Book Reviews
Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, by Alec Nevala-Lee, 2022
Hero, charlatan, genius, huckster, prophet, guru… it’s now open season on the legacy of Bucky the man, a conflicted character indeed, apparently. He spent his life traveling and pitching plans to save the world through various dymaxionisms and synergeticnesses, leaving his dreams of manufactured metal houses and cars to crash. His domes inspired many to do their own thing, even if it was only to meet together inside domes to talk about saving the world with domes. (Meanwhile America’s post-war global power was enhanced by protecting hundreds of radar installations near and far with his radomes—the Department of Defense was his biggest paying customer.) He didn’t much care for politics, it seems. Maybe he cared most about his legend, while being his own worst enemy. Like an artist, which is maybe what he was more than anything else.
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, by John Markoff, 2022
From the Merry Pranksters to the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has been on the leading edge of the middle of things for a long time. He is a technologist looking for a better way, but not as an oracular visionary preaching a gospel sent from above (like Bucky), but grounded, following something that looks more like steps along the road of common sense (a subjective thing, yes, but we sort of know it when we see it, don’t we?). His Whole Earth Catalog was a familiar-feeling foundational idea for so many, and his 1994 book How Buildings Learn (constructed over several years in a shipping container) was nearly as great. He’s not without complexities and contradictions, of course, but now there is this book, to help connect the dots and fill in the blanks.
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation, by Eric Rutkow, 2012
This book is full of interesting things that should be common knowledge, but aren’t, like that the oldest living tree in America was discovered after it was cut down by a forest service researcher to count its tree rings; that Wisconsin’s Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871 was the deadliest forest fire in American history, likely killing more than 2,000 people and burning 2,000 square miles; and that the writer Henry David Thoreau was the son of a pencil maker. It is possible to see the forest of American history through its trees indeed.
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, by Alexandra Lange, 2022
A thoughtful journey through the architectural history of malls, written by Alexandra Lange, a design critic, former Curbed architecture writer, and mall user. Though malls may have originated with Victorian enclosures of urban space (or even much, much earlier), the modern mall story told here starts with the classic modernist malls of Victor Gruen, who built the first enclosed climate controlled suburban mall in Minnesota in 1956, and continues through important 1970s milestones like HOK’s Houston’s Galleria (1971), and Jon Jerde’s Horton Plaza, in San Diego (1985), and the Mall of America (1992), also in suburban Minneapolis. The story ends, for the moment, chronologically, where her book begins, with a visit to the recent but long-delayed full opening of the American Dream, in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. The mall is dead. Long live the mall.
Car-Stoppers, by Temporary Services, 2022
A recent pamphlet publication depicting a variety of “car-stoppers”: concrete and metal posts (mostly), set in place to protect buildings from being damaged by slow moving vehicles in tight corridors like alleyways. United in function but often differing in form from the outset, car-stoppers develop more individual characteristics over their lives by the marks, bumps, cracks, scrapes, and other scars acquired in their line of duty. They possess a tangible nobility too, serving their selfless function like sacrificial sentinels, or like members of an architectural secret service, taking the bullet, as it were, for the more “important” structures they protect and defend. This is a very local survey, from alleyways around northern Chicago (mostly), and while perhaps phenomenologically exemplary, clearly a more widespread nationwide study of the form is called for. This 36-page color publication is part of the ongoing and compelling output of Half Letter Press and Temporary Services, an independent cultural outfit based in Chicago.
The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Company, by Stephen R. Brown, 2020
The fur trade formed the first strands of European incursion into the native continent, and its history is complicated and horrid, involving the Dutch, French, British, Russians, and countless Native populations, spanning 250 years. The Hudsons’s Bay Company was one of the largest players, and this book covers their part exhaustively. Initially working from fortified depots on Hudson Bay, at points where rivers lead into the interior like cracks in the continent, much of the Company’s network of outposts and routes ultimately fell on what became the Canadian side of the border. But by the early 1800s the Company had expanded through the northern plains and northwestern USA, via the Missouri and Columbia Rivers and their tributaries, and was trading at US ports on the west coast, including Seattle and Astoria. By the 1830s, though, the wave of western migration grew, and the Hudson’s Bay Company evolved into a general merchandise retail business, and is still at it today.
Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land, by Sandra Matthews, 2022
Most of the things depicted in this book of site photography seem barely attached to the ground, or about to fall over. Heavy-looking rock monuments, attempting to convey a fixed history, seem more like imported thought bubbles, and the buildings, in this normally deep-rooted land of Massachusetts, are depicted here as temporary sheds and flimsy, disintegrating ephemera. The flotsam of occupation. Another entry in the lengthening line up of publisher George F. Thompson’s output, which spans decades and includes some of the best books about places out there.
Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City, by Lucy Sante, 2022
Croton, Ashokan, Schoharie, Rondout, Neversink, Pepacton, Cannonsville: these are the places where New York City is plugged into the ground; its hinterlands; its sacrificial infrastructure; its “Chinatown.” Ideally the massively extended watershed of the nation’s largest city would be as familiar to the city’s residents as its museums, businesses, and cultural landmarks are. This book, written by Lucy Sante, who teaches writing and photography at Bard, gets us a bit closer. Wish though that the designers had decided it was more of a photography book, as many of the great historic photos spanning the spread are lost in the gutter.
Underground Empires: Two Centuries of Exploration, Adventure & Enterprise in New York’s Cave Country, by Dana Cudmore, 2021
A recent local history book about one of the oldest show caves in the nation, Howe Caverns in Upstate New York. The cave opened to the public in 1842, a few years after the more famous and mammoth Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and decades before Luray Caverns in Virginia (with its spectacular stalacpipe organ). Howe, long known as a conservative 1950s-kind of cave development (in contrast at least to Secret Caverns, the ragged underdog cave nearby), has had a new owner since 2007, who has made some changes, such as introducing specialized nude tours, and plans to turn the site into a major resort and casino complex.
Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, by Harlan Hubbard, 1953 (University of Kentucky Press edition, 1977)
The modesty of the life and art of Harland Hubbard and his wife Anna is an inspiration to those who stumble on this old book, which was helped into a wider audience by this edition with an introduction by Wendell Berry, a Hubbard fan. The Hubbards built a shanty boat in 1944, and with their dogs, floated under their own power down the Ohio and the Mississippi over a few years, playing music, painting, writing, cooking, and living day to day, outside of the economy. Once the journey ended, they settled at Payne Hollow, near Louisville, on a steep bank of the Ohio, where they built a house and lived in the same way for many more years (and he wrote a book about that too). The ruins of their homestead recently changed hands, and an effort to restore their legacy has begun, hopefully not too late for the world.