American Icons

Sam Lubell's argument in American Icons runs against the standard account. Most histories of US architecture treat the arrival of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and the other European Modernists in the 1930s as the moment the country woke up architecturally. Lubell is more interested in what was happening before that, and what continued alongside it: the organic tradition that Frank Lloyd Wright established and that John Lautner, Bruce Goff, and Fay Jones carried forward with varying degrees of commercial indifference.

The book covers buildings from 1891 to 2008, and the selection spans the whole country, including eighteen examples in California alone. The range is wider than a greatest-hits reel: alongside the obvious Wright houses and Mies towers, there are airports, museums, and private residences whose architects most people outside schools of architecture would not name on sight. What holds the selection together is the word in the subtitle: defiance. These are buildings that resisted the prevailing style of their moment.

The photography gives particular attention to textural detail: the grain of concrete, a roofline against scrubland, the way a window frames a hillside. The images are credited to multiple photographers rather than a single project, which gives the book a varied visual rhythm rather than a single voice. Lubell's essays sit alongside the images rather than sequestered in blocks, on the assumption that you will read and look simultaneously.

As a reference, the book is more useful than a celebration. Lubell has written more than ten architecture books for publishers including Rizzoli, Phaidon, and Monacelli; this one synthesises a clear argument about American design identity rather than simply anthologising. The subtitle, Visions and Defiance, names that argument plainly.