Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement. (Modernismus Redivivus).

Edited by Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. 2002. [euro]37.50

The editors of this large, glossy, floppy book wrote to a number of leading people in the architectural world and asked them for their thoughts on various set questions: the more practical among them were asked whether the spirit of the Modern Movement was still relevant today, what its lessons were, and whether its monuments should be preserved; critics, historians, and others involved in what in Yiddish would be called the Luftgeschaft of the profession were asked much the same thing, but in a slightly fancier way. The result is more like an encyclopaedia than a coherent book, with short pieces, some graphic but mostly written, on a very wide range of aspects of Modernism.

There are certainly some pearls here: any book with a contribution by Catherine Cooke is generally worth reading, and there are also memorable pieces by John Allan, Harry Seidler, and Julius Shulman among others. Nostalgia for Modernist architecture has become so widespread recently that the interesting thing now is the way in which the articles are written and the books are edited: there is an odd mixture here between the very general (for example, the AA in the 1950s), and the very specific (aspects of the Van Nelle factories), making the book more of a stage in a Modernist revival than a landmark event in its own right.

Shulman's biography here includes the statement that his night-time photograph of Case Study House #22 overlooking the glittering lights of Los Angeles is 'the most famous photograph of architecture in the world'. Is that really true? Answers on a postcard, please.