The big idea here? This is a question that reverberates throughout Nicholas Adams's new biography of Gordon Bunshaft. Bunshaft was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's lead designer during some of the firm's best years, coinciding with the phenomenal rise of the United States as a global superpower. As business operations shifted to a corporate scale and building practices incorporated new technology developed during the war, architectural values and popular tastes shifted too. Bunshaft has typically been considered an architect who had big ideas, most especially in his famous Lever House (1951–52). But this exhaustive study depicts him less as a brilliant designer than as an adroit synthesizer of other people's ideas, someone who brainstormed with SOM team members to draw together the best of contemporary practices.
Adams, emeritus professor of architectural history at Vassar, has written an updated, greatly expanded biography of Bunshaft's life and career. His wide-ranging sources include unpublished...
University of California Press