Craig Ellwood. (The Man Who wasn't There).

By Neil Jackson. London: Laurence King Publishing. 2002. [pounds sterling]35

'Although unquestionably elegant, the visible structure is highly misleading in relation to the real one,' Edward R. Ford's quotation refers to Craig Ellwood's gorgeous Case Study House 16, but in historian NeilJackson's view, the words fit the man himself. And while it may be deemed bad form to open a review with a quote from another book, it is one cut from Jackson's neatly tailored cloth.

Jackson, professor of architectural engineering at Leeds University, is the author of The Modem Steel House (AR November 1996). His latest book is not about architecture, as its title suggests: Craig Ellwood, not The Architecture of Craig Ellwood or Craig Ellwood, Architect. It is a thoroughly entertaining and well-researched book about a subject that becomes more depressing with every turn of the page. Jackson asserts that while Ellwood, known as Mies van der Robe's heir apparent of spare steel boxes, was a master peacock in his polished ambitions, he never was the master of architecture the world acclaimed him to be.

He wasn't even Craig Ellwood. Jonnie Burke (1922-92) was born to a migrant barber and his hard-working wife who rode their model T Ford through the dusty Great Depression from the Texas panhandle to San Bernardino, California. After the Second World War, with no training, he founded a building firm named 'Craig Ellwood' with his brother and two war buddies; whoever was closest to the phone would be 'Craig Ellwood'. Being in the right place at the right time led to pioneering structural engineer Konrad Wachsmann and John Entenza, founder of the Case Study House programme. Ellwood was also cost estimator for the Eames House (1949).

His reputation rests on designs such as the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (whose provenance was questioned by Meredith L. Clausen in Casabella in 1999: Ellwood's colleague James Tyler is now credited as its principal designer along with architect-of-record for its 1989 extension); his three CSH Houses, 16, 17, 18, 1952-58; and Scientific Data Systems facilities in the late 1960s. He did not appreciate the implications of problems he ostensibly posed -- challenges that employees such as Tyler, Stephen Wooley, Jerrold Lomax and others relished. Around 1980 he abandoned architecture, if not his Ferraris and Picasso, for bad painting in a Tuscany farmhouse. He married well and often, each woman younger and/or richer than the one she replaced.

So what's new? Jackson's book raises interesting questions of architectural authorship. Typically in a practice, credit is given to the person who founded the office and has the will and fortune to make a name, as well as the sense to hire well. And who is not influenced by flipping the pages of magazines, as Ellwood did? 'Progress is inevitable, plagiarism implies it,' is a favourite adage at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, acknowledging the cultural air we breathe. Ellwood appears to have taken it further in being quickly outstripped in talent and experience by those around him and even sometimes taking credit for others' work. He did not lead or oversee, it seems, the designs he is famous for. He couldn't draw. His hand wasn't there.

For all the discussion of structure, the book's one disappointment is that there are not more and larger details and drawings. But then, this is not a book about architecture.