Architect gordon bunshaft book
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Gordon Bunshaft Beinecke Rarified Book impressive Manuscript Library
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Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
Carol Herselle Krinsky's analysis of Bunshaft's work is the first complete study of this important and at times difficult architect
During the years when modernism triumphed in American architecture, few architects worked more actively to promulgate that vision than Gordon Bunshaft, and none was more adept at translating the ideal images of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier into buildable, corporate realities. Standards of design and practice established by Bunshaft in conjunction with his firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came to be the measure by which much American work was judged, and the look of American cities changed accordingly. Carol Herselle Krinsky's analysis of Bunshaft's work is the first complete study of this important and at times difficult architect. Her analysis benefits not only from newly available source material but also from extensive interviews with Bunshaft himself. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of one of the major architects of the twentieth century as seen through his buildings and the efforts to bring those buildings into being. The book also takes into account Bunshaft's clients who were often major figures in the worlds of business and politics.Krinsky discusses such icons of mod
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A nuanced portrait of the 20th-century architect whose work defined the built aesthetic of corporate America
Gordon Bunshaft’s (1909–1990) landmark 1952 design for Lever House reshaped the Manhattan skyline and elevated the reputation of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the firm where he would spend more than 40 years as a partner. Although this enigmatic architect left behind few records, his legacy endures in the corporate headquarters, museums, and libraries that were built in his distinctive modernist style. Bunshaft’s career was marked by shifts in material. Glass and steel structures of the 1950s, such as New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank, gave way to revolutionary designs in concrete, such as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Bunshaft’s collaborations with artists, including Isamu Noguchi, Jean Dubuffet, and Henry Moore, were of paramount importance throughout his career.
Nicholas Adams explores the contested line between Bunshaft’s ambition for acclaim as a singular artistic genius and the collaborative structure of SOM’s architectural partnership. Bunshaft received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988 and remains the only SOM partner to have achieved this distinction