BOOK REVIEWS many excluded. Selftends to favor projects with iconic intentions and ambitious, transformational urbanistic aspirations. The museums considered are the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Fort Worth, Texas; Tadao Ando & Associates); the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, Ohio; Zaha Hadid, Architects); the Kunsthaus Graz (Graz, Austria; Spacelab Cook/ Fournier); the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, Texas; Renzo Piano Building Workshop); the Museum of Modern Art expansion (New York, New York; Yoshio Taniguchi and Associates); the Walker Art Center expansion (Minneapolis, Minnesota; Herzog & de Muron); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia expansion (Madrid, Spain; Ateliers Jean Nouvel); the de Young Museum (San Francisco, California; Herzog & de Muron); the Toledo Museum ofArt Glass Pavilion (Toledo, Ohio; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA); the Denver Art Museum (Denver, Colorado; Studio Daniel Liebeskind); the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Boston, Massachusetts; Diller, Scofidio +Renfro); the NelsonAtkins Museum of Art Bloch Building (Kansas City, Missouri; Steven Holl Architects); the Akron Art Museum (Akron, Ohio; Coop Himmelb(l)au); the New Museum (New York, New York; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA); the Acropolis Museum (Athens, Greece; Bernard Tschumi Architects); the Museum Brandhorst (Munich, Germany; Sauerbruch Hutton); and the Museo Nazionale delle Arri dell XXI Secolo (Rome, Italy; Zaha Hadid Architects). This list of case studies includes virtually all the major players in contemporary art museum design, though Renzo Piano, the leading art museum architect of the period, is represented only by the Nasher Sculpture Center which, though incorporating his trademark glass roof and natural lighting, is not the most representative of his work because of the institution's sole focus on sculpture. Important projects conspicuous in their absence are the DIA: Beacon Riggio Galleries (Beacon, New York; the ARRIS 70 § Volume 25 § 2014 installation artist Robert Irwin, in association with OpenOffice); the Musee de Quai Branly (Paris, France; Jean Nouvel); and the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery expansion (Washington, DC; Foster+ Partners). This said, these exclusions are largely explained by Self's interest in what he terms "the Bilbao effect" or "the Sydney effect": the quest of clients and architects to use these buildings to create destinations that will also become transformative symbols of their cities. Further, the other pole of contemporary art museum design (that of the understated, spiritual envelope for collections) has been virtually monopolized over the past thirty years by the practice of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Self's critiques are always judicious, taking into account the realities of process and clients' desires rather than long discussions of aesthetic preferences, though he clearly articulates the relative success and failure of the buildings analyzed. The journalistic origins of the case studies are apparent, however, in their uniform length; some of the more complex projects, such as the MoMA or Reina Sofia expansions, would have benefited from longer exposition and exploration than some ofthe simpler projects. Perhaps a little more time could also have been spent on the museological implications of radical architecture (Self acknowledges that many of the projects present challenges to curators; should they? The preference of many ofthe great collections for "white cube" galleries and warehouse-type exhibition spaces endures for a reason), but The Architecture ofArt Museums presents a terrific summation of the building type over the first decade ofthe twenty-first century and is the definitive reference work on the subject. It belongs on the shelf of any architect engaged in museum design. ERICMICHAEL WOLF The Menil Collection Houston, Texas A Field Guide to American Houses Th Definitiv Guid to Identif ing and Und r tand.ng Am nca Dome tic Architec ure Virginia Savage McAlester Virginia Savage McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and UnderstandingAmerica's Domestic Architecture. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2013, 848 pp., black-and-white illustrations, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4000-4359-0. This book is the long-awaited second edition of the nationally recognized standard for identifying American domestic architectural styles. The first edition, published in 1984 and in print since its release, is in the library of every preservation architect, State Historic Preservation Office, historic preservation specialist, and educator and serves the professional and advocate with an illustrated and comprehensive architectural vocabulary and a national...
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Aug 31, 2016
Humberto Farias De Carvalho 
Open Access
