Raphael Soriano. (Sad Soriano).

By Wolfgang Wagener. London: Phaidon Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]39.95

Raphael Soriano is one of the great heroes of postwar Californian architecture but a curmudgeonly character and a steadfast belief in a machine-based architecture led to his recent obscurity. Access to the archives at CSPU Pomona, and the enthusiasm of the photographer Julius Shulman, himself a Soriano client, has allowed Wolfgang Wagener to produce a comprehensive and well-illustrated if rather unrevealing overview of his oeuvre. Wagener's sources are thorough although almost exclusively secondary. He makes good use of them -- his initial chapter on the development of postwar American architecture is as good as I have read anywhere -- but the main text, 'Pioneering Steel Houses: 1935-1970', lacks the immediacy which primary research would bring. What was it like to hire Soriano, or to work for him? -- questions which Al Grossman or Pierre Koenig could still answer, if asked, In many ways, the concluding catalogue raisonne provides as much, if not more information about his buildings as does the main text, An d here is this book's real value, for it brings together a hitherto confusing assemblage of works referenced by various authors such as Esther McCoy, Reyner Banham, Elizabeth A. T. Smith and myself.

For one familiar with Californian architectural scholarship, it was irritating to recognize, all too frequently, well-worn wordings or close paraphrases of one's own writing, and to see folklore embodied in the text: Craig Ellwood, for example, never worked for Soriano, Wagener discovered Raphael Soriano ten years after I did, but by then, sadly, Soriano was dead. For a man with such a zest for life -- 'Joan Crawford', he would say, 'now there was a woman -- this book is a small reward. But for those who did not know him, it certainly deserves a place on the bookshelf.