Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architecture Culture.

Edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault. London: MIT Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]23.95

There is a serious problem with this type of book, which editors and publishers should attend to. Goldhagen held a conference at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1999 entitled 'Anxious Modernisms: Postwar Architecture Culture, 1943-1968' and this book is the result. Twelve essays based on conference papers, addressing some of the less popularly covered aspects of Modernism, have been turned into an expensive, glossy, hardback.

It doesn't work. The very narrow subject matter of each of the short individual papers is suited to an academic conference, where it would be surrounded by formal debate and chatter, and illustrated with slides; it gets lost when bound in a fancy binding. Timothy Rohan, for example, proposes on the basis of a word used in a letter and of some gossip that Rudolph's Jewett Arts Center is expressive of the architect's homosexuality. This suggestion is, I think, ludicrous without some proper analysis of the building's form, of Rudolph's way of talking about it, and of contemporary homosexual culture. Goldhagen herself is much taken up with the Smithsons, and yet the only building illustrated is the Sugden House, and even that superficially, because Goldhagen doesn't think that the Smithsons were much good at designing.

Academic papers should be published in a cheap, accessible, way; the vanity of a book (with, in this case, a silly name and silly graphics) should be saved for writing that is sufficiently substantial to stand on its own. That substance should probably come from more and detailed descriptions of buildings and projects. Very often here we have critics talking about critics talking about critics -- for example, Felicity Scott on Banham on Rudolfsky: it's not enough. Other contributors have written in such a boring way that their work is virtually unreadable. There are, admittedly, subtle and elegant pieces, in particular by Sandy Isenstadt on Neutra and by Cornelis Wagenaar on Bakema; and Goldhagen's 'Coda' -- which should have been a preface -- shows that she had a clear picture of what she wanted to achieve. She should have bullied her authors and her publishers into something more worthy of their intelligence.