60.00 (cloth)
News of Eladio Diestes achievements has finally
reached the United States, in a collection of essays
carefully edited by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Stanford Anderson. Dieste (1917
2000) was one of the great engineers of modern
times, in the same league as John Roebling (1806
1869), Gustave Eiffel (18321923), Robert Maillart
(18721940), Eugne Freyssinet (18791962),
Eduardo Torroja (18991961), and Felix Candela
(19101997). Thanks to his design of a small number of sacred spaces, beginning with the Church of
Atlntida in his native Uruguay in 1958, he has also
come to be regarded with special reverence by Latin
American and European architects.
Even though six monographs on Dieste have
previously appeared in Bogot, Buenos Aires, London, Milan, Munich, and Seville, his work has been
little known in the United States. Anderson attributes this lack of attention to the fact that Dieste
worked with brick rather than cutting-edge materials, but the provincialism of American architects and
academicians should receive part of the blame. In recent times, the only Latin American architect whose
work the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) deemed
important enough to show was the Mexican Luis
Barragn, in 1976. This happened thirty-three years
after MoMAs discovery of Oscar Niemeyer and
modern Brazilian architecture in 1943, as part of a
larger government interest in securing Brazils support during World War II. It has taken another generation since Barragns show for Dieste to be noticed
in this country.
Apart from Andersons own contributions, focusing on Dieste as a humanist and an architect,
most of the essays in this book make the case for his
work to be considered engineering rather than archi-

63

book reviews

tecture. Edward Allen writes of Rafael Guastavinos

and Diestes roles in revolutionizing masonry vaulting; John Ochsendorf examines Diestes work in the
context of other great engineers innovations; Remo
Pedreschi and Gonzalo Larrambere focus on the formal and structural aspects of Diestes work. There is
also a brief tribute by Lucio Cceres, a former student and colleague. Other material in the book includes documentation of about thirty representative
projects, appendixes with theoretical essays by
Dieste, a complete list of his works (with maps locating them), and an evaluation of the future of reinforced ceramics by Antonio Dieste (a structural
engineer and one of Eladios eleven children).
Dieste invented his first reinforced ceramics
structure in 1947 for the ceramic roof vaults of a
summer house designed by Antonio Bonet, where
Dieste wanted to eliminate the tie rods, continuous
lateral supports, and heavy end arches normally required by such structures. From then on, he continued to explore the possibilities of brick, a cheap,
traditional material that is widely available throughout Latin America. His major structural innovations
were two types of vaults, which he called selfcarrying and Gaussian (in reference to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great German mathematician), and a
type of perforated tower that required no formwork
for its construction. Tour-de-force designs of the
self-carrying vault structural type, like the storage
sheds for Massaro Industries, with a vault cantilever
of 54 feet at one end and a series of three vaults
supported by a single row of central columns and
cantilevers of 43 feet to either side, are well documented in this publication. He achieved the longest
span of a series of Gaussian vaults with clerestories
between them164 feet between side wallsin
the replacement roof for the main warehouse in
Montevideos docks. The tapering brick towers, used
for agricultural and industrial purposes, consist of
vertical ribs of reinforced brick connected through
staggered, spiraling horizontal brick ribs, also reinforced. The slots left between accommodate the
tapering so the vertical ribs do not change their

Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 6371 2005 ACSA, Inc.

width from top to bottom, and allow the insertion of

scaffolding beams for the bricklayers platform,
which moves up with each new course of horizontal
ribs. Thus formwork and extensive scaffolding are
eliminated while the perforations reduce the wind
load and express the towers slenderness, extraordinary for brick: the Maldonado TV tower is 197-feet
high and only 11.5 feet in diameter at its base. The
relation between form and structure is obvious in
Diestes work. As Pedreschi and Larrambere state:
The roofs and walls of Diestes buildings are folded
where they need to be folded. The long cantilevers
of his roofs project because their form allows them
to (p. 138). The form is the source of stability. Oschendorf points out that all great engineers succeeded because they were able to produce structures
at a lesser cost than their competitors, and Dieste
was no exception. Like Eiffel, Maillart, and Roebling,
Dieste focused on a single material, mastering and

extending its construction process, directing the

work on the site, and designing methods appropriate
to the local conditions. Design and construction
were never disconnected in their practices. However,
methods and materials that rely on local expertise
are always shunned by large construction companies
in industrialized countries, and are not taught in engineering schools. Thus the lessons of Diestes work,
including the considerable advantages of brick over
concrete in thin shell construction he discovered,
remain outside the commercial production of structures in most countries, even as he proved the economy of reinforced ceramics in large-scale projects.
In 1956 he and his engineering classmate Eugenio Montaez (19162001) established the firm
Dieste y Montaez, S.A., which built millions of
square feet of covered areas for bus stations, warehouses, and silos, many of which are awe-inspiring
because of their extension and height. However
Dieste is remembered by architects for two modest
but extraordinary churches, the Church of Christ the
Worker in the outskirts of Atlntida (19581960),
for a congregation of poor agricultural workers, and
the church of St. Peter in Durazno (19691971), a
remodeling project that replaced the churchs nave
and roof after its destruction by fire. In both cases,
brick is the finish in all surfaces, and the glowing
light within is a function of the material. In Atlntida, walls and roof are formed by curved surfaces
that meet with extraordinary precision; in Durazno,
there are no columns to support the central bay of
the basilican plan, a feat made possible by treating
the folded plates of walls and roof as thin (but very
deep) beams spanning the entire length of the
church. Yet these are serene, not dazzling, spaces,
in spite of the obvious structural brilliance.
Andersons essay attributes this serenity to
Diestes humanist ethics and spiritual devotion, an
explanation that ignores Diestes vigorous advocacy
of appropriate and appropriated modernity, a debate that was central to architectural culture in Latin
America throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Andersons approach thus places Diestes work in an imag-

ined timeless tradition, lifting it from a context

where dynamic forces shape the world anew.
Susana Torre is the author of the forthcoming book Latin
American Architecture and Urban Design: A Critical History,
to be published by W.W. Norton.

Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the

Machinic Landscape
MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI and CIRO NAJLE, Editors
Architectural Association, 2003
176 pages, illustrated
$59.69 (cloth)

Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the

California Delta
JANE WOLFF
William Stout Publishers, 2003
195 pages, illustrated
$29.95 (paper)
Field over object, time over space, operation over
composition, dynamic over static, performance over
appearance, diagram over pictureeven someone
with the most casual interest in landscape and its associative practices will recognize these pairings as
fundamental to its current sensibility. So it comes as
no surprise that two recent books, Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape and
Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta,
despite their differences, each reiterate these pervasive concepts. Both books provide cohesive frameworks that advance calibrated arguments and diverse
strategies regarding two preoccupations of the landscape field today: form making in an environment
organized more by commerce than design, and the
role of representationgraphic and politicalin
deciding landscape futures.

As a term and an emerging discipline, landscape urbanism hovers between the familiar and the
opaque. Its discourse has long been a part of landscape architecture, with Frederick Law Olmsteds
work on the Back Bay Fens a comprehensive example. In this way, landscape urbanism includes
work that is landscape in the traditional sense, with
its medium and techniques, as well as work that is an
analog to it, that grows and changes over time. At
this point, the characteristics for landscape urbanism
are so broad they include much of contemporary
work in architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and
as such, they are of questionable use.
Landscape Urbanism, edited by Mohsen

book reviews

64

Mostafavi and Ciro Najle, offers more specific parameters that shape but still refrain from defining
this emerging discipline. Engaging both landscape
and architectural concerns, this book convincingly
presents landscape urbanism as a mode of operation
that informs design approaches and techniques (as
opposed to objects) in a way that casts both design
theorist Jeff Kipnis and French landscape architect
Michel Desvigne as landscape urbanists. In doing so,
it opens up new territories for those who may have a
biased sense of landscape urbanism that associate it
with both goodness and greenness.
As readers navigate the book, landscape urbanism unfolds as a spectrum of possibility through six
sections: Framework, Medium, System, Prototype, Plan, and Context, which are illuminated
through student work from the Architectural Association, essays, and mostly unbuilt design work. Although diverse, these essays and projects advance a
design approach that is separate from an aesthetic
of work, where the landscape develops as a product
of its transformative processes and techniques and is
concerned less with form than with its effects.
This ambition is not new, but the refreshing variety of work that it produces and is presented in
Landscape Urbanism is. Landscape architect James
Corners strategies to put materials to work (p. 61)
in Freshkillss successional planting strategy conceptually aligns with the preoccupations of architects
Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, who characterize their work as a concern with the way that material computes itself (p. 106). Corner, who seems
weary of what he calls the lust for indeterminacy
(p. 59), advances landscape urbanisms specific characteristics: horizontality, infrastructure, processes,
ecology, and techniques, the last comprised of a
toolbox for a projects development. These projects,
like most of those featured in the book, suggest that
the avoidance of static representationsfunctional,
typological, and historicalis the hallmark of the
landscape urbanists ambition.
The difficulty of these ambitions is evident in
the tension between the essays and the student

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book reviews

projects. In a book that advocates landscapes performative logics, it is surprising to see work that
verges on pictures of organizations, obsessed by
characteristics of the horizontal. These diagrammatic
plans are programmatic and formal representations,
less operative than the projective diagrams advanced
by design critics Robert Somol and Stan Allen. There
are too few convincing examples of the latter, and
their lack in Landscape Urbanism is disappointing.
The landscape urbanist project as presented in
this book is for the most part convincing. At times,
though, the characteristics of this emerging discipline seem stretched too far. When, for instance,
ecology serves simply as an analog for a surface
strategy without also informing the detailed biological and ecological development of the landscape,
one is left wondering if landscape urbanism is a
Trojan horse for the advancement of new formal
concerns.
If Landscape Urbanism condenses disparate
urban and landscape practices, Jane Wolffs Delta
Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta operates
in the realm of representation, suggesting strategies
for negotiating complex and conflicting values for
the future of a contested eco-region of California
a landscape that Wolff reads as, simultaneously, a
garden, a wilderness, a machine, and a toy.
The concept for the Delta Primer responds to
the projection that Californias population could
reach sixty million by 2040, and Wolff tells us that it
is a political tool. As a means of analysis and action,
it is conceived to manage the conflicting forces that
shape the regionagriculture, development, environmentalism, and the demand for waterand their
attendant constituencies. Wolffs work springs from
her conviction that raising consciousness is the first
step toward effecting change and offers her book as
a model for negotiating the politics of growth.
For Wolff, this ambition to mobilize possibilities
for a future landscape is contingent on making visible the regions complexity, and she does this by
telling stories. The book is structured by photos, essays, and a glossary that are all attempts to do so,

but Wolffs playing card mapa map of the region

scored into sixty rectangles, fifty-two of which are
storyboards on one side with a map segment on the
otheris the notable invention. The potential effects of conflating the system of a deck of cards with
the spatial information of a map places this publication in a tradition of those concerned with the power
of landscape representation.
Wolffs juxtapositions of map segments and
drawings (either side by side in the book, or front to
back on the map) recall another publication that focused on the role of landscape representation for
raising consciousness and prompting action. James
Corner and Alex Macleans Taking Measures across
the American Landscape (Yale University Press, 1996)
juxtaposed aerial photographs with what Corner calls
map-drawings, the latter with the intention of
making visible latent information about how these

landscapes work. Although the messages of the

map-drawings are often difficult to decipher, the
intention is that information, which is lacking in scenic photographs, will sponsor alternative landscape
strategies that challenge pictorial sensibilities and
practices. In this way, seeing landscape is linked to
understanding it, valuing it, and acting upon it.
To this end, Wolffs metaphor of a card game is
a strong yet problematic way to make the stories accessible and equally valued. Her playing card map,
like Corners map-drawings, mobilizes a variety of
techniques to display information about an artifact,
practice, or process and its relationship to a place.
Each card face is made up of a selection of plans,
sections, diagrams, charts, or perspective drawings,
sometimes juxtaposed at different scales, in order to
depict the most information possible. Weve seen
these strategies before. The choice of freehand
drawings over a variety of digital techniques may
represent the stories in ways that most people understand (p. 44), but at times appears naive and,
given each drawings reliance on lengthy descriptions, unnecessarily pedestrian.
Additionally, the ranking of stories in a suit
where face value is based solely on scalethe bigger the story the higher its value in cardsproves
problematic. Whereas moving a potato headquarters
is assigned a face value of two, suburban appliances as indexes of water consumption is the king.
Disassociating a king from power, or card value from
the value of the tale being told, is difficult.
To this end, Wolffs metaphor of a card game
for imagining the California Deltas future is both ingenious and contrived. It does offer readers, and potentially constituents, a way to represent, in cards
and therefore politics, the seemingly trivial and topical side by side. It is a smart, optimistic, and engaging way for everyone to put their hands on the table,
making visible diverse and conflicting values that
need to be negotiated. But negotiation, like card
playing, is about luck as well as skill, and there is always someone in these processes holding the better
cards.

It is no news that the discipline of landscape

has enjoyed a conceptual shoring up over the last
decade. At a time when this material has become
pervasive in architecture schools, in endless variation, these particular books promise to develop and
refine landscape discourse, not simply restate what
has already been said.
Julia Czerniak is an associate professor at Syracuse University. She is the editor of Case: Downsview Park Toronto
(Prestel and Harvard Design School, 2001) and the author
of Large Parks (forthcoming).

Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living

MARY McLEOD, editor
Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Architectural
League of New York, 2003
304 pages, b/w & color illustrations
$65 (cloth)

Charlotte Perriand: A Life of Creation

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND
Monacelli Press, 2003
400 pages, illustrated
$40 (cloth)
Charlotte Perriand is the young woman with her face
turned away. In the iconic photo that appears in
many texts on Modern Architecture she is reclined in
a tubular steel and leather chaise longue, which carries her name next to that of Le Corbusier. Perriand
maintained this enigmatic position until the 1980s
when a general interest in feminism sparked investigation of her work. Finally, twenty years later, five
years after she died at the age of ninety-five, two
books on her life as a designer have reached publication. Mary McLeod offers a collection of insightful
essays complemented by large and well-reproduced

images, which place Perriands work within the larger

movements of the time. In addition, a translation of
Perriands autobiography presents her own narrative
of experiences that marked her life.
McLeod was among the first to bring scholarly
attention to Perriand. In this volume, Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living, her thoughtful work as editor
reflects Perriands approach to both collaboration
and design. The book presents coordinated research
from a number of authors in pursuit of themes that
extend well beyond a single designers oeuvre.
McLeod notes that Perriand did not leave a huge
quantity of work, but managed to place herself at
the heart of critical controversies that both defined
and disputed modernism. Her work offers insight
into several of the major cultural phenomena of the
twentieth century: the definition of a modern role
for women, the influence of the communist/socialist
Popular Front in France, the encounter between
modern western design and traditional crafts in
Japan, and a negotiation between machine age
technology and a movement back to the land. Per-

book reviews

66

riand contributed to each discussion in spirited works

of design that articulated a clear position. Memories
recorded in her autobiography, A Life of Creation,
people the events with friends, circumstances, and
details of the design tasks as she saw them. Perriands narrative is a good read. Many of the characters are familiar and the historical circumstances real.
At times, the story is gripping. For example, she
matter-of-factly tells of her harrowing escape from
Indochina in 1945 with her infant daughter, hiding
from looters while the American air force bombed
Saigon.
Perriands contribution to design that remains
most relevant may be her consideration of how domestic objects shape the habits of daily life. Several
of the essays in McLeods volume trace her maturing
sensibilities. McLeods own essay recounts Perriands
early years in Le Corbusiers office, where she worked
with Pierre Jeanneret to develop domestic equipment. When she arrived, Perriand was already recognized as an independent designer, known for
light-hearted, modern interiors that freed men and
women from the strictures of traditional gendered
spaces. Together, Perriand, Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier designed furniture to occupy modern houses
as agile, even athletic figures in an expansive
ground. They integrated compact kitchens into salons so a host could serve food while talking to
guests, his or her movements choreographed in steel
and chrome. These kitchens, however, imply that the
real work of preparing food is done elsewhere, by
others. In the ten years she worked for Le Corbusier,
Perriand increasingly sympathized with the others,
ordinary people working with objects in simple circumstances. In an essay entitled Lessons from
Objects, Joan Ockman relates that Perriand would
arrive in Le Corbusiers atelier every day with a new
photo or thing that she always called adorable. Her
finds ranged from vernacular and handmade objects,
to manufactured articles and kitsch, some of which
found places in her interiors. For example, a furniture
installation of 1931 included brightly colored synthetic tourist rugs with images of lions and leopards.

67

book reviews

Her concerns, like many of her contemporaries,

coalesced into support for the socialist ideals of the
Popular Front political party in France. Her political
stance was reinforced by two trips to Soviet Moscow
in the early 1930s that she details in her autobiography. Finally in 1937, Perriand left Le Corbusiers office no longer able to condone his single-minded
goals. Working in his atelier was like stepping into
a monasterythe rules had to be obeyed (A Life
of Creation, p. 101). In the McLeod volume, Danilo
Udovicki-Selbs essay, Cetait dans lair du temps:
Charlotte Perriand and the Popular Front, offers a
glimpse of how the movement catalyzed the avantgarde and redefined modern art and design toward a
social purpose. Perriand and some of her colleagues
expressed their sentiments in a photomontage de-

picting the suffering of the poor of Paris that they

displayed at an annual exhibition of domestic arts.
This pointed piece, next to the usual department
store displays of luxury furniture evoked strong response in an already heated political atmosphere
that ultimately destroyed the Popular Front.
In 1940, Perriand accepted a position in Japan
as a design consultant to develop furniture for export that could maintain Japanese traditional crafts.
She left Paris on the very day that German troops invaded the city. Yasushi Zennos essay reads the cultural tensions implicit in her task as a representative
of the West in an atmosphere of rising nationalism.
This analysis coupled with her autobiographical account reveals a thinly veiled contest over cultural
dominance, measured in design. Who was appropriating forms from whom? Perriands bamboo interpretation of the chaise longue, shown on the cover
of McLeods book, was criticized as a naive reduction
of Japanese identity to a common material. At the
same time, her host and colleague from Le Corbusiers office, Junzo Sakakura, infused modern
ideas into Japanese architecture toward a vital synthesis. In 1941, Perriand left Japan abruptly on the
eve of its attack on Pearl Harbor.
Unable to return to an occupied Paris, she
spent World War II in French Indochina, now Vietnam, married a military officer, and bore a child. On
her return home after the war, Perriand increasingly
spent time in the mountain provinces of France to
design a series of ski lodges for vacationing families.
Her work there marks a confluence of several strains
from her past. The ski lodges catered to middle-class
families on vacation, vacations legislated by the
Popular Front. Rooms had to be small and efficient,
recalling Perriands efforts with Le Corbusier. In one
chalet, a delicate bathroom gave French habits of
toilette a Japanese pace and sensuality. And many
variations of rustic suites throughout the project reflected provincial habits of simple wooden furniture
made for large families at table.
Perriands autobiography gives us moments of
her life with the people, places, and events that ren-

der them human. McLeods collection of essays gives

us Perriands work, placed in a social, political, and
artistic context that reveals its meaning. They are
part of a broad reassessment of modern architecture
that is slowly replacing the hoary heroic narrative
with the open-ended decisions and compromises
made by thoughtful people in challenging circumstances. Together these two books introduce us to
the woman in the chaise longue, they show us the
grace of her thought through design, and they allow
her to speak.
Gray Read is an assistant professor of architectural history
at Florida International University. She has written articles
on Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. She is currently working
on a book titled Quintessential Theatre: Modern Architecture and Theatre in Paris and has a chapter, Aragons Armoire: The Architecture of Darkness, in Architecture and
Surrealism, edited by Thomas Mical, Routledge, 2005.

Sustainability on Campus: Stories and

Strategies for Change
PEGGY BARLETT and GEOFFREY CHASE, Editors
The MIT Press, 2004
344 pages, illustrated
$23.95 (paper)
Depending on your school you may or may not be
surprised to learn that during the 1990s a determined and diverse group of our colleagues, students,
staff, and administrators began the slow process of
bringing sustainable practices and concerns to our
campuses.
Origins of such action lie within the expansion
of environmental education following the energy
crises of 1974. By 1989 campus activism yielded the
first comprehensive campus environmental audit at
the University of California, Los Angeles. The following year, university leaders adopted the Talloires
Declaration, recognizing the role of universities in
environmental education, research, and policy for-

mation (p. 8). Since then organizations like Second

Nature, University Leaders for a Sustainable Future,
Campus Ecology, and publications like Sustainability
on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change have
maintained the momentum. They provide guidance,
networking, seminars, and information for campus
environmental action such as: curricular development, building design, community outreach, systemwide initiative, and the development of stewardship
guidelines.
The sixteen narratives collected in this volume
document this recent history. They are personal stories told by those engaged in environmental action
on the ground. The editors purpose is twofold:
first, to facilitate attempts to bring sustainable practices to academic institutions by providing detailed
and personal examples of success, failure, and

struggle, and second, to further position academia

as a critical leverage point for change (p. 5).
Since most of the narratives are well written
and earnest, the volume appears to achieve the first
goal. Each essay includes a statement defining sustainability and an account of specific experiences
from initiating campus recycling programs to the
construction of green campus architecture. Yet,
even the best accounts are hampered by the singular
voice of the advocates for change. Despite the social
nature of their actions we are deprived of hearing
from those with competing interests or intentions
who may have played a key role in the projects success or failure. A case study approach might have
avoided this result and fostered a more rigorous
and vital understanding of sustainability as a social
process.
The latter more ethereal goal is better served.
The intimacy of the stories conspire to convince the
reader of his or her own responsibility to act in one
way or another as either activist or supporter. Further, they spark curiosity about what may be going
on at ones own institution. Look around; you may
be surprised.
The books most valuable contribution, particularly for readers of JAE, emerges outside the intentions of the editors: the positioning of sustainability
as a social, rather than a technological discourse.
Many of the authorslike most architectsapproach
sustainability as the application of techniques (gray
water recycling) and/or technologies (solar panels).
These stories, however, reveal sustainability to be
primarily a social process achieved through negotiation, participation, and the adaptation of local practices. It reinforces the idea of sustainability as a
social construction, in which broadly applicable concepts are fully realized when localized.
Three prominent themes emerge from the narratives to reinforce the important issue of social process. In most, the themes of local place and direct
engagement in local conditions were key. Although
many of the authors intended similar improvement in
the behavior and environmental quality of their uni-

book reviews

68

versities, every process and end result was socially

and physically distinct to that institution. More importantly, the specific geography of places often
played a role in galvanizing action and support for
protection and improvement. In Peggy Barletts account, the threat of road construction through the
Baker Woods, a beloved local landscape, served as
the catalyst for environmental action at Emory
University.
Most of the activism described was initiated
and sustained by individual faculty or students outside of their normal responsibilities. Even in cases
where upper-level support or outside funding was
forthcoming, grassroots activism and coalition building proved central to success. Debra Rowes excellent, almost Machiavellian narrative, gives an
insiders of view of administrative political action.
While Audrey Chang helpfully presents competing
styles of activism: a slow, thorough, patient, and
successful building of support upward through administrative levels, versus a short-lived, Greenpeacesupported, unsuccessful protest campaign.
Readers familiar with academia will not find the
third theme, institutional resistance, a surprise. The
impediments faced in fostering campus environmental action are identical to those faced by any agenda
aimed at change: new ideas are greeted with skepticism, financial support is scarce, and bureaucratic review time-consuming. The message that emerges
most clearly is that the key to success, especially
with regard to adoption of sustainable concepts and
practices, is attaining and sustaining the support of
upper administratorsthe process of education and
negotiation.
Among good narratives by David Orr, Michael
Edelstein, and Nan Jenks-Jay the best contribution
is that the book functions like the social processes it
documents. Its many voices provide inspiration. Its
links, references, and examples help build a community. However, the editors organization and
summary introduction, while helpful, break no new
ground. The reliance on personal narratives remains
the books primary strength and greatest weakness.

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book reviews

While these stories should challenge every reader to

bring sustainability to their own campus, they remain
one-sided and less helpful than intended. At the
very least, though, they let you know that you are
not alone.
Vincent B. Canizaro is an assistant professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research and teaching include the subjects of regionalism, site-specificity, and
sustainability.

Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston

BARRIE SCARDINO, WILLIAM F. STERN, and
BRUCE C. WEBB, Editors
University of Texas Press, 2003
368 pages, illustrated
$35.00 (cloth)
In 1982, after a period of explosive, yet protracted
growth, Houston was unknowingly teetering on the
brink of a quick, spectacular fall. The city that
counted approximately 380,000 residents in 1940
had more than quadrupled to approximately 1.6 million people in forty yearsfrom a combination of
migration, immigration, aggressive annexation by
metropolitan government, and, truly, the development of affordable air conditioningand by 1982
encompassed almost 600 square miles (p. ix). (See
http://houstonhistory.com/decades/history5l.htm
and www.ci.houston.tx.us/departme/planning/
planning_dev_web/long_range/demographics/
Ann_%20Est_City.htm.) But seemingly almost
overnight, as a result of the crash of the oil industryand subsequently, the real estate industry
Houston lost 160,000 jobs in fifteen months,
creating a patchwork of abandoned suburban tract
houses, cleared inner-city parcels, and see-through
office towers (p. 69). (For an account of the relationship between real estate and architecture in
Texas in the 1980s and the origin of the term seethrough buildings, see Joel Warren Barna, The See-

Through Years, Rice University Press, 1992.) This

boom, bust, and rebuild cycle, combined with a
plenitude of land, a lack of limiting geographic features, and deeply held political and economic beliefs,
has shaped Houston into the constantly shifting city
it is today.
On the cusp of that shift from boom to bust,
the journal Cite: The Architecture and Design Review
of Houston debuted in an attempt to foster thoughtful urban and architectural criticism in and for a city
that had none. That such an initiative has not only
lasted, but has also thrived, is testament to the importance of such a publication about Houston, and,
by extension, about places like Houston. In The
Right to the City (in Architecture Culture, 1943
1968, edited by Joan Ockman, Rizzoli, 1993), Henri
Lefebvre asks: Why not counter the idea of the
eternal city with ephemeral cities, the fixed center
with multiple moving centers? (p. 433). Just as
Rome epitomizes the eternal qualities of the traditional city, Houston represents the ephemeral

qualities of the contemporary American city: it is dynamic, temporal, and mobile, unburdened by its history, and focused on its future. While some might
consider Houston to be an extreme example of late
twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American
urbanism, it is hardly unusual; consider Atlanta,
or Jacksonville, or Phoenix. And though conventional urban criticism may continue to deride Houston as an example of everything wrong with the
contemporary city, the simple fact is that cities like
Houstonand suburban areas of cities quite unlike
Houstonare where increasing numbers of Americans are choosing to live; as such, they demand our
critical attention. (See http://www.citymayors.com/
gratis/uscities_growth.html. Nine of the top-ten
fastest growing cities in the United States since 2000
are nontraditional, highly suburbanized cities.)
Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houstona consistently outstanding anthology of essays from the
past twenty years of Citeopens with a disclaimer:
From the beginning, Cite has tried to present Houston more in terms of critical observations than as an
object of theoretical speculation (p. 3). Cites longevity is in large part due to its excellent, provocative writing and criticism on a wide range of topics,
from the everyday urbanism of mobile taquerias, to
Houstons recent implementation of light rail. Equally
important is its accessibility; this is a journal aimed at
both the profession and the public. Accordingly, it is
a body of writing that not only focuses on lucid, critical thinking, but also goes beyond a critique of the
formalized architectural object, instead explicating
the historical, economic, political, and cultural influences on urbanism and architecture.
Believing that order should not precede essence (p. x), the editors have selected essays from
the past twenty years that are most representative of
three themes: Idea of the City, Places of the City,
and Buildings of the City. Places of the City explores unique areas both known and under-known
within the city, while Buildings of the City makes
manifest the myriad opportunities afforded architects as a result of Houstons remarkable growth. Al-

though these sections address more conventional

urban and architectural topicssuch as the buildings and urban impact of the Museum District, the
influence of Mies van der Rohe in Houston, and the
design of the Houston Astros new downtown baseball stadiumthey also work to uncover the nonarchitectural forces acting on the architectural result.
It is Idea of the City that is the most compelling section, however, as its essays establish a
cohesive, comprehensible historical and cultural
framework with which to understand the everchanging physical character of this fascinating, yet
often inscrutable, city. This is where broader issues
that define and shape Houston are explored, including the overwhelming lack of traditional public
space, the importance of mobility and a subsequent
dominance of freeways, the lack of limiting geography and the ever-expanding suburbs, and the focus on privatized planning interests and a parallel
antipathy to zoning. Underlying many of the essays
are the powerful political and economic currents that
inform the city.
In particular, the stridently pro-business tendencies of Houston are repeatedly referenced in individual essays throughout the book. Unfortunately,
neither the economic framework, nor a concurrent
political structure, are ever fully explained or put into
context. This would facilitate a more comprehensive
understanding of Houstons unique development environment, which is not simply predicated on private
property value, as one might assume from the emphasis on the economic. Its origin is in private property rightsland-ownership and self-government
as expressions of Jeffersonian democracyand a
tradition of individualism and a historic distrust of
governmentexemplified by things like two-year
terms and three-term limits for mayor.
Overall, this is an outstanding collection of essays, intelligently chosen and organized, well written
and accessible, and compelling in its search for meaning in the ephemeral American city that Houston
epitomizes so well. For urbanists and educators in
particular, this anthology serves as a model of ex-

tended critical observation and analysis of potential

(sub)urban strategies and points to the future of urban work in many cities.
Judith K. De Jong is Associate Director for Undergraduate
Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lived and practiced
in Houston from 19921999.

Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion

and Media
MITCHELL SCHWARZER
Princeton Architectural Press, 2004
307 pages
$29.95 (paper)
Photographs and films of architecture rarely acknowledge the many fictions underlying their pretense to depict the built environment in its actuality.
The images of pristine homes and working environments that fill the pages of books and magazines
typically omit human beings. Movement and flux,
intrinsic to the city and limitless in their variations,
can only be hinted at by capturing a small temporal
sample through still and moving images. What it
means to inhabit a space, from its corporeal and tactile dimensions, to its construction flaws, commonly
eludes visual representation. No less fictional is the
presumption that we perceive architecture in a state
of rest, when more often than not we are ambulatory, moving on foot or traveling in automobiles,
trains, airplanes.
Restoring this mobility to the architectural
observer constitutes a major goal of Mitchell
Schwarzers Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and
Media. In six gracefully written chapters on the railroad, automobile, airplane, photography, film, and
television, Schwarzer argues for the centrality of
these technologies as mediations that have forever
changed our experience of built form. He demonstrates the ubiquity of what he calls the zoomscape, a largely optical mode characterized by

book reviews

70

speed and surface (p. 12) that he associates with

mechanized transportation and the camera, a moving or imagistic transformation of architecture from
site to flow and from object to event (p. 26). More
than simply the operation of a zoom lens (an optical
device that alters neither distance nor movement between the perceiver and the object), the zoomscape
is a mode of perception embodied in such operations
as panning, tracking, editing, and birds-eye views.
Schwarzer takes the everyday environment as
his object of investigation and approaches it not as a
formal or linguistic system but as a series of physical
movements and images from which it has become
practically inseparable. Paraphrasing Immanuel Kant,
one might claim that for Schwarzer there is no architecture in itself, just architecture for us, as it exists in experience and always already shaped by the

71

book reviews

automobile windshield, the window from the train

compartment, photographs, and motion pictures.
Relentlessly descriptive and nuanced in its observations, Zoomscape takes its place in a long tradition
of phenomenological investigations of architecture
but replaces the disembodied transcendental subject
of philosophers and an earlier generation of architectural theorists with a media savvy contemporary
observer who encounters architecture driving on the
freeway, seated in the multiplex, or viewing The
Sopranos in a suburban living room. (For a paradigmatic work in this tradition, see Christian Norberg
Schulz, Existence, Space, and Architecture, Praeger,
1971.)
To illustrate this thesis Schwarzer reveals the
zoomscape in operation, explicating the impact of
the railroad upon spatial perception that culminates
in a brilliant reading of the decaying industrial landscapes visible through the windows of most American commuter trains and their relation to postwar
modernism. In what for me was the books strongest
chapter, the discussion of the airplane, he investigates the reception of aerial photographs by German
architects and art historians of the 1920s such as
Hans Schmidt and Fritz Wichert and notes how such
images ushered in new urban and spatial conceptions. No less impressive is the range of literary,
artistic, and cinematic references to how architecture
has been depicted in the modern world. If such a
profusion of citations occasionally does read like a
catalog, as in the books final chapter on television
(redeemed by a fascinating discussion of the Naked
City television series), the relative independence of
the six chapters allows for, perhaps even encourages,
the reader to dip in and sample them out of sequence, as if Schwarzer had emulated the very perceptual discontinuity of the zoomscape as a stylistic
principle.
Informing his argument is a recognition that architecture has become increasingly intertwined with
visual observation. While acknowledging the paradoxical situation that zoomscapes encourage optical mobility and hamper physical mobility (p. 23),

Schwarzer begs the question of the growing inextricability of the built environment from vision, the
ocularcentrism that thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault understand as a signal
tendency in the evolution of western rationality. (On
this intellectual tradition, see Martin Jay, Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought, University of California Press, 1993,
and Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited
by David Michael Levin, University of California Press,
1993.) Concluding his book by observing that Zoomscapes have pushed our vision toward a state of almost perpetual transformation. Zoomscapes have
estranged and enlightened our understanding of architecture (p. 305), he remains silent on the ways in
which the culture of images may well have impoverished architecture. For the surveillance possibilities
afforded by optical transparency and Foucaults understanding of panopticism, if not the very presumption that architectural experience can be wholly
encompassed by the sense of sight, pose challenges
to Schwarzers largely sanguine account.
Greater treatment of digital technology (conspicuously absent in his discussion of the digitally
manipulated photographs of Andreas Gursky) might
have encouraged Schwarzer to reflect on the tradeoffs that accompany the transformation of spatial
and bodily experience into visual images. A consideration of the work by contemporary practitioners
such as Peter Zumthor and Herzog & de Meuron,
who value the tactility of architecture, could also
have led in this direction. Not all architecture or
perceptual modes have embraced the logic of the
zoomscape, and a discussion of those that have
resisted its pull would probably reveal a different account of modernity, less monolithic and technologically driven, than that outlined in this nonetheless
rewarding book.
Edward Dimendberg teaches in the Department of Film and
Media Studies and Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.