Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture

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The Monacelli Press, New York, 2009, English

Nonfiction, Architecture

ISBN: 9781580932646

Collects for the first time Paul Goldberger’s essays on architecture from The New Yorker, where he became architecture critic in 1997, taking over the Sky Line column formerly written by Lewis Mumford and later by Brendan Gill. In more than 50 pieces, Building Up and Tearing Down traces a period in which larger-than-life buildings, sometimes designed by larger-than-life architects, have shared the spotlight with historic preservation battles and ambitious urban schemes. These essays, range from a discussion of Norman Foster, who Goldberger calls “the Mozart of modernism,” to Philip Johnson, whose proposed towers for Times Square Goldberger described as “a rather monstrous matched set, at once frilly and grotesquely large, like elephants in tutus.

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