Tall Building Artistically Rec

by Ada Louise Huxtable

Book Overview

Ada Louise Huxtable 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394537734
• ISBN13: 9780394537733
• Release Date: April 1985
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Keep Looking Up!

The Skyscraper: Yes, it's the nearest thing to heaven we have here - in New York, Chicago and all around. Ms Huxtable, who is THE architecture critic, gives an intelligent and highly insightful overview of the tall building. How is it built? How does the exterior express the building's structure? How do we know - visually - when we are at the top and by the way, how should the top of a skyscraper end? What set of feelings does this kind of a building evoke in the viewer? The answers are still emerging, about what makes a skyscraper have style. And most Americans, God bless `em, know what is authentic, what is a "near miss" and what is pretentious just by looking. How good it is of Ms H to confirm or challenge our perceptions! This book is definitely NOT just for architects to read - although all of them ought to have it in their library. Because tall buidings are all around us. It is for the man and woman on the street, who cannot help but stand there on the pavement and look up and enjoy what they see.