Review: Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan by Jeffrey Plank; Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow by John Caserta and Lynnette Widder, editors

Abstract

Jeffrey Plank. Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan . Richmond, California: William Stout, 2010, 324 pp., 54 color and 111 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780979550812 John Caserta and Lynnette Widder, editors. Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow . Richmond, California: William Stout and Rhode Island School of Design, 2010, 207 pp., 74 color and 100 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780981966700 Though the global economy has crippled commercial architectural publishing in recent years, the monograph remains a surprisingly durable genre, and minor figures from the modern period continue to arouse the interests of scholars and audiences. The latest beneficiaries of this trend are Crombie Taylor of Chicago and Ira Rakatansky of Providence, two midcentury architects with clear connections to modernist masters. Taylor is the more significant of the two, and Jeffrey Plank provides the more serious and extensive study. Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and The Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan is a big book in every sense: well-researched, beautifully designed and printed. Charles Crombie Taylor (1914–1999) was a man of many interest and abilities. While he designed “spare, even severe” houses (13) that evoke a more reductive Mies van der Rohe, he also devoted many years to restoring Louis Sullivan masterworks and reconstructing Sullivan's method of creating pattern and ornament. He did double-duty as an architectural historian and color photographer, earning NEH and NEA grants for experimental multiscreen presentations of historic buildings. He also served as director for Chicago's Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), and later taught architectural history at the University of Southern California (USC) for several years. Plus he loved the English countryside. Plank weaves these “contradictory” facets together to create a seamless portrait of Taylor where each aspect of his work seems to complement and enrich the others (15). If you have visited Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building—the banquet hall, the Sullivan room, or the auditorium itself—you have experienced Taylor's great achievement. He led the restoration work from 1954 to 1963, and that project clearly remains a masterwork in the field of historic preservation. When Taylor began, many original elements had been lost, and in particular the …