FAME

I’ve just finished reading Roxanne Williamson’s American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame (1991). Despite some interesting historical research into the professional connections between architects and their mentors/employers, it is not a very satisfying book. The first question to ask about fame is “Famous among whom?” The public, the architectural profession, the critics, architectural historians? Williamson considered only the last group. She compiled an “Index of Fame” by consulting twenty histories of architecture and four encyclopedias, and counting the number of times individual architects were mentioned. Since most recent historians (Giedion, Hitchcock, Banham, Pevsner, Fitch, and Scully) have been interested in the history of modernism, this naturally skews the results. An architect such as Rudolph Schindler, who designed a handful of interesting private houses is more “famous” than Paul Philippe Cret, who built major civic buildings such as the Federal Reserve, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walter Reed Hospital, and much of the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. The second problem is that fame is treated as an absolute quality. But, as the old saying goes, “All glory is fleeting.” Sixty years ago, when I was a student, the famous architects we admired were Aldo Van Eyck, Peter and Allison Smithson, and Shadrach Woods, long since forgotten (none appear in Williamson’s book). But neither does the “Index of Fame” include Norman Foster, who, in the years since the research for this book was conducted (the late 1970s) has become the world’s most recognized architect (and the richest). If you are going to study fame—a dubious undertaking—you must incorporate a sliding time scale: famous today, not so famous tomorrow, and vice versa.

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