William Alex (1)

One year after the release of the popular and well-reviewed Great American Artists series, in which publisher George Braziller (1916–2017) “kept the price as low as possible to make the books available to a wide audience,” the Masters of World Architecture series came out. Like the artists series, Braziller commissioned esteemed writers—including Françoise Choay, Ada Louise Huxtable (her first book), Esther McCoy, and Vincent Scully—to create accessible introductions to notable show more architects. Accompanied by more than a hundred illustrations, a timeline, and bibliography in each of the eleven titles, the books reflect a time when crafting architecture books in large print runs for a general audience was a tenable undertaking.
The series also captures the “age of the masters,” as historian Reyner Banham called it, when so-called master architects revolutionized modern architecture and the architects who followed them. That age was nearing its final phase just as Braziller published the series on eleven male architects—Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 and alternatives to orthodox Modernism became more prevalent as the 1960s advanced.
Six decades later the master architect is dead, replaced by collaborative and networked practices that prioritize process over product, content and context over form. Nevertheless, the Masters of World Architecture series holds its appeal for its concise intro- ductions to important architects and its commendable means of bridging the architectural profession and the general public.
(From my book "Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books") show less