The English Romantic poet John Keats has suffered several demises since his literal death at 25 in 1821, the most recent being last year’s bilious biopic Bright Star. But this book of 16 interviews with starchitects by Yael Reisner should keep the ghost of Keats in good health, if indeed ghosts are concerned about such matters. It was Keats who famously wrote in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . .,” and if any single line of poetry could serve as a better burr in the saddle of architects of the past century, I’d love to see it. Reisner might have had that line of Keats in mind when she titled her just published Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship (Wiley, 2010).

 

Troubled relationship with beauty? What understatement! Christopher Hawthorne brilliantly covered the panel discussion marking the book’s publication for the L.A. Times, and noted among the book’s contributors, “[Eric Owen] Moss, who literally held his head in his hands for much of the discussion, said he didn’t think a conversation about beauty was ‘useful’ any more.” Many of the other panelists, Hawthorne observed, had always viewed beauty with distrust or hostility. This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of modern architecture. But it is very much a tribute to Reisner’s skill as a kind of trickster-interviewer that she manages to tease out the contradictory thinking about beauty in Moss, Frank Gehry, and Gaetano Pesce. She even tricks Greg Lynn into sounding like a romantic, proto-Victorian connoisseur of beauty, a 21st-century Ruskin. This is Lynn talking to Reisner:

 

I could also take a more systematic approach and outline the 10 things you need for beauty and, in my opinion, they are pretty consistent: voluptuous curvature and surface, modulation of detail and components across the surface, a scale shift of a large interior out of components, or a large scheme out of components or gradient color.

 

A moment before this extraordinarily lucid catalogue of his aesthetics, Lynn comments, “Aesthetics are not an overarching preoccupation in my work. . .” Only an extraordinary interviewer could have drawn Lynn’s subterranean aesthetics out of him so directly and forcefully. She’s equally clever in pushing Zaha Hadid into a sly confession about her romance with color. And prefaces each interview with something akin to X-ray vision. Here is Reisner seeing through Pesce’s anti-aesthetic stance:

 

However, while he adamantly rejects the role of ‘eye judgment’ or the notion of a formal aesthetic within his design process, he does reluctantly concede that without natural intuition or a ‘good eye’ there is little chance for a designer to develop a valuable project.

 

The design writer Fleur Watson took the raw material of Reisner’s interviews and fashioned them into thrilling vignettes. This might be the most gripping and readable assortment of revealing interviews with starchitects ever published, even as its subjects doth protest too much about beauty, and stray occasionally from the book’s thematic focus. Honeycombed with exquisite photography of projects and published with old-fashioned panache, this book is itself a thing of beauty. Alas, as Keats knew, beauty comes at a steep price: $120 in this case. This is a damned tragedy because I can’t imagine a more provocative recent publication architecture students would profit from and can’t afford. Cross fingers that Wiley will do a sanely priced paperback version soon.

 

By the way, that line from the poet Keats about the identity of truth and beauty wasn’t referencing romantic mists over the moors. Keats was using an ancient urn as a symbol through which he meditated on the fluid commerce between art and daily life, culminating with the assertion that the identity of beauty and truth is all one ever needs to know. A dubious assertion, surely. Architects must know so much more. But maybe the ghost of Keats is roaming about, troubling our sleep lately, in order to push architects into reconciling technology and sustainability with that eternally contested word that sticks in every modern throat . . .beauty.

 

Featured architects: Will Alsop, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Peter Cook, Odile Decq, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Zvi Hecker, Mark Goulthorpe, Kolatan/MacDonald Studio, Greg Lynn, Tom Mayne, Juhani Pallasmaa, Gaetano Pesce, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf Prix and Lebbeus Woods.

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. You can reach him at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.