PAUL GOLDBERGER ON THE AGE OF ARCHITECTURE The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry, the CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas, the Getty Center by Richard Meier, the Times Building by Renzo Piano: Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger’s tenure atThe New Yorkerhas documented a captivating era in the world of architecture, one in which larger-than-life buildings, urban schemes, historic preservation battles, and personalities have commanded an international stage. Goldberger’s keen observations and sharp wit make him one of the most insightful and passionate architectural voices of our time. In this collection of fifty-seven essays, the critic Tracy Kidder called “America’s foremost interpreter of public architecture” ranges from Havana to Beijing, from Chicago to Las Vegas, dissecting everything from skyscrapers by Norman Foster and museums by Tadao Ando to airports, monuments, suburban shopping malls, and white-brick apartment houses. This is a comprehensive account of the best—and the worst—of the “age of architecture.” On Norman Foster: Norman Foster is the Mozart of modernism. He is nimble and prolific, and his buildings are marked by lightness and grace. He works very hard, but his designs don’t show the effort. He brings an air of unnerving aplomb to everything he creates—from skyscrapers to airports, research laboratories to art galleries, chairs to doorknobs. His ability to produce surprising work that doesn’t feel labored must drive his competitors crazy. On the Westin Hotel: The forty-five-story Westin is the most garish tall building that has gone up in New York in as long as I can remember. It is fascinating, if only because it makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky. It is not easy, these days, to go beyond the bounds of taste. If the architects, the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, had been trying to allude to bad taste, one could perhaps respect what they came up with. But they simply wanted, like most architects today, to entertain us. On Mies van der Rohe: Mies’s buildings look like the simplest things you could imagine, yet they are among the richest works of architecture ever created. Modern architecture was supposed to remake the world, and Mies was at the center of the revolution, but he was also a counterrevolutionary who designed beautiful things. His spare, minimalist objects are exquisite. He is the only modernist who created a language that ranks with the architectural languages of the past, and while this has sometimes been troubling for his reputation . . . his architectural forms become more astonishing as time goes on.

From the late Herbert Muschamp, the former architecture critic of The New York Times and one of the most outspoken and influential voices in architectural criticism, a collection of his best work. The pieces here—from The New Republic, Artforum, and The New York Times—reveal how Muschamp’s views were both ahead of their time and timeless. He often wrote about how the right architecture could be inspiring and uplifting, and he uniquely drew on film, literature, and popular culture to write pieces that were passionate and often personal, changing the landscape of architectural criticism in the process. These columns made architecture a subject accessible to everyone at a moment when, because of the heated debate between modernists and postmodernists, architecture had become part of a larger public dialogue. One of the most courageous and engaged voices in his field, he devoted many columns at the Times to the lack of serious new architecture in this country, and particularly in New York, and spoke out against the agenda of developers. He departed from the usual dry, didactic style of much architectural writing to playfully, for example, compare Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao to the body of Marilyn Monroe or to wax poetic about a new design for Manhattan’s manhole covers. One sees in this collection that Muschamp championed early on the work of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Thom Payne, Frank Israel, Jean Nouvel, and Santiago Calatrava, among others, and was drawn to the theoretical writings of such architects as Peter Eisenman. Published here for the first time is the uncut version of his brilliant and poignant essay about gay culture and Edward Durrell Stone’s museum at 2 Columbus Circle. Fragments from the book he left unfinished, whose title we took for this collection—“A Dozen Years,” “Metroscope,” and “Atomic Secrets”—are also included. Hearts of the City is dazzling writing from a humanistic thinker whose work changed forever the way we think about our cities—and the buildings in them.

At the pinnacle of his profession and powers, Christian de Portzamparc is a shining star in the firmament of high design. Pritzker Prize–winning architect Christian de Portzamparc is renowned for bold yet artful architecture that is at once sensitive to its context while at the same time being novel, adventurous, and frequently exciting. One57, the soaring residential skyscraper in New York, with unparalleled views of Central Park, is perhaps his most famous building in the United States, but his work ranges widely across the globe, from an extraordinary handkerchief puff–shaped boutique for Christian Dior in Seoul to a low-winged arabesque of a building for the wine producer Cheval Blanc to a mysterious temple of the modern for Casarts in Casablanca. This volume, the first major comprehensive book on Portzamparc’s work in more than three decades, is a revelation and a comprehensive survey of the work of one of the world’s most innovative and exciting architects at the height of his powers.

This informative guide gathers together an essential collection of Berlin's most significant buildings drawn from the widest historical background with a bias towards modern architecture. Each entry has a photograph, name, date, address and architect.

The author here presents an architectural history of Paris, stretching from the 3rd century BC up until the end of the 20th century.

Five hundred stunning duotone photographs showcase the finest, most majestic, and interesting examples of architecture in one of the world's most beloved cities. This inspiring photographic journey through the City of Lights features the greatest buildings, monuments, and structures of Paris, organized by neighborhood. Each building is featured in a rich, fine-resolution duotone photograph. Information including the building's name, its address and location, and year of completion or renovation is included underneath the image. A brief description of each building, which highlights its distinctive features and places it in historical context, is included at the back of the book.

This volume offers both an introduction to and an insight into key contemporary architects as well as giving a snapshot of the varied nature of architecture today. For each architect there are details of their life and work and illustrations of their most representative and iconic buildings.