Robert A. M. Stern

This is a massive book from 2002 with excerpts from the first 30 issues of "Perspecta," the journal edited by students at Yale School of Architecture. The book is massive because it adopts the same quarto paper size as the journal itself, and because the importance of the contributions collected in the reader is unmatched by any other architectural publication with such longevity. "Perspecta" started in 1952 under chair George Howe, but it is most famous for the 9/10 double issue edited by Robert A. M. Stern in 1965, the last year that Paul Rudolph served as chair. I have that double issue that is coveted for the excerpt from Robert Venturi’s then-forthcoming "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" and Charles Moore’s “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Unfortunately, Stern and the other editors of "Re-Reading Perspecta" (Caroline Picard and Alan Plattus) opted not to carry the page layout and design from the original issues to the reader; this provides a consistency across the hefty book’s 828 pages, but it pushes the images into a narrow 2-inch band across the bottom of the 12-inch tall pages, clearly an effort at maximizing the book’s contents while keeping it below a thousand pages. This means readers will not see, among other things, the red Disneyland gatefold map that was part of Moore’s essay — one example of how an original exceeds its copy.… (meer)

The end of July in Chicago means the Newberry Book Fair at the Newberry Library, which I would raid every year for obscure and unexpected donated books; it's something I have missed since moving to NYC, which doesn't appear to have a similar fair. One year an architect seemed to have donated his whole library to Newberry, and one of the many titles I picked up that year was this issue of A+U from the glory days of Postmodernism. The XL issue is packed with architects both well known – Stern of course, Michael Graves, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, Arquitectonica, Charles W. Moore, even Frank Gehry – and a lot that time has forgotten. As I noted last year in a blog post on old publications (https://archidose.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-value-of-old-publications.html), the issue is more and more valuable as Postmodernism is being reappraised, even though I still don't like what the movement produced.… (meer)