Through the brilliant photography of Richard Schulman and an insightful introduction by New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger, Portraits of the New Architecture celebrates the 50 architects who have reinvented architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries. From Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei to Richard Meier and Daniel Liebeskind, Portraits emphasizes the magnetism of the architects as well as their creations. With highly personalized representations of the architects  themselves and images and design plans of their best work, the book explores the architect-as-superstar phenomenon: what does it mean that architecture today has become a style statement?

“Richard Schulman has an unusual eye. His lens sees people in a very different light from that which some might consider ordinary. It is his extraordinary insight that brings a freshness of perspective to this new book published by Assouline.” (Richard Meier)

The December, 2004 issue of Clear Magazine (Fashion & Design) entitled Pop Moderne has included coverage of Assouline’s Portraits of the New Architecture within their In Context section. The story with book cover photo which can be found on page 109, reads:

PORTRAITS OF THE NEW ARCHITECTURE
Goethe wrote that architecture is frozen music. We could only have imagine what sounds the writer and philosopher would extract from our modern architectural marvels. Portraits of the New Architecture has an inkling. Celebrating 50 architects who have reinvented the art in the last two centuries, this visually compelling and informative book is as much a reference guide as it is a graphic centerpiece. It sweeps across movements like a veritable virtuoso, with sections including the architect immersed in his own environment Norman Foster gazing at his Hearst Building model while within the complex itself; Rem Koolhaas at this firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture; Christian de Portzamparc looking down at New York’s 57th Street from LVMH Tower. And the beat goes on...

Introduction: Portraits of the New Architecture
Paul Goldberger

Architects are not people who recede into the background. One would think that by being able to produce such conspicuous evidence of their creative force as buildings, they would not fear being overlooked, but it is rarely so. Few architects are content to let their work speak for them; most of them are determined to strut the stage themselves, along with their buildings. It is hardly true that ego in architecture is directly proportionate to talent - there are as many exceptions to that in this profession as in any other - but it is probably fair to say that there are relatively few architects who lack substantial egos. Almost all architects, having been conditioned to think large, see themselves not only as people of substance, but as people of power. They do, after all, shape things that are likely to outlast their own lives, and perhaps the lives of the next generation or two, and unlike novelists and composers and painters, they do not have to be creating masterworks to assure that their work will be noticed after they are gone. Not the least of the paradoxes of the architecture profession is that the bad architects often have as big an impact on the landscape, and on the future, as the good ones. Then again, if architects are not the most modest of people, it is not, of course, so easy to be an architect. You are part artist, part engineer, part businessman, part technocrat and manager, and part - perhaps more than part - salesman. If you act as if your work is only creative, then the realities of economics and politics and structural engineering will do you in, and if you act as if the mundane things matter more than the art of it all, then you will never be any good. It is a difficult life, and it is not for the faint of heart.

In Richard Schulman’s portraits of architects, there are no fainthearted figures. What is most astonishing about Schulman’s work is how he manages to portray fifty of the most prominent architects practicing today as distinct personalities, each one different from all others, to craft each portrait in a way that connects the image of the architect’s persona to his or her work, and then to make of all of this a whole that is even more than the sum of its parts. That whole is a picture of the architect as cultural figure right now, a time when architects loom larger in the culture than ever before. Schulman presents the architect as celebrity, which indeed he is, and he does not kowtow to this phenomenon. He is able to honor the more prominent role architecture plays in the culture today while at the same time making it clear that he is aware of the expansive egos it yields, and is willing to tweak them gently, if not to cut them down to size.

This is not a book that will garner much favor among those who call for a more anonymous architecture. You cannot be an advocate of quiet, background architecture and see the world through Richard Schulman’s lens. But neither is Schulman trying to bring us back to the crude and cartoonish view of the architect as the all-powerful figure misunderstood by lesser mortals, as Ayn Rand would have had us believe he was (in those days it was always he) in The Fountainhead. The men and women in these pages are human, so much so that in some cases we perceive them as victims of the culture of celebrity more than as exploiters of it.

Schulman has gotten the essence of architecture today - personality-driven, image-driven, but at the same time deeply engaging and exciting. We live at a moment of public passion for architecture, and every page of this book expresses this. This passion does not in itself mean that all the architecture we produce now is great or even good, but no matter; it is a start, and in any case it is impossible to say that public engagement in the most public art is not a good thing.

It is common to date the outpouring of public interest in architecture to the 1997 opening of Frank Gehry’s remarkable Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, but the reality is that Bilbao was as much an effect as a cause of the current sensibility. It represented a kind of culmination of years of moving toward an increased willingness to see architecture as the basis for emotional experience, an increased willingness to celebrate expression and invention, not to mention the creative power and possibility inherent in new technologies. Gehry summed up all of these forces and put them together into a great work that, in and of itself, had the ability to push things even farther, and as with all great art, made the world feel different from the way it had been before. But if Bilbao was not the sole begetter of what we might call the category of New High-Visibility Architecture With Emotional Impact, it is the symbolic beginning, and the building that led an entire generation of non-architects to demand architecture that they would find emotionally and intellectually engaging.

And the more of that that gets built, the more the constituency for architecture grows: the age of architecture, if we can call it that, comes about in part because of architecture itself; the more it is a presence,the more there is a demand for it. And thus we have not only Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles, an even greater building than Bilbao, but Tadao Ando’s Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth and Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s Folk Art Museum in New York and Raimund Abraham’s Austrian Cultural Center in New York and Norman Foster’s Swiss Re Tower in London and Bernard Tschumi’s architecture school at the University of Miami and Richard Meier’s apartment towers on the Hudson River - and that is only the beginning. In an age in which the board of Lincoln Center hires Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio to redesign the center’s public plazas, when MIT decides that it wants the calling card of its campus to be a series of conspicuous works of architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry and Steven Holl, and when the Port Authority of New York commissions Santiago Calatrava to design a new transit station for Lower Manhattan, there seems to be a certain inevitability of architecture as the preferred means for institutions to put themselves on the map today. Organizations that were once resistant to architecture now seem to consider having a notable building (a “signature building”, to use that somewhat cloying phrase) to be an essential part of their public identity.

There are risks in all of this, of course, no matter how much you believe, as I do, that the rising tide of architecture is more healthy than not. Still, we are a society that is increasingly visual, and increasingly eager for the stimulation of a quick visual fix; wanting to be noticed at all costs means that we may find ourselves falling for the architectural equivalent of the tarted-up blonde rather than the brunette whose charms are more subtle, but more sustaining. Sometimes, as in Gehry’s best work, instant allure does not preclude deeper, more long-lasting pleasures, but that is not always the case, and there are times when I suspect we will fall prey to the heady turn-on of a glamourous building and pass up something that may be a more profound work of architecture but is not nearly as exciting at first glance. And as we become more and more accustomed to the idea that architecture is supposed to give us a kind of emotional high, are we not at risk of needing more and more of it, all the time, upping the ante as buildings that once would have excited us now become routine? In the end, this may turn out to be the real way we pay a price for our new fixation - that we need each piece of architecture to be more and more different, to make a louder and louder statement, to attract our interest. (When every building is extraordinary, as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown once said, then haven't they all become ordinary?) And while no one wants to return to the early modernist creed of functionalism above all (a creed that was honored more in the breach anyway) there are plenty of architects these days who seem to disdain practical concerns as so far beneath them as to be unworthy of any attention at all.

To say this is to risk spoiling the party, and a wonderful party it has been. I am most astonished at the extent to which the fascination for name-brand architecture has moved beyond its traditional realm of cultural institutions, universities and houses for the rich, and into the sphere of commercial buildings. Real-estate developers now want apartment towers by Calatrava, office buildings by Robert A.M. Stern, hotels by Jean Nouvel and shopping centers by Daniel Libeskind. They have come to realize that architecture is a marketing tool in itself - that the name of the architect can have as much impact on the price of apartments as the number of closets. Richard Schulman’s portraits are the farthest thing imaginable from marketing tools, striking and memorable though they are. Schulman’s style is mannered and far from casual, but it is deeply insightful. Whether it is Charles Gwathmey looking thoughtfully as he sits before the large grid of an old industrial window, or Santiago Calatrava gazing a bit too admiringly at his own sculptures, or Jean Nouvel looking like a character in a film noir, or Peter Eisenman affecting a casual disorder, Schulman has gotten the essence of each of these people. Diller and Scofidio come off as thoughtful and even understated, Norman Foster as a bit narcissistic as he stares at a model of his new Hearst tower now rising in New York, and Frank Gehey as strangely rabbinical. Rafael Vinoly is one of the few who manages to come off as even slightly playful, since Schulman has a tendency to encourage his subjects to take themselves rather too seriously, although one might think of the brilliant photograph of Harry Cobb, who is seen only in shadow behind a model of one of his towers, as far wittier. Schulman’s wit also comes through in the image of Eric Owen Moss in reflection, and in the portrait of Renzo Piano as almost papal. And what are we to make of the picture of Christian de Portzamparc, who is presented as a tiny figure standing in the huge space atop his LVMH tower in Manhattan, looking out at the skyline? Is he inconsequential, or powerful as the maker of the very space that appears to diminish him? It is difficult, on the other hand, not to be moved by the exquisite photograph of James Ingo Freed, who appears almost stoic, by the gentleness of Michael Graves and by the warmth that Schulman has seemed to coax out of Venturi and Scott Brown.

In all of these images, there is a degree of ambiguity between the subjects’ identity as architects and whatever other qualities they have as human beings. That is precisely as it should be. Schulman is asking us to think about the connections between architects and their work, but he is wise enough not to draw simple conclusions. Artists are never precisely like their work anyway - there is no easy correlation between an artist’s character and the nature of the work he produces, and there is little to be gained in seeking one. Schulman, aside from being a portraitist, is an accomplished architectural photographer, and within the pages of this book are not only unique portraits of the architect-subjects, but images of many of their buildings that in some cases are among the finest that have been taken. These architectural photographs serve another purpose, too: they assure that, however bedazzling Schulman’s portraits of these architects are, the architecture will still have the chance to speak for itself.

Review from A Weekly Dose of Architecture: Portraits of the New Architecture, Richard Schulman with Paul Goldberger

Richard Schulman’s color photographs highlight fifty international architects and their buildings. In some ways a product-and critique-of the celebrity status of architects, the candid images of each (mainly individuals but sometimes firms) are the most illuminating aspect of the book. Mainly taken in offices and homes, the portraits don't have a stylistic theme, instead finding their inspiration in the architects themselves. For example, Rem Koolhaas is the only focused head among a sea of blurry OMA-ers - exhibiting the teamwork of his practice-and Daniel Libeskind sits on an office chair in a loft populated only by crates and boxes-a clue to his transient nature. The one consistency in the portraits is Schulman’s use of light, the strongest element in each photograph. The only distracting part of the book is its geographical bias. Schulman admits in his introduction that picking the final fifty was difficult, though looking at the list of architects the crosshairs are pointed at New York City. Twenty-one of the fifty architects are based in NYC, half of the fifty located in the Northeastern states. The rest are spread across Europe, Japan, Mexico and the other US coast, with exceptions like Miami’s Arquitectonica and New Mexico’s Antoine Predock. Unfortunately no representatives from the Midwestern states are present, nor is Africa, South America, or the rest of Asia included. But this isn't necessarily a detraction of the book, as it is an indication of where the most popular and cutting-edge architecture is being produced. Perhaps this is a book that can be updated in ten years or so, as an architectural barometer showing the profession’s cultural and geographical evolution.