Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture and Design

by Janet Abrams, Deyan Sudjic (Foreword by)

Overview

Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus collects the unparalleled writings of legendary British wordsmith Janet Abrams for the first time. From pivotal figures in international modernism to the pioneers of digital medium, Abrams explored the ideas, theories, and emotions that fueled their work.

The book's twenty-six profiles, written in Abrams's signature, personal, often hilarious style, include Reyner Banham, Berthold Lubetkin, Philip Johnson, Paul Rand, Phyllis Lambert, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Muriel Cooper, April Greiman, and Michael Bloomberg. Many of the profiles are back in print for the first time, having originally appeared in Blueprint, I.D. magazine, the Independent, and in books and catalogs from the 1980s through the early 2000s. A foreword by Blueprint's founding editor, Deyan Sudjic, and new reflections by Abrams set the stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616899516
Publisher:	Princeton Architectural Press
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Pages:	319
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Janet Abrams's career as a writer and editor spans several decades, cities, and disciplines, with a focus on architecture, design, photography, digital media and ceramics. Trained as a journalist in her native London, she became features editor of weekly newspaper Building Design at age twenty-three, before earning her Ph.D. at Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar just as Blueprint magazine was launched and she became its US correspondent. Back in London in the late 1980s, she wrote for the Independent and on film and visual arts for Sight & Sound and New Statesman & Society. In the early 1990s, she became writer-at-large for I.D. Magazine in New York, where she wrote on new media and contributed to Domus, Frieze, Lotus International, Metropolis, Ottagono, Print, Skyline and the New York Times magazine, as well as exhibition catalogs, monographs, and books. From 2000-2008, as director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, she launched a publishing program spanning print, broadcasting and digital media. She is co-editor of Else/Where: Mapping-New Cartographies of Networks and Territories.

Table of Contents

Foreword Deyan Sudjic 11

Introduction: Tightrope Walking with the "Circus of the Perpetually Jet-Lagged" Janet Abrams 14

Lubetkin Speaks Berthold Lubetkin Building Design, 1982 39

(Mis)Reading Between the Lines Peter Eisenman Blueprint, 1985 47

My Tea with Andrée Andrée Putman Blueprint, 1985 61

Miami Vice Versa 1: Of Vice and Vixen Bernardo Fort-Brescia Laurinda Spear / Arquitectonica Blueprint, 1986 65

Miami Vice Versa 2: Town Kriers Andrés Duany Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk / Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. Blueprint, 1986 73

Now We Are Eighty Philip Johnson Blueprint, 1987 81

Delirious Visions Rem Koolhaas Blueprint, 1988 97

Reyner Banham: A Past Master Blueprint, 1988 109

Call That a Fish, Frank? Frank Gehry Blueprint, 1988 115

When the Sky Falls In Coop Himmelb(l)au Blueprint, 1988-89 123

A Tale of the Riverbank Sir Christopher Wren The Independent, 1989 129

Britischer Architekt James Stirling Michael Wilford 135

The Independent, 1989

Phyllis's Choice Phyllis Lambert Blueprint, 1990 141

The World According to Mickey Michael Eisner Blueprint, 1991 147

"This Must Be Progress"-The Master of Modernism on God, Graphics, and Other Devotions Paul Rand I.D. Magazine, 1993 159

Woman and Her Symbols April Greiman it'snotwhatyouthinkitis / cen'estpascequevouscroyez arc en rêve centre d'architecture, 1994 175

Gesamtkunstwerk: Coming Home to Rome Michael Graves Michael Graves: Designer Monographs 3, 1994 183

Richard Saul Wurman Gets What He Deserves I.D. Magazine, 1994 195

Muriel Cooper's Visible Wisdom I.D. Magazine, 1994 209

A Man for All Media Bob Stein I.D. Magazine, 1995 227

When We Were Very Young Philip Johnson Blueprint, 1996 239

Best of All Possible Worlds David Rockwell I.D. Magazine, 1996 245

Information Overlord Michael Bloomberg Rethinking Design 4: Medium, 1997 253

The Choreography of Site-Specific Media Lisa Strausfeld Profile: Pentagram Design, 2004 263

Julie Snow: The Rugged and the Refined Julie Snow Architects, 2005 273

Ge(ne)ography Ben Fry Else/Where: Mapping-New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, 2006 283

Postscripts 293

Acknowledgments 313

Credits 317

Editorial Reviews

"The British journalist, critic, and artist brings a personal, often hilarious style to her profiles of pivotal, sometimes truculent figures in design (she likened interviewing Paul Rand to a "boxing match"). Here, 26 essays are collected from national and international magazines and books from the 1980s through the early 2000s, with subjects including Julie Snow, Rem Koolhaas, and Michael Bloomberg."
- AIA New York

"Collected here are 26 narrative essays, all of manageably moderate length, all from 1982-2006. Readers are thus teletransported into an architectural design zeitgeist surrounding the turn of the last millennium: postmodernism rejected, "Starchitects" rising, and everyone a critic (notably Prince Charles, who memorably labeled a National Gallery addition a "monstrous carbuncle"). Internationalism flourished, with digital tools making it easier to design in one continent and build on another....Abrams's style is appealingly waggish-one admiring portrait begins with "Andree Putman has a habit of losing things..."-and largely from a pre-internet time, when tar pits of jargon like "built environment" were happily less common. In bemoaning how nowadays building designs seem to be determined more by algorithms than inspiration, this retrospective carries a torch of justifiable nostalgia. Long-form, tangy treats for all observers."
- Library Journal

"In Abrams' profiles there are histories of the distant and the immediate past, linking the two- and three-dimensional design fields together, and presenting postmodernism not as a style but a cultural tendency....'Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus' leaves one wanting less of the current anodyne reporting of projects and designers, and more reviews of the kind which Janet Abrams' book is made." - Architecture Today (UK)

"Janet Abrams was writing about designers and architects in the late '80s and early '90s for magazines like Blueprint and i-D - an era in retrospect that feels like the beginning of the design culture we now find ourselves in. This book collects her best profiles, of people like Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and April Greiman before they became household names. Her profile on Paul Rand, slightly challenging his position in design history, is especially worth a read for graphic designers."
- Eye on Design

"For someone like me who knows less than zero about architecture or design, this collection of profiles made me feel I'd gotten a crash course. Janet Abrams, with a foundation of sharp questions and sharper writing, builds her book with profiles of designers, policy makers and academics, written over a few decades."
- Jewish Exponent

"[Abrams's] portraits vividly capture what drove the architects and designers she interviewed. Architects interested in what was happening in the world of architecture in the US and Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s will find much to like here, but so will people interested in design and media, topics that occupied Abrams as much as architecture in the later articles written for other publications."
- A Daily Dose of Architecture Books

"Design isn't about buildings, or objects, or typefaces, or software. Design is about people. And no one has looked more incisively at the people who have shaped the design world over the past three decades than Janet Abrams." 
- Michael Bierut

"Precociously, Janet Abrams found her distinctive-and creatively skeptical-voice in the American and British design worlds in the 1980s. We feel as though we are eavesdropping in medias res on provocative chats with famous and lesser-known actors, from graphic designer Muriel Cooper to starchitects Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman. A fast-paced page-turner that takes us back a few decades to historic moments at once distant from and formative for our own world."
- Barry Bergdoll

"This droll, insightful survey of key figures in the field is an essential resource for students and professionals, as well as any creative thinkers cogitating on what they might build next."
- Publishers Weekly

"For the first time, readers can enjoy the collected essays of legendary English writer, editor, and critic, Janet Abrams. Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus brings together 26 profiles of a cast of characters that includes include Reyner Banham, Berthold Lubetkin, Philip Johnson, Paul Rand, Phyllis Lambert, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Muriel Cooper, April Greiman, and Michael Bloomberg, written in Abrams's unique and often uproarious prose. The book is an opportunity to catch up with one of the 20th century's great architectural critics as well as many of its best designers."
- Metropolis

"Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus leaves one wanting less of the current anodyne reporting of projects and designers, and more reviews of the kind which Janet Abrams' book is made."
- Architecture Today (UK)

From the Publisher