Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

In this tour of contemporary architecture, John Silber exposes the wilful disdain of 'genius' architects for their clients, their budgets and the people who live or work inside their creations.

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Since the 1970s, various books have savaged aspects of contemporary architecture. For example, Patrick Loughran's Falling Glass details many kinds of building envelope failure caused by design flaws. Silber (Straight Shooting) was actually an architectural client. A former president and chancellor of Boston University, he commissioned major campus structures and modified some deficient ones. As the subtitle suggests, Silber rants against architects who pursue personal visions in the face of engineering practice, scale, function, climate, materials, budgets, or construction schedules. His examples of such architects include I.M. Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright in his later years, Le Corbusier, Josep Lluis Sert, Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl, and Frank Gehry. Silber also criticizes trustees who get sold on impractical, even ruinous conceptions and treads shakier ground when discussing architects' design rationales or speculating on the relationships between specific clients and architects. All in all, this book is a good reminder that the client is paying the shot and as such deserves respect. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.-David R. Conn, Surrey P.L., B.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

In this reactionary little book, feisty Silber, a former president of Boston University and the son of an architect, delivers a broadside against the starchitect phenomenon. Celebrity architects have run amok, he charges, sacrificing function and sound construction principles at the altar of their own egos. (He's particularly harsh on Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry.) The results of their audacity at treating architecture as an art form akin to sculpture, he rails, are interiors that don't serve the users' needs, and contrived exteriors whose forms are often either arbitrary or of dubious symbolism. Silber scores some legitimate points, but he goes too far. Leaky roofs and cost overruns are hardly unique to ambitious architecture, after all; plenty of grimly utilitarian buildings have caused at least as much trouble. And Silber never credits architecture with some of its highest functions: to inspire, to convey a sense of occasion, to trigger an emotional response. In his zeal to stamp out creativity and risk-taking and deliver us to the promised land of the practical, Silber promotes the architecture of boredom.--Nance, Kevin Copyright 2007 Booklist