AR Reading List 005

Since 2011, almost every issue of the AR has included a Reputations: a portrait of an influencer or agitator, written by an independent critic, to break with historic canons or investigate the most significant characters of our time. Each is published with a specially commissioned illustration – the most enchanting of these  showing the figure made up of pieces of their own work.

We are now nearing one hundred of these pieces, their subjects including architects, urbanists, critics, and even an animator. The features are not an act of valorisation, the list not a hall of fame – individuals both excellent and reprehensible featuring alike, all examined by a critical eye. We have, however, yet to feature Le Corbusier: we have been waiting for the right time. See the full list of Reputations here

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• Rem Koolhaas, AR November 2018, Jack Self
  ‘When people ask how Rem became Rem, they are often asking how anyone becomes a Rem. That is, they are concerned with the concentration of power in particular individuals’
• Eileen Gray, AR September 2016, Tom Wilkinson
  ‘By his symbolic removal of Gray’s obstructions Corbusier rendered her complex house transparent, and with the erotic scenes he painted, he supplied the imagined objects of his desire’
• Alison and Peter Smithson, AR February 2012, Steve Parnell
  ‘After Hunstanton, the Smithsons’ principal achievements consisted of rhetoric and polemic: words and images rather than buildings’
• Howard Roark, AR December 2013, Paul Davies
  ‘Roark has legs: in his thrusting individualism he didn’t just aid McCarthy, but he was right for Reagan and he’s still Talisman for the Tea Party, all without professing any politics’
• Zaha Hadid, AR March 2018, Owen Hatherley
  ‘There was always something sad in the way that the hugely wasteful but fascinating, bristling and bafflingly complex steel skeletons of these later “Parametric” buildings would be covered with perfunctory shiny cladding’
• Charlotte Perriand, AR July/August 2018, Catherine Slessor
  ‘Her relaxed affinity for the discarded or ordinary challenged fine art perfectionism, and by approaching everything as a creative endeavour, she connected art to the minutiae of everyday life’
• Colin Rowe, AR August 2015, Paul Davies
  ‘Holding on tight to the lectern, those rheumy eyes betrayed the pain of having to deal with such a turgid and wearisome world; and man’s almost unbearable loneliness within it’