Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep. 

Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.)

Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York Review Books.  

Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest
This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Ernest, and today I'm talking with Martin Filler. Filler is a longtime contributor to the Review, starting with his 1987 essay, The Master Builder, on architect Louis Sullivan. His essays for the Review have been gathered into three volume series of books called Makers of Modern Architecture, all published by NYRB. We discuss many things, including his 1999 essay on Frank Gehry, as well as their complicated personal relationship. This was recorded before the architect's death in December, 2025. And for his further reflections, I would like to direct you to Filler's obituary for Geary titled The Liberator, which was published in the Review. When was the first time that you became aware of architecture as something that you could have a particular esthetic response to or that was created by a person?

Martin Filler
When I was about 12 years old, and my junior high school in Camden had a complimentary student subscription to the New York Times. So we were given a copy of the New York Times on our desk every morning, which was astonishing luxury. And I began at that age to read the fairly new architecture column that was being written by Ada Louise Huxtable, who was the first full-time architecture critic in an American newspaper, and it was through her remarkably vivid and accessible articles that I cut my teeth on the subject, so to speak.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, I wanna say congratulations on your 40th year writing for the New York Review of Books.

Martin Filler
Well, thank you.

Jarrett Earnest
And how did you start writing for The New York Review of Books?

Martin Filler
Well, I had studied architectural history at Columbia and got my master's and I decided at that point that I should not proceed with a PhD because I felt unable to write. I said to myself, you're never going to be able to write a dissertation. And what I only later realized is that I couldn't write in the approved academic mode that was required by the establishment at that time. Because I had been involved in student publications in high school and as an undergraduate at Columbia, I decided I would go into publishing. And my first job was at Teachers College Press at Columbia where I became a production assistant, where my work was not editorial, but in terms of book manufacturing, cost estimates, ordering paper, all the kind of nitty gritty nuts and bolts things about that. I was soon hired away by McGraw-Hill, which wanted to start an architecture imprint that was related to their architectural record magazine. And although I was in my mid-20s at that point, I had a unique combination of skills, of book production know-how, and architectural history training. So I had that job. After working for them for a few years and editing rather poorly written, I thought. Uh. Uh. Ha ha ha ha! Manuscripts written by by practicing architects, I said to myself, you can probably do better than this. And I began to write book reviews for architectural record magazine, which was sort of the old English method of getting your foot in the literary door by writing book reviews. Many much more distinguished careers than mine began that way. And it was through that, that I began to become a writer rather than an editor. I then was offered a very lucrative position at House and Garden magazine at Conde Nast. I felt somewhat guilty about straying from my original academic pathway and decided that I should also write serious criticism for more prestigious publications in House and garden magazine, which was my very generous employer at the time. And I began writing a series of articles for Art in America magazine that were a series of monographic profiles of emerging architects around 1980 and 1981 who were really beginning to change the nature of high style architecture in the United States, figures such as Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Richard Meyer, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry. And it was possibly through those publications. That the sense that I could do more serious writing became more widely accepted. It was unknown to me for many years exactly why Bob Silvers called me out of the blue one day and asked if I would be interested in doing a piece for him in 1985. And I've, of course, said yes. People have since asked me how does one get to write for the New York Review of Books? And I've sort of jokingly said to them, it's a little bit like the Holy Spirit. It will descend on you perhaps if you're very lucky, but there's no way of making it happen. That's not exactly true. And I don't want to perpetuate that clubby myth that this is a closed shop and that the only way to write for the New York Review is if you've written for them before. And in fact, under the editorship of Emily Greenhouse, it's changed considerably from that. But it certainly wasn't specified how it happened. And it was only many years later that I... Towards the end of Bob Silver's life, that I asked him what was the motivation for contacting me. And he said, oh, Maude, I thought you knew. You were recommended to me by Ada Louise Huxnall. Well, the assignment was for a book she had written under her MacArthur Foundation grant called The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered, which was a reference to a similarly titled book by Louis Sullivan. The great turn of the 20th century, a Chicago architect who was a great mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright. Unfortunately, the book, I didn't feel, did justice to Sullivan. And as much as I revered Ada Louise as a virtual mother figure to me and my architectural education was somewhat out of her depth as an architectural historian, I thought she was a marvelous critic of contemporary developments. She was wonderful on city planning and zoning issues. She was a staunch advocate of historic preservation, but I don't think her scholarly chops were of equal consequence. And I submitted my piece, which was not a positive review, And, virtually, not a word was changed. And after Bob revealed... The source of my first assignment at the review. Ada Louise had maybe 10 or 12 years more to live, and I went out of my way on any occasion possible to insert some words of praise into an article that I was writing to try to make up for it. We weren't close. She tended not to socialize in architectural circles because she felt it was a corrupting influence. So I didn't know her personally, but I felt, of course, tremendously guilty. And on the other hand, I had a certain, almost mafia-like feeling, as they say.

Jarrett Earnest
Godfather. It's just business. Well, in a way, it's a blessing you didn't know. Yes. Because you probably couldn't have written what you wanted to write. Yeah. I've reflected a lot on the utility of negative criticism or complex criticism. And one thing I really don't like is when somebody hates something, but they hate it unproblematically. And nothing slows them down from hating it and they can just go forward. But I really feel a good negative review is one that hurts you as much as it hurts the subject. Oh, absolutely, I agree with that. Because it's like you don't want to say these things about this person you admire.

Martin Filler
I would much rather write a positive review. On the other hand, there is a strange American tendency. I think it's a residual form of the boosterism that was a necessary component of America's growth and expansion and development in the 19th century. But there is this strain in this country that really, or at least before social media and before the curdling of the public discourse that we're living through now. That if you can't say something nice, don't say anything. Or that was certainly the case when I was growing up in the 50s and before the 1960s. And to a degree until fairly recently in general. So, Architectural Record Magazine, where I first began writing book reviews, had a stated editorial policy that if a building is built, it's good for the profession. And we don't want to do anything to harm the profession, so we're not going to say anything negative about a building. And that was their policy. If they felt a building was terrible, they just didn't publish it. But I don't go out of my way looking for things to attack. But sometimes when there are certain inevitable subjects that one must address, you know, building of such public importance that every other critic and publication is weighing in on and you feel you have to add your voice to the mix. I feel you just simply have to speak the truth as you see.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, I think also the thing about being a critic, especially writing about architecture or art or music, everybody figures out the way they're gonna do their thing. Like everyone has their own sense of integrity and what they'll do and not do. And it's interesting when you said that A. Louise Huxtable didn't wanna mix with people in the architectural scene. My impression is that you were maybe the opposite personality. No. No.

Martin Filler
My wife and I went on Monday to the press preview for the Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, a marvelous new sculpture museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway designed by the Swiss firm Herzog& de Maron with landscaping by Pete Udolph of Highline fame. And when we arrived at the press check-in desk, they didn't have a name tag for me. And they said, would you like us to make one up for you now? And I said, no, I think it's safer that I don't wear one. When I go to certain things like that, I prefer to do it as anonymously as possible, not just because I'm afraid of running into people who I may have offended by my writing, which has happened, but I'm very reclusive in a funny way. And I think Ada Louise really had the right attitude. Now, I must say she changed course in later life when she became a juror for the Pritzker Prize, which is one of the most powerful. It's like The architectural equivalent of being named to the U.S. Supreme Court, it's not a lifetime position but it's of such grandeur and prestige and nobody's ever asked me to join the Pritzker jury and I doubt that they ever will, but I would be tempted to say no despite the fact that it involves a lot of very luxurious travel to faraway places that's paid for by the Prittsker Foundation. And I think there's something inherently incorrect about a critic being involved. In

Jarrett Earnest
giving. Right. I don't think you could continue being a critic, but you don't have, you don't t have friendships with architects.

Martin Filler
I have had them in the past and they've two of the most important ones ended in tears. As the Brits say, my wife and I were very close with Frank Gehry, for example, before he was Frank Geherry. We met him in 1977, a year before Rosemary Blatter, my life, and I, were married. And he was just at the cusp of the important part of his career. He had just finished his famous. Corrugated steel and chain link fence, wrapped house in Santa Monica. It was beginning to get some small commissions. And it was another, essentially another 20 years before the incredible international success of Bill Bow made him a superstar of architecture. And we found that he changed tremendously over that course of time and even more so afterwards. And another close friend of ours who was. In fact, more instrumental in vouchsafing his fame, Mildred Friedman, who was the design curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who mounted an important retrospective of his show in the 1980s that traveled internationally and really helped establish his reputation, was aware that there was a sea change in Frank's personality as well. And when I once brought this up with her, she said, how could that level of fame not have affected him? And I said, he's not the simple mensch that he once was. He seems to be another person. My personal feelings about him have nothing to do with my critical assessment of his work and shouldn't. But there is a danger to getting too personally close to the subjects you're writing about because they don't like criticism. Hahaha

Martin Filler
It's fine if you're saying everything is great, but one of the breaking points with him came when he designed the band show for Millennium Park in Chicago, the Pritzker band show, and to which he added what I thought were some superfluous curlicues of titanium. Unnecessary, not only in a structural way, but in a compositional way. I'm not saying we're dealing with early modernist functionalism or utilitarianism, but even from an esthetic point of view, it just didn't work. And in fact, we're quite awful, I thought. And I mentioned this to him and he said, yeah, I wasn't too happy with it myself. But Penny Pritzker said to me, come on, Frank, I want some titanium on this. Nobody's going to know it's by you. So I gave in and I did it. Words to that effect. But, you know, they want adulation. They don't want criticism. And one of the things I've said over and over again, especially when I'm talking to groups of professional architects, is people will read a review of mine in 10 minutes that will demolish a building that has taken you 10 years of your life to realize. And that's It's very unfair and it's very unequal. I am fully aware of the tortures and compromises and travails that architects go through to get their work built, but that's my job.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, I'm so fascinated to hear about the Frank Gehry saga because I feel like your writing on Gehri is especially good. And sometimes I wonder if there are, especially if you're peers, I mean, Frank Geherry is a generation older than you, but really professionally started to emerge in tandem with your work as a critic. And sometimes, I feel that there's like an artist who is a perfect, foil for a critic, like they can say what they need to say and what needs to be said about that work. And that essay that you wrote, the big Geary essay in the late 90s, after the triumph of Bill Thao, there's a kind of shimmer over that essay, that just feels like special, insightful, the drama of it. And I had no idea that you were close, but I wonder what insights there might've been in that essay from having had that relationship.

Martin Filler
Frank had always posited himself as the embattled outsider. And he had started off as actually an extremely competent architect for one of the most enlightened real estate developers of the period, James Rouse, who did some marvelous work in Virginia and other places on the East and West Coast. And he invented himself essentially at around age 50 as an art architect. And this was equivalent say to some of the artists of abstract expressionism named de Kooning having to be a sign painter or Rosenquist doing billboards or Jasper Johns doing department store windows or things like that. I mean, that wasn't their main employment. They were trying to make money while they're trying to establish a market for their art. But in a way it was a very brave reinvention of himself. But because he started afresh at 50, you're quite right. He is, he's old enough to be my father by, if he had me when he was 19. But generationally, you're quite right. And it took him another 20 years, because architecture is a very slow-moving profession, to attain the commission and the acclaim that Bill Bauer represented. And he was pushing 70 at that point. And I felt, became a sewer winner, for lack of a better word, that he had attained what he wanted, but he was very resentful. That it came so late. Well, as it turns out, he's now 96. So he's lived another 26 years since then. And I'm not so sure that the period post-Bilbao, with the exception of the Marvelous Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles of 2003, have been the best years of his career. And I think, looking back, now, knock wood, I hope he lives to be 120, or at least 100. But I must say that part of my thinking these days is if I had to write an obituary about him now or soon, what would I say in total? And I think the arcs of artists' careers are all very different, and you have to look at the totality of what he achieved, or he or she achieved. And I thinking in the case of Gary, there's no question that he's been one of the spectacular. Architects of modern times and whether or not one likes this or that particular building of his or what direction he decided to go into at what point in his career is irrelevant.

Jarrett Earnest
The embattled outsider is like the most intoxicating narrative like both as the storyteller or as the audience but you know at a certain point you do have to say like can you let that go when you're longer.

Martin Filler
You know, it's a pose, and a number of other writers have brought that up in recent years. He still tries to elicit artistic sympathy for something that is long past. I mean, he's so well-connected and moves in the highest circles of international culture, has won every possible award, and there's a certain point at which the revolutionary does become the academy. He's not an academician in the sense that his work is singularly unsuited to copying by others. You know, it's not that he's going to have descendants. A lot of people who have worked in his office and may have absorbed certain principles, but there's not going to be a school of Gary. I mean, there's a one-off quality to his particular genius and it will end with him.

Jarrett Earnest
Reading your three volumes of the essays you've written on architecture for the review, The Makers of Modern Architecture, was such a fun, incredible experience. It was like being in a really fast seminar on modern architecture, like being in a convertible, it's like moving around. And it has such a coherence as like a vision or as like project. And I wonder how early in writing those pieces did you conceptualize it as going together like that into a bigger picture?

Martin Filler
The idea for the series was entirely Bob Silver's. After I had done my first piece on Edelweiss Huxtable's book, we began to talk about what next. And it was very clear he wanted me to become a contributor at that point. And I said to him that the 1980s, which we were in the midst of, was a decade of centennials of major figures of modern architecture, of Mies van der Rohe, of Le Corbusier. And several other of the giants of modernism. And because a particular preoccupation of architectural practice in America, at least at that point, was modernism versus postmodernism, the notion that modernism was dead, that it had reached some sort of apex of creativity and had to be superseded by something more meaningful and more grounded in architectural history, which was allegedly postmodernist. And Bob felt that some of those giants of modernism hadn't been revisited lately, and it would be beneficial to examine them one by one. And the centennials of many of those figures were accompanied by exhibitions, anniversary exhibitions by many publications for each architect. I think my Le Corbusier piece. May have set a record for the New York Review and the number of books that it included. I think it may have been something like 36 books. Oh my God, we're gonna check the record. Yeah, and we had eliminated a great many that didn't even make the cut. And one of the things I began to talk to Bob about in general is people were saying, well, would you write a book for us? And I said, I don't really have an overarching theory or polemic of architecture. I respond to individual works, I respond to individual styles and movements and developments, but I don't have a blanket or umbrella interpretation of architecture as an art form. And I would be very reluctant to impose that on a reader. And he said well Martin you ought to do what? Bunny did, and it took me a second to realize that he didn't mean Bunny Mellon, but Bunny Wilson, that is to say Edmund Wilson, whose strange nickname was Bunny, but Bob knew him all enough that he could use it. He said, you ought to do what Bunny did. He would write a series of essays on a related theme, and then after he had seven or ten of them, he would combine them into a book. And there you have a book. So you could just do it chapter by chapter. So it was sort of conceived that after there would be a certain number of essays, it would be suitable for book form. It was sort very ad hoc at the beginning because it depended on what books were being published or what exhibitions were being held. As I said, the first volume was a mixture of classic giants of high modernism, but then also contemporary architects of growing importance. Who were beginning to take notice, and then they were just arranged chronologically by either date of birth or their emergence onto the scene from earliest to most recent.

Jarrett Earnest
One of the things reading through it, and I know I had proposed this to you as something I wanted to focus on, but how much attention there is across the essays to these big museum projects. And I wonder why that became such a key site for contemporary architecture discourse over the time you were writing.

Martin Filler
You write about what's getting built, if you're writing about contemporary architecture. And there are certain building types. By the way, that was a phrase one was not allowed to use under Bob Silver's, and probably still at the review, a building type was considered jargon. I think the word type reminded Bob too much of Damon Runyon, you know, he's the type of guy. So building type is forbidden as a phrase, so I would say forms of building. But in any case, you get the idea. And for example, in the immediate post-war period in America, there was a huge amount of activity in building schools, elementary schools, universities for returning GIs, and of course mass-produced suburban housing, which was not the subject of any serious architectural study at that point, although it since has become. After World War I in Europe, there was a huge upswell. Of activity in church architecture, memorial churches, and as a reaction to the appalling death toll of the First World War. In certain periods, there are certain building types that emerge as being most important, and the rise of the museum as the locus of the most important architectural commissions of the period certainly was the defining theme of the last 20 years, at least. Of the 20th century, and because every major architect was involved in some way with a museum or a museum edition, that became an inevitable focus.

Jarrett Earnest
Of our work. I want to talk to you about your recent piece on the Frick renovation, which was so great. One of the ways that you opened that piece is a kind of wry comment on the experience that we all had with the Frick collection in what was then called the Met Breuer, but then the Fric Breuer. And we all have the same experience seeing those paintings in that building, which is they never looked better. And it made me think, wow, things look good in this space. In a way that very few, especially new museums in New York, I don't have that feeling. And as an art person, my sole criteria for evaluating a museum is that the art has to look good. And I wonder why there is such a predominance of new museums that do not make art look good, or if you do not have that experience.

Martin Filler
No, I agree with you entirely. There are certain architects who know how to make art look good in a space. One of them who burned brightly earlier in his career, but has been less heard of in recent years is Richard Gluckman, who was responsible for popularizing a fad that began in the 1980s for repurposing. Disused industrial buildings as art display spaces, most famously DIA and other industrial buildings that had been abandoned in New York City and elsewhere. And he led directly to a widening of the practice, buildings such as Mass Mocha and a former industrial mill in North Adams Mass and all around the world converting industrial spaces. Gortman just didn't tidy up. Spaces. But he had a very, very acute sense of how to make art look wonderful in it, I felt. And a lot of it was very minimalist art or art that didn't have a great deal of visual activity in it. But, he was very, very good with lighting, was very good placement. But I would agree with you, there are very few museums that do that.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, in trying to give architects a little bit of a break, I guess, if you are trying to make art look good in a building, you have to have some idea about what that art is. And because contemporary art is such an expanded possibility, it almost is like, well, could be anything, which means they're not necessarily thinking about paintings, where it's like with paintings, you do want natural light. And as I was reading your essays, you make such a beautiful point about Louis Kahn's Kimball and about the early Renzo piano museums in Texas as their relationship to how they mitigate natural light differently. And it makes me think, oh, well, that's one thing that's wrong with a lot of the contemporary museums is that they're not dealing with natural light in a sophisticated way.

Martin Filler
Yeah, that's absolutely true and Khan and piano were both masters at the manipulation of natural light and particularly interesting to me that they both achieved such success in one of the parts of the country where light conditions are so problematic, which is Texas with a very sort of blasting light problems where the main issue is how do we get less in here rather than war. And what do we do with it once we've got it in here? They both had an acute sense of how light enlivens volumes of internal space. There are small museums in Texas that are really the finest work of both of them.

Jarrett Earnest
When you were putting together your collections, which span 40 years of writing, what's so unique about that as an opportunity as like a group of essays is that you get to grow and evolve as a critic in dynamic relation with evolutions in architecture discourse with technological advancements. And so it becomes this very interesting chart of the last 40 years of architectural thinking. Including when you revisit the same subject.

Martin Filler
Multiple times.

Jarrett Earnest
And I want to know about the experience of looking back at things you've written recently or things that you had written before and how you see that that shift that kind of fluid relation.

Martin Filler
Well, one of the things I admired most about Louis Mumford, who was another formative influence on my architectural thinking, I read his architecture criticism and his famous culture of cities when I was a teenager for the first time, was his willingness to recant or to amend his opinions about buildings. And he was most famous for having written an initial. Very harsh evaluation of Rockefeller Center for the New Yorker in the mid 1930s, dismissing it as just commercial crap and much more elegantly phrased, I can assure you. But then when the complex was finally finished in 1939 and he saw how despite the fact that it was ornamented in an Art Deco manner that he thought was cheesy. How well it worked as a piece of urbanism, how the massing of the buildings, which which descended from the tall towers at the center of the site and stepped it down to more humanly scaled buildings and volumes on the avenues, knit it into the urban fabric far more successfully than he anticipated and he was happy to say I was wrong. And I can't think of many instances of things where I would go back and change my mind, but I do leave the door open for that. And I don't see any of these things as settled. One of the problems being that as architecture critics, we see buildings usually before they open or the minute that they open, and we don't really see how they're used. And some of the professional architecture magazines in the United States some time ago used to do what they called post-occupancy studies. Where they would go back and revisit buildings that they had reviewed upon opening maybe 10 or 15 years before to see how well they actually fulfill their intended purpose. There's a certain functionalist bias to that because I think in terms of evaluating how a building succeeds, isn't just a matter of function per se. Was the auditorium big enough or? Is the lobby too small or are there enough stalls in the bathroom or things like that? But how well does a building age? How well is it received by the community? Does it connect with people in a way that was anticipated or not anticipated? And there's not enough real value.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, another essay that I had wanted to talk with you about is the Magisterial essay on the Richard Myers Getty speaking of which was published in 1997 with the title the big rock candy. Yeah, where did that title come from?

Martin Filler
Popped out of my head, but it was actually a song or sung by Burl Ives. It was sort of a kiddie folk song when I was growing up.

Jarrett Earnest
Yeah, I know the song and I wanted to think about it with you a little bit and also considering the time that has passed between writing the brand new opening of the Getty to the 30 years hence, how your relationship to that building or this essay have evolved.

Martin Filler
Well, the Getty Commission was certainly the most coveted architectural prize during my career. It just riveted the architectural profession when this seemed to be the career-making gift of the gods. It was essentially an open-budget, high-prestige, multi-year commission that was assumed enshrined whoever was so lucky as to get the job a place in the pantheon. And as it turned out, I think it's a classic example of the famous warning, be careful what you ask for, you might get it. And I think had a very deleterious effect on the career of Richard Meyer, who received the Commission in 19. 84, which was the same year he won the Pritzker Prize at age 50, and the commission extended another 13 years until 1997. And by the time the Getty opened in 1997, was only a matter of weeks before the opening of Frank Gehry's Bilbao, which completely blew the Getty out of the water in terms of international publicity. I mean, just to turn on the evening news, the national news on network American television and have a story about the opening of Frank Gehry's Bill Bow was an unprecedented coup. And it just symbolized the explosive effect that that had. One of the ironic things, which I do mention in the piece, is that Meyer, before the building was completed, wrote a very bitter personal memoir of the process, naming names, complaining about the slights and cuts and insults and budgetary setbacks and a pass of discontents against his client. And this outraged, understandably, the Getty administration. And they, in turn commissioned a documentary film about the making of the Getty, which portrayed Meyer, as I say in my piece, as petulant and childish and unreasonable. And he came out very badly. So it was a sort of a very undignified mudslinging contest that culminated, supposedly, the commission of a lifetime. I also enjoyed finding and rereading the piece. A quote that was told to me by Rainer Bannum, the distinguished British architecture critic who was a member of the professional advisory committee to the jury. And when the deliberations were underway, I asked him what his thoughts were. And he said, basically, it's going to come down to who the Getty wants to have dinner with for the next 10 years, which is to say the personal aspect of the architects in question. And and he said if it's a choice between the rather uptight Fumihiko Maki, the Japanese architect, or the rather boorish James Sterling, the British architect, or Richard Meyer, the job is going to go to Meyer because he would be a much more congenial social companion than the other two. I found that the personal element in architecture, which is one of the things that drew me to the subject matter in the first place because of its larger social implications. Also functions very much the same way on a one-to-one personal level.

Jarrett Earnest
You note in many places in your writing in terms of how anything gets built and how many people are involved in creating it even though we think of them as authored in a particular way. Several moments you say it's more akin to being a filmmaker.

Martin Filler
Absolutely. It's very similar to filmmaking. And although I think some critics of this series might say that the designation of individual chapters based on single architects helps to perpetuate the great man theory of architecture, I've gone out of my way, I think to try to emphasize the collaborative nature of the profession where there's so many participants in terms of technical and ancillary. Tasks that no one architect can handle himself. On the other hand, in film criticism, I'm a great exponent of the auteur theory, where I feel there is a strong vision supplied by the director that is then carried through to his direction by the rest of the film crew. And to that extent, I think, to say this is a Corbusier building or this is Amis building. Or this is a Frank Lloyd Wright building. Of course, we know there were landscape consultings and lighting consultants and structural engineers and acousticians and on and on, and on. That long list of everybody except a grip is probably the only thing you won't find listed. I think there are certain architects who are in fact auteurs, which the theory would also say, in which all of their work is worth examination. Even a bad picture. By Orson Welles is worth studying in a way that the greatest film by a hack is maybe a great one-off film, but he's not an auteur.

Jarrett Earnest
I think about this in relationship to painting, where I feel like painting is a very specific discourse in which each move in a different context mobilizes its own history. And architecture is so daunting because it is its own very specific discourse in which architects themselves are huge contributors to the written theorization of architecture. And I want to know how you think about architecture criticism. And its criteria, its possibility, like what are things that good architecture criticism should address itself to that might be different than other kinds of criticism? Or do you just see it as an extension of a writing project that could be related to other things?

Martin Filler
I must say, I'm not very taken with architectural theory. And I know this has been one of the dominant themes in my field since the 1980s, when the application of linguistic theory to the study of architecture into the decoding of deep meaning and the application of certain concepts that dealt from French and other literary criticism began to be felt in architecture. And apart from the fact that I find much of the writing in that vein completely impenetrable and would never pass muster at the New York Review of Books, where clarity and accessibility are considered paramount for writing, even though there's no house style that is imposed on its contributors. I felt very relieved that Bob Silver's did not feel that I had to weigh in. On the terms that were then being set by many of the books. And for example, in my first roundup of books on Louis Kahn, there was a book on a semiotic interpretation of the Kimbell. And I asked Bob to have a look at it, and I said, Bob, do I really have to include this? He said, of course not. No, forget about it, even though it was one of the new studies on it. And so I felt very lucky to a vis- dodge that bullet as it were. But very oddly enough, I don't have a very conscious set of criteria. Things, especially as I get older, are occurring to me more and more spontaneously and almost automatically. I find in the last several years, happily, almost an automatic writing process that happens in my dreams, it happens in my racing thoughts. It happens when I'm shaving. Suddenly I'll dash away from whatever I'm doing and I'll be at my computer. And Rosemary will say, we're about to leave or the dinner's on the table. I said, I'm sorry, I just had this idea and I've got to get it down. Not that I'm afraid to lose it, but I don't work from outlines. I just try to think what's the story here. I do think it's important to develop some sort of narrative. To draw in the non-specialist. The New York Review readership are very highly educated, very highly motivated, and luckily very acculturated, so you don't have to explain very basic things that, say, the New York Times, which I've written over 50 pieces for over the years, at least in the days that I was writing for them, I was just tearing my hair out over having to explain Mary basic things. That they felt the average Times reader wouldn't understand. That's never been a problem at the New York Review. But it for all the social relevance of architecture, there does seem to be something that's off putting to the general public that they can't approach it for whatever reason. And I think developing a narrative on a human level is one way of engaging people. And this is why I think. The personality and the character studies that these essays also are in addition to career compendia has brought people in. Or what was this person like? One of the things that always amused me is that you would find out so much about the people you were writing about, about Gary, about Charles Moore, about Robert Venturi in the new Scott Brown. And then you couldn't bring or you didn't bring very much of that into the actual article. And I'm not saying it should be a gossip fest or a first person revelation. But I've tried to to give these review pieces a greater sense of that. And I don't know how it how it fits in with other architecture critics. I mean, I must say, I look at co-professionals work often for information. I'm very critical and I just read a piece about a new project. I won't mention the writer or the project. And I thought, thank God it's completely atrocious. I'm not gonna have any trouble competing with this one.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, there is an aspect to the makers of modern architecture book that are these kind of character studies, little portraits. But there's another narrative thing that you use often, which is beautifully suited to describing architecture, which is the first person experience of the space unfolding as you move through.

Martin Filler
That's something I was instructed to do by Bob Silvers, and we talked at very great length over the years about exactly how pieces like this can better engage the review readership, and one of his points was there should be at least one building that is described in great detail. And one of the best ways to do this is let us know what it is like to be there. We're not an illustrated publication. The heavy lifting can't be done by glossy photos, as was the case when I wrote for shoulder magazines, and there would be captions, but you assumed the reader would get the point just by looking at it. On the other hand, I had always been bored stiff by highly descriptive architecture writing, one of the great historians, and someone whose works I resort to often because of their accuracy and their completeness is Henry Russell Hitchcock, who was an old historian of beginning in the 1930s with his first classic book on A.J. Richardson. Writing is extremely, extremely descriptive. I'll talk about string courses of limestone and Roman brick and... And slate and materials and stories and attics and coins and lintels and all this other stuff. I've always felt that the necessary descriptive passages, especially in the review where we're not having pictures to show you, I've found those passages the most work. I could work for days over one paragraph that's descriptive to make sure it tracks. With my experience of it? Am I conveying closely enough what it was like, why I got that impression, why I'm saying this? And the other thing being that the review tradition has always been extremely rigorous about density of meaning. I used to say that John Russell, who was for years was one of the principal art critics of the New York Times, he used to write morangs of criticism. There were these wonderfully shaped, wonderfully attractive and voluminous takes on an exhibition or a work of art, except by the time he finished there was no nutrition. It was just this wonderful prose, the gorgeous unfolding prose, but he wasn't really saying anything. And I got the impression very, very quickly. At the review that you had better know what you're talking about before you say it. There was a sense because Bob was such an intimidating figure in a way that you didn't want to embarrass yourself in front of him. I didn't file a copy until I felt it was absolutely worked through. And since there were really very few or no time requirements, you know, take as as long as you need. Just do it right. You just stuck with it until you thought it was ready for the great man to read.

Jarrett Earnest
Embarrass yourself by not doing your best. One of the moments in your writing that stands out to me as this descriptive narrative unfolding is the way that you describe the memorial at ground zero in which you enter into the space through the grove, the sound of the waterfall rises until it obliterates the sound of the city and you go in into this. Sequential waterfall into a pit that you describe as like a monochromatic Joseph Albers, homage to the square. And then it disappears into nothingness, but there's, it's a long stretch, maybe five, six, 700 words that's about getting you and it's not just what it looks like. It's what it sounds like. It's, what it feels like ultimately into this kind of deep, emotional. I was shocked by the

Martin Filler
reaction I had to my first visit to the September 11th Memorial at Ground Zero. I prefer not to see works of architecture until they're completed. Of course, I've visited many of them in construction, but my feeling is you have to go back when it's finished anyway. If it's convenient for you to go or if someone is paying for you to go in advance and see it, that's one thing, but you really have to see it finished. And it was... A little bit after its completion that I went on just a regular day when they still had long lines of people waiting, I think you still needed reservations. You had to go through a security check that I said was sort of like going to the airport and walking through covered tent-like areas and making the circuit. But I was completely, completely dumbfounded by my reaction. As I said, it starts off, I cried, but about what I cannot tell you, I mean, I've wept in the presence of very few works of art on first sight in my life. One was Las Meninas at the Prado, God knows why, but I was just so moved by it. And another was Satashmahal, I mean at dawn. Both of those would probably be understandable to people of an esthetic event, but I was very skeptical about even the notion of a memorial at Ground Zero. I was very much on the side of doing something more educational or remedial than a memorial. It wasn't that I was skeptical about the design of it itself, but just its overall conception. And furthermore, the way which has been said since that the attack itself was the occasion of a fatal overreaction by the United States and so many aspects of policy and action. You know, it was a real terrible turning point, I think, in American history. Be that as it may. I've always fully honored the fact that the family members of people who were killed at Ground Zero do consider this literal graveyard and respect the idea that perhaps has priority. Given all of those concerns, I don't think the job could have been done any better possibly than that. And I wanted somehow to convey in the piece that sense of my own working through the... Question at hand and also the changing nature of the memorial in a period when unspeakable and unprecedented things have happened. How do you memorialize that? But I think it was a brilliant solution and the tenacity of Michael Arad in getting those results, knowing, as I've said, all the things that can go wrong. It's amazing. So much architecture gets done so well, considering all the forces that are constantly conspiring to mess it up on every possible level. And we're just looking at the kind of things that most architecture critics are looking at. It's just the top 1% of architectural production in any period. And I have seen the memorial since. It was of course all over the news again for the annual television coverage of the reading of the names and it still communicates very powerfully. It's a remarkable achievement.

Jarrett Earnest
Wow, I mean, it's also, I would say that the essay is opposite to the task. Did you feel to write about that piece as, even if it were bad, I mean that would have been way worse to write like, I hate this, but that you needed to match somehow.

Martin Filler
The gravity of the ride. Yeah, yeah, no, I felt that. And that first paragraph, I possibly have spent more time rewriting and moving words around in that first paragraph, and that's a skill that I have been inspired by one of my most revered New York Review colleagues, Joan Didion, who was famous for the way she could move one word over or backward and completely changed the tone than me. Implied meaning, if not the actual meaning of a sentence or a paragraph. And I really, really wanted that to be lapidary and not just finish and say, I'm done, but kept going over and over it with it for a lot of qualities that I value in a piece, sound quality, alliteration, which I'm prone to do, I hope not too often, just the sense of rhythm or mood. I realized in this case was extremely important and a lot of it is completely unconscious. You know, you just, you do it and then you say, Oh, I think this is better than that. But I must say that a lot the technique seems to be submerged in the subconscious. And this was one of the things that Lewis Mumford told me many years ago. His first words of advice to me as a writer, which sound very simplistic, but I've never hurt anything better. He said, have something to say and say it as simply and as clearly as possible. But the other thing that he said, and I told him once about having an idea and a dream or something, and he said you must always trust your subconscious. And for a writer who was so sort of stately and dignified as Mumford, you wouldn't necessarily think that was a motivating factor for him. But I'm very happy. That the piece expresses its subject matter to the degree you've mentioned.

Jarrett Earnest
The other thing I love about that advice from Mumford about the subconscious is increasingly I feel that the most significant aspect of form is the parts of it that connect to the unconscious. You know, it's like, that's part of what makes it form. The last thing I want to ask you about people are really rightfully delighted by your current piece in the review about department stores and what I admire so much about it, partly has to do with form because when you start reading it, you think, oh, maybe it's about one thing starts with this recollection of your childhood going to the department store, then it into this discussion of these memoir of the Barneys guy. And then at the end, you end up in this whole other place, which is like looking at this new department store. So that to me felt so surprising the turns in it. And I wanted to know, how did it evolve the research, the writing, the thinking?

Martin Filler
It was actually not my idea. It was suggested by the New York Review staff, apparently at a staff meeting. I honestly don't know what happened, but they were obviously looking at fall books. And here was this memoir by Jean Pressman called, They All Came to Barney's. And somebody said, this is an assignment for Martin. There was also apparently a great deal of coverage on social media, none of which I participate in. I do not even own a smartphone, let alone follow Instagram or TikTok or any of those things. But apparently, there had been an awful lot of coverage on social media about the new Prandtl New York store, and some of the younger staff members felt that this would be a likely appendage to the Barneys book. So essentially the assignment was we'd love to have you review this book and why don't you go have a look at Prent Hall and see what you think. And then as usually happens when you get an assignment, I then start trolling around the internet to see what allied books may have recently come out about the same subject, because we try to be as comprehensive as possible. And if there are multiple studies of the same subjects, we want to advise our readers. This is the more important one, or don't forget this one, although that one is probably going to get more publicity. So I discovered that there had been a recent history, a scholarly study on John Wanamaker, who was the father of the department store in America, although he didn't personally invent the concept, which came from mid 19th century France, but which he applied to enormous success in Philadelphia. And because I have a subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer online, I serendipitously discovered that the old John Wanamaker store, which had gone through several reiterations as a retail space after the Wanamakers concern closed in the 1990s, that the building itself was being closed down. So this gave me a topical tie to that aspect. I had lunch around that period with Emily Greenhouse and she brought up Bloomingdale's and Marvin Traub, the famous impresario of 70s and 80s shopaholism in New York. It was a sort of a balancing act to try to combine these things together, but I wrote several sections of the piece independently and then started to look at it as a whole. What order should they be in? What allegiance can be made to more naturally move from this subject to the next? Then the piece was in development. I had written quite a lot of it already when belatedly I discovered that there were two more books that had recently come out about the important role women played in fashion retailing in the mid 20th century. One book on women who had headed. New York City department stores and another one on women designers on Seventh Avenue in the post-war period and decided that those had to be included as well and made room for those and shaped it. But it was a kind of almost a sculptural process. Not that every article evolves that way, but it was like working on the arms, working off the legs working on the torso and then deciding. What position they're all going to assume when the body parts are assembled, but it was great, great fun to do. I was really delighted to step out of a strictly architectural format and apply the sort of everyday experience that we've all had with shopping and consumerism and especially in the period when I grew up when recreational shopping in this city was a major pastime when I was in my 20s. People really did used to go to Bloomingdale's to pick people up.

Jarrett Earnest
Well, you know, because of my eccentricities and interests get to drive certain aspects of this conversation, there was something that came up in a previous piece. My relationship to architecture and interest, it's very eccentric and all over the place. But one of the architects that I love very deeply is Carlos Scarpa.

Martin Filler
Oh yeah

Jarrett Earnest
and one of my favorite places in the world is his Olivetti showroom in Venice. And there was this beautiful kind of congruence between this paragraph long description of that showroom in relationship to thinking about the ideas that come up in the department store piece because it's a shop, but of a very different nature.

Martin Filler
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you saw that. It certainly hasn't occurred to me, but no, Scarpa is one of the architects who might be hardest to present to a general audience because he's really known as an architect's architect. So much of his work, which is extremely modest in a way, but extraordinarily ambitious in another way with a fiendish attention to detail and attentiveness to materials that, of course, is based on this millennial old Italian tradition that he emerged from. But there is a spiritual and almost magical quality to his work. And a lot of it is quite difficult to see. It's off the beaten touristic path. But it is a remarkable coincidence that in one of the most overly touristed venues in the world just off the Piazza San Marco is this vestige of the old Olivetti showroom, which used to have, in my day when I was first there, used to these plinths that would rise from the floor on which a single typewriter would be elevated up at eye level and as almost Etruscan idols or something very totemic and going back to Italian classical prehistory. And he attended to every surface. I mean, the turats are flooring and the ceilings and the plaster and the marble. And I mean he was a complete genius. Very little known, but kind of almost a holy figure and architect.

Jarrett Earnest
When you slip into that space in San Marco, it's like the most amazing secret. You think this is something really special, but I was so delighted. I've never read anybody really writing about it like this. The Olivetti showrooms shimmering floor of pale gold and deep red Murano glass tesserae, irregularly set in cement seems to draw visitors inward, like the flood tide. A not unintentional metaphor for the aqua alta that immerses the city with increasing frequency and suffuses the long narrow room with a warm reflected glow smooth natural colored stucco walls are outlined with simple strips of dark stained wood near rough concrete walls inset with narrow bands of brass this ranks as one of the most extraordinary interiors of any epoch in venice And it's like... That's my guy. That's the feeling of that place.

Martin Filler
Well, yeah, well, I'm delighted. As I said, I've always found descriptive writing really, really difficult. And I've often moaned and groaned, and gotten up away from the machine I'm writing on, and have wailed to my wife, I hate it, I hated it, and she said, yeah, I know your descriptive writing is a pain, but it's necessary. And again, particularly necessary where you can't depend on the crutch of illustrations, which has never been possible in the New York Review. I'm lucky if I get more than one illustration these days, and I fully understand the primacy that the word has always had here and should, and also the feeling nowadays that if people are that curious about a work of architecture or even a specific detail, they can find it pretty readily on the internet, And one doesn't have to. Go to a library as one would have had to do 40 years ago when I first started writing here.

Jarrett Earnest
But what's so interesting to me about that description is that space in particular, and maybe this is true of architecture more broadly, what's important about it is something that feels almost non-visual. Like every aspect, every surface is perfect, the material is perfect. But there's like, it all adds up to something else.

Martin Filler
To something else. Yeah, no, that's it. I mean, well that's great art. I mean some being greater than the totality of its parts is what we come away with. I mean you can analyze a great painting from dawn till dusk and it's like, it's the feeling it gives you and there's something else going on there. You know, there's just something weird and magical about the Portnari Altarpiece. I know what it is. Last

Jarrett Earnest
I can't, that's the last thing that made me cry, by the way. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. This spring, I was looking at that burst into tears.

Martin Filler
Yeah, yeah, I can see it. And I was very lucky on my last trip to Florence to have hit the Uffizi at a magic hour when the room was empty. And they weren't, it wasn't just before closing time. I think people were all having their gelatos at 5.30 or something. I just was walking by and saw no line. And I said, seize the moment. And I walked in and I headed right for that picture. And I just stood there and I said, this is something. You can't analyze, yes, you can attempt to, but there is something about great art that just cuts through rational thinking and it gets you. And that's one example. And architecture at its best will provide that. It's very rare, but it's rare in all art forms, really. We always talk about these great moments of artistic production. If you look more closely at almost any period, there was an awful lot of junk that was produced. And it's with the distance of three or four or 500 years that things get filtered out and the best things are saved and the less important ones aren't. And then even with that, there are still in the art world amazing discoveries of things that are of extremely high merit. That have slipped through the net and only emerge many years later.

Jarrett Earnest
For next week's episode, we will release an audio recording of Martin Filler's 1999 essay Ghosts in the House on architect Frank Gehry. You can read that essay, or the Big Rock Candy Mountain on Richard Meier's Getty Museum and many others that we've discussed, with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants full access to our complete archive since 1963, searchable on our website. Subscribe at a discount today! At nybooks.com slash pl sub. That's n-y-b-o-o k-s dot com slash p-l-s-u-b. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew O'Coyne, and it is a production of the New York Review.