Thursday, 20 November 2025

America's modern best

























The second volume of Sam Lubell's excellent survey of American architecture. I reviewed the first title (ISBN 978-3967041552)  Westread Book Reviews: A land of visionary buildings 5/5 (westreadreviews.blogspot.com) ) and this second helping follows the same format. Forty-five buildings are presented with several big photos of exterior and interior and a brief essay. These are followed by an essay on corporate modernism, considering thirty-five buildings with a photo and essay.

A couple of structures caught my attention. Monsanto's plastic House of the Future, built in Anaheim, California Disneyland in 1957, it had twenty million visitors before it was demolished in 1967. Surely an unusual building, as the walls gently curved, which must have prevented items from being fixed to them. The other is Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago. Sixty-five floors, including seventeen for parking, it had 896 apartments.

I think it's worth saying that this is not a technical book; there are no floor plans or other architectural graphics. Lubell has written a celebration of modern buildings that are part of America's architectural legacy. Will there be a third title? 

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Elizabeth makes her case

















Bluprints is on top of the very large Taschen CSH book.
ISBN 3822864129. They have also published the book
in an inexpensive condensed edition,
A first-class study of the background to the Case Study Houses project created by the Southern Californian Arts & Architecture magazine. This book was originally published in conjunction with an exhibition of the program at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1989-1990. It has plenty of photos and plans (though some of the photos are just a little too dark) to illustrate the eight main essays. Editor Elizabeth Smith and Amelia Jones devote forty-two pages to the actual houses with succinct descriptions, plans and photos. The rest of this marvellous book has a huge amount of information relating to housing and the post-war environment and how the thirty-six prototype houses had a wide influence on the domestic architecture that followed.

I particularly enjoyed the two essays by Thomas Hine and also Dolores Hayden's essay: 'Model Houses for the Millions: architects' dreams, builders' boasts, residents' dilemmas'. The back of the book has six contemporary architects' ideas and plans for housing in 'Extending the Case Study Concept', followed by biographies, chronology, bibliography and index.

Was the project worth it? Architectural writer Esther McCoy summed it up as... `Perceived as a prototype that was to be enacted on a mass scale, the Case Study House program was a failure. Perceived as a prophetic statement, however, as a demonstration of trends and influences that would in one way or another achieve realisation, the program must be judged a success. Perceived as art, finally, an approach suggested by their presence in The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Case Study Houses have won the right to be recognised and respected in the history of American design'.

You might think that everything about the CSH was included in this book but Elizabeth Smith has just edited another one called (you guessed it) Case Study Houses (Taschen Jumbo ISBN 3822864129) a beautiful, very expensive, so worth searching around the net, and very heavy (twelve pounds) very big (opens up to over thirty-two inches wide) 440 page visual history with hundreds of photos, especially from Julius Shulman, plans and drawings. What was missing from this sumptuous volume was all the background information in Blueprints for Modern Living, so if you go for both books, you really will have the COMPLETE CSH experience.

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Wednesday, 19 November 2025

Tube benders delight 4/5





















The authors drove around Nevada, I assume mostly at night, to capture the neon signage that the state is famous for. A map opposite the Contents page shows that it wasn't just the obvious Las Vegas and Reno but lots of small towns with bars, motels, truck stops and other buildings that sported some wonderful vintage and new neon. 

Makers of these delights name themselves as tube benders and the YESCO Company (Young Electric Sign Company) rightly gets lots of mentions and a lot of old signs from their scrapyard formed the basis of the Neon Museum, Las Vegas (with more than 250 signs and best to visit after dark to enjoy the glow). Some signs are now really famous, like cowboy Vegas Vic with his moving left arm, built for $90,000 in 1951 by Thomas Young or his sidekick Vegas Vickie. Probably photographed thousands of times is the Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas Nevada, designed by Betty Willis and erected in 1959.

The book is an updated and expanded edition of the 1994 and 2011 titles with lots of color photos. I thought it unfortunate that many of these are smaller than necessary, with rather generous margins on many pages and oddly, the photo pages have no page numbers (making chunks of the back pages Index redundant).

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