Paul Goldberger

His firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox, became an international force, merging the commercial with the creative in designing some of the world’s tallest buildings.

Stefan Al’s “Supertall” is a thoughtful inquiry into the new generation of skyscrapers, which are taller and more ubiquitous than their predecessors.

Architect, author, Yale academic and City Hall planner, he directed the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and helped plan a New York City Olympics.

He transformed skylines around the world by recruiting blue-chip architects and holding to the credo that good design is good business.

Devoted to classical architecture, he was equally committed to design that benefits city life and helped establish a New York agency to promote it.

Mr. Pelli, whose many distinctive projects include the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, tried to reconcile modernism with his interest in shape, texture and the architecture of the past.

He departed from the pristine monoliths spawned by followers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, challenging the idea that they defined Chicago architecture.

Mr. Pei, a committed modernist, was one of the few architects equally attractive to real estate developers, corporate chieftains and art museum boards.

A favorite of corporations, museums and government, he was given wide leeway in expressing his restless imagination in refined but daring ways.

Mark Lamster’s book recounts the long and productive life of an architect who had an outsize influence on the art form throughout the 20th century.

Philip Johnson, elder statesman and enfant terrible of American architecture, dies at age of 98; he dies at compound surrounding Glass House, celebrated residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn; he was known less for his individual buildings than for sheer force of his presence on architectural scene, which he served as combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader; his own architecture received mixed reviews and often startled public and his fellow architects; yet several of his designs are considered among architectural masterworks of 20th century: his Glass House, sculpture garden of Museum of Modern Art, and pre-Columbian gallery at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington; detailed profile of his life and work; photos (L)

"[Daniel Libeskind] barely used an architectural term in his presentation. He talked about commemoration, memory, mourning, and renewal . . ."

Paul Goldberger reviews three children's books about architecture: Frank O Gehry: Outside In by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan; Arches to Zigzags: An Architecture ABC by Michael J Crosbie; Roberto the Insect Architect written and illustrated by Nina Laden; drawing (M)

William L Turnbull Jr, architect whose buildings earnestly and profoundly expressed a sense of place, dies at age of 62 (M)

Mario G Salvadori, engineer and teacher, dies at 90 (S)

J M Kaplan Fund, a leader in giving grants to save buildings, support cultural institutions, restore landmarks and find innovative ways of creating housing in New York City, is marking 50th anniversary; Joan Kaplan Davidson, former fund president and one of founder Jacob M Kaplan's four daughters, will also be honored on occasion of her 70th birthday; photo (M)

Like a spurned bride who decides that cohabitation is better than solitude, the financially troubled New-York Historical Society, after six years of failed attempts to join permanently with several New York City cultural institutions, last month quietly signed an agreement to affiliate its library with New York University. Under the terms of the agreement, which the society and the university both call a collaboration, N.Y.U. will catalogue and preserve the society's vast collections of manuscripts, photographs, prints, architectural records and books, which on their own constitute one of the largest private libraries in the country.

Paul Goldberger on the rural pleasures that survives on Long Island's East End despite transformation of 'the Hamptons' from collection of self-contained towns and villages to a set of second-home communities; photo (M)

Article discusses battle between small bookstore Books & Co with its landlord Whitney Museum of American Art, which wants to maximize its profits from valuable storefront by raising rent; photo (M)

Profile of Sue Ferguson Gussow, who has taught figurative drawing at Cooper Union for past 26 years and is treated with something close to reverence; photo (M)

Article contends that when group made up of investment bankers Goldman, Sachs & Company, real estate developer Tishman Speyer Properties and David Rockefeller took control of Rockefeller Center last year, they acquired $1.4 billion worth of real estate, ice skating rink and Radio City Music Hall; Rockettes, dance team which has been integral part of Radio City Music Hall, is owned by separate company, Radio City Production Inc, and are in center of battle involving dispute over Music Hall's future; photo (M)

Paul Goldberger article on resurgence of retail stores; says retailers, competing with convenience of home shopping via catalogues, television and Internet, are working to make stores enticing by offering kind of communal excitement; chronology; photos (L)

Paul Goldberger article on retail chains that have raised standardization to high art, bringing to mass marketplace level of design quality once available only at high price; notes trend has led to increasing sameness; credits Mickey Drexler for transforming Gap from chain of jeans stores to mass-market design engine and driving force in shift in American taste toward simple; photos (L)

Article discusses works of photographer Aaron Rose; some of his works will be shown to public for first time in Whitney Biennial; photo (M)

Paul Goldberger Critic's Notebook column on Byzantine Fresco Chapel in Houston, which Francois de Menil designed to hold 13th-century frescoes acquired by his mother, Dominique de Menil; photos (M)

Anna Deavere Smith, actress, playwright and performance artist, will moderate debate on race and the theater between the playwright August Wilson and the critic Robert Brustein at Town Hall; Wilson has said that black actors are compromised by mainstream theater; Brustein has accused Wilson of advocating a dangerous separatism; photos (L)

Paul Goldberger article offers appraisal of architectural style of New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nev; $460 million hotel, casino and theme park described; photo (M)

Paul Goldberger article in collection of articles on disliked design trends cites flawless interiors; photos (S)

Marvin Trachtenberg, architectural historian at New York University, charges that Pazzi Chapel in Florence was not designed by great architect Filippo Brunelleschi, but by one of his followers, Michelozzo dei Bortalommeo, who was known for his willingness to copy works of others; photos (L)

Comment by Paul Goldberger socres possibility that Sterling Divinity Quadrangle at Yale University may lose portion of its back in proposed renovation; photos (L)

New York City Mayor Rudolph W Giuliani, in most ambitious urban-design initiative of his administration, wants to import some of flavor, and some of commercial ambitions, of Parisian streetscape; he has proposed broad plan under which city would turn over 3,300 bus shelters and 331 newsstands now on streets to private company, which would have right to install new designs of its own that would include advertising; under bill City Council is expected to pass, company would also set up more than 30 public toilets, and could be required to include such other elements as public telephones, litter baskets and information kiosks in facilities it builds; photos (M)

Architectural view column discusses how Wagner Park in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan has become national model of civilized urban planning; photo (M)

Paul Goldberger comment on fascination of art forgery and review of exhibition Discovery and Deceit: Archeology and the Forger's Craft, at Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; photos; curator Robert Cohon sees subject as way to entice the public to look at works of art in serious way (M)

Paul Goldberger reviews exhibition on airport and aircraft design at Art Institute of Chicago; photos (M)

Paul Goldberger reviews book The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard; photo (L)

Paul Goldberger's Architecture View column on two new, minimalist emporiums on Madison Avenue--one of them Giorgio Armani's own, a four-story extravaganza at corner of 65th Street designed by New York architect Peter Marino, and the other the first New York work by London architect John Pawson, a store at 60th Street purveying designs of Calvin Klein; photos (L)

Paul Goldberg appraises rebirth of 42d Street in the new Times Square; finds that 42d St and Times Square are turning into one of hottest entertainment and shopping zones of any downtown in United States; finds it remarkable that 42d Street is being strikingly transformed without battery of huge office towers that public officials and real estate developers had insisted were necessary first steps to renewal; photos (L)

Paul Goldberger assesses building designed by Peter Eisenman for University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning; dedication fetes include 'summit meeting' of leading architects on future of American architecture; photos (M)

Paul Goldberger reviews exhibit Louis I Kahn Drawings: Synagogue Projects at the Jewish Museum, NYC; drawings (L)

Architecture View column by Paul Goldberger on story of two lower Manhattan buildings, one old, the other yet to be built, that tell much about this moment in historic preservation; photos of two cast-iron structures, the Rouss Building and the Little Singer Building and drawing of architect Aldo Rossi's proposed building, which would be shoehorned between the two (M)

Paul Goldberger Architecture View column on skyscrapers sees era of American dominance in tall buildings passing to Far East, noting that world's tallest building is nearing completion in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; expresses confidence that mantle of world's tallest building will never return to this continent; asserts that buildings that are not merely high but awesomely high are products, by and large, of cultures that are in first flush of moving onto world stage; notes that as global economy moves toward Pacific Rim, these countries hold a commanding position; they not not only have money, but they want to spend it in way that will demonstrate their economic vigor; drawing (M)

IN an age noted for its "signature" designs, Jed Johnson's signature was grace. Mr. Johnson, who died last week in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 at the age of 47, became one of the celebrated interior designers of our time not by inventing a style, or by creating anything anyone might call a "look." He seemed to have had a love of all styles, and sought only to practice them softly and respectfully. Yet no one could call Jed Johnson hesitant; if there was anything that marked his designs, it was a forthright determination to make space resonate, to make it glow with that peculiar form of perfection that comes when objects of great quality are well placed in carefully wrought surroundings. He did not care whether the objects were Art Deco French sofas or Arts and Crafts tables; the point was that they had to be good, and they had to fit together into a room, which was mainly a matter of some hard-to-fathom formula that existed mainly in his intuition. Another way to say all of this is to say that Jed Johnson had an eye, one of the best eyes that has existed in our time.

WHERE PEACHTREE MEETS SWEET AUBURN The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta. By Gary M. Pomerantz. Illustrated. 656 pp. New York: A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner. $27.50.

Philip Johnson turns 90 tomorrow, and he is still trying to find himself. Or so it would appear, given that after half a century of architectural practice his stylistic preferences still fluctuate more than the Dow Jones average, and his intense, restless mind jumps from subject to subject with the speed of an Olympic athlete. Is it not time, at 90, to settle down and stand for something? No, it is not and never will be. Philip Johnson proves the truism: people do not change as they get older; they just get more so.

IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN EASY FOR DISNEY to make the new, animated version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." It took lots of money, vast amounts of technical expertise and an absolute, complete and total misunderstanding of what the original novel and its many classic film interpretations were about. No, wait a moment. Maybe Disney didn't misunderstand at all. I've just now cast my eye over the background material that the Walt Disney Studios prepared to explain its intentions, and I think I had it all wrong here. Disney didn't miss the point of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." It just didn't like it.

The real question is whether Atlanta sold its Southern soul to get where it is, or whether it had one in the first place. Forget Tara. Atlanta is what you would have if Detroit got its act together. The reality of Atlanta is that it has become the ultimate American city, born of a marriage of outsize boosterism and hard-nosed business. It may be in Georgia, but with every passing day it is less and less of Georgia. The Atlanta that is about to become the most watched city in the world, as 1.4 million athletes, spectators and journalists descend on it for the 1996 Olympic Games, is a place that has invented itself in what can only be called a stunning combination of civic determination and public relations hype. The city has trained for this moment in its history with as much focus, and as much tenacity, as any athlete has prepared for the Games.

CAN a meteor, once it hits the ground, soar again? That is the question posed by the reopening of Windows on the World next week, as the restaurant that became the emblem of New York City's revival in the late 1970's, and then went into decline itself, tries to take off all over again. This time it is costing $25 million, not the $7.5 million it took to do Windows the first time. That is a lot of money, considering that the site is the same, the 107th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center, and much of the infrastructure, like parts of the kitchens and bathrooms, has been carried over from the original Windows. But almost everything the public will see now is completely new and different in myriad ways from what was created in 1976, when the first Windows on the World brought its sleek, glitzy presence to the top of the trade center.

DETROIT WOULD KILL TO have a street like North Michigan Avenue. St. Louis surely seethes with envy at its prosperity. Omaha must look at it as the epitome of urban sophistication and chic. So why does North Michigan Avenue strike me as profoundly depressing? Perhaps because it is the clearest sign anywhere in the country of the desperate measures American cities must take if they are to save themselves. This is a great boulevard, one of the finest in any American city, its noblest stretch -- the Magnificent Mile -- running from the Chicago River to Lake Shore Drive. This part of North Michigan once was the province of Chicago's most elegant shops, most of which were set in handsome, medium-size commercial buildings of limestone and brick. A few apartment buildings, some hotels and a couple of office buildings joined to create one of those truly civilized boulevards whose buildings are individually distinctive yet have enough in common to make a coherent whole.

REMEMBER Father Guido Sarducci's classic "Saturday Night Live" routine, the "Five-Minute University"? The one in which he rushed through the highlights of every subject at breakneck speed? That's what visiting "America's Smithsonian," the vast exhibition that opened this week at the New York Coliseum, feels like. History? Here's Abe Lincoln's hat. Sports? Step right up and see Arthur Ashe's tennis racquet and a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. Culture? Yes, it must be, because there's a Henry Moore, and an Edward Hopper, and hey, that's an Andy Warhol over there. But keep moving, because now you're at Natural History, and you don't want to miss those dinosaur bones or the fossils preserved in amber. Ancient artifacts? Nice Cycladic figure over in that case, circa 2500 B.C. Want some reminders of American ingenuity? Have a look at Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph key, the Jarvik-7 heart and Alan B. Shepard's Freedom 7 space capsule. Like literature? Then you'll be sure to love the portraits of Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Music? Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet, thank you. Whew. This is less an exhibition than "Supermarket Sweep" played on the turf of the museum. When I heard that the Smithsonian Institution planned to mark its 150th anniversary by organizing a national tour of highlights from the collections of its 16 museums, I thought that such an exhibition would at least have the virtue of celebrating authenticity: in an age of virtual this and virtual that, putting so many real objects together would be a refreshing tonic. Arthur Ashe himself really held that actual tennis racquet. That is the real and true space capsule that sailed into the sky on May 20, 1961, not a replica. Jacqueline Kennedy herself wore that actual gown. I imagined that people would come and they would have to be impressed with the power of authenticity.

New Yorkers view Central Park with a stunning inconsistency. They will tell you it is full of risk, but they treat it like their cathedral. And when crimes like Tuesday's savage beating of a woman occur within the sacred glade, they respond with the shock and horror of those whose sanctuary has been despoiled. So even though serious crimes committed within the park's 840 acres are relatively rare, each one receives the attention of a major world event. New Yorkers remember the murder of a Brazilian-born shoe clerk in the park last September, or the rape of the woman known as the Central Park jogger in 1989, with a clarity and a sense of urgency that exceeds that of crimes of even greater scope elsewhere.

Nowhere else in New York does God confront Mammon as directly as where Trinity Church meets Wall Street. A landmark Gothic Revival church staring down the canyon of capitalism: what better way for architecture to symbolize the very conflict of urban civilization? Trinity Church, which turns 150 years old this week, is one of those landmarks that New Yorkers take for granted, and which turns out to have a far more profound connection to the idea of city life than it appears to on the surface. This is no mere Gothic Revival leftover amid skyscrapers. It was New York's tallest building for most of the 19th century and one of its most potent symbols, as closely identified with the idea of the New York skyline then as the World Trade Center is now.

TO drive the 120 miles from Brooklyn to Montauk, the length of Long Island, is in a strange sort of way like crossing the continent. It is a journey that begins in the great city, moves on and on through what can seem like endless stretches of different landscapes, then culminates in a place of great beauty where the land runs out at the edge of the sea. Now it is not exactly like crossing the country, of course. There is no Continental Divide, since it is something of a stretch to conceive of the pine barrens as being nature's break between East and West, and obviously it takes somewhat less time to traverse Long Island than the American continent, although on certain Friday afternoons in the summer it is reasonable to think otherwise.

IT'S STRANGE TO THINK OF AN ART museum as the work of a noted architect when he didn't design its exhibition galleries, and probably stranger still to praise it as one of the high points in his recent oeuvre. But how else to describe what Robert Venturi has just done at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego? The museum, which maintains a small exhibition space in downtown San Diego but has its main quarters here, a few miles up the coast, has occupied the landmark Ellen Browning Scripps house, a triumphant 1916 work of the great California architect Irving Gill, since the institution's founding in 1941. During the 1950's and 60's, as the museum grew, local architects oversaw the evolution of the building from a house to a public institution by adding a series of gallery and service wings. None of these were distinguished, and they had the collective effect of almost obliterating any sense of the magnificent structure that was at the museum's core.

There is something strangely pleasing about the fact that Jane Jacobs, who has spent her life writing books about cities and the virtues of urban disorder, has now, at 80, written one about a single woman who lived a life of extreme order in that most rural of places, Alaska. This book -- "A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska" -- is much more important than its self-consciously quaint title lets on. It is nothing like any of Jane Jacobs's other books, and in fact was written only partly by her; the body of it is the memoir of her great-aunt, Hannah Breece, who spent 14 years at the beginning of this century teaching children of Alaska natives. Breece died in 1940, leaving her great-niece a manuscript she hoped would be put into publishable form. The pleasure in this book comes not from any sense that Ms. Jacobs has reversed course; quite the contrary. She has not elevated Fort Yukon over Greenwich Village, and neither has she put aside her profound belief in the value of serendipity. What she has done is make the point that a sense of independence and of control over one's life is essential to satisfaction and productivity. This is hardly inconsistent with what Jane Jacobs has been telling us for more than 30 years; it is just that until now she has been fairly constant in wanting us to believe that the wide range of choice the city offers makes it a more likely source of fulfillment and independence than the country. The truth is that these are virtues that transcend geography, and can occur in all kinds of places and all kinds of situations; perhaps the most important aspect of her new book is that it contains Jane Jacobs's implicit recognition that this is so.

HOW DELICATE IS great architecture, that it must be protected not only from its enemies, but also from its friends. Almost everyone who has ever seen Louis Kahn's Salk Institute for Biological Studies admires it as one of the exalted buildings of American architecture. Dr. Jonas Salk, who founded the institute, was so proud of this structure that he came to see himself not merely as the client who had commissioned it but almost as Kahn's collaborator. And he believed the building, completed in 1965 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, to be one of his finest accomplishments. When Salk decided in 1989 to expand the institute, he made a point of hiring two architects who had worked on the original designs with Kahn, who died in 1974. Salk made it clear that whatever form the addition took, the Kahn building was not to be altered and, indeed, even agreed that the new wing should be set at some distance from the original structure.

There are no Corinthian columns, no ornate coffered ceilings, and the grand staircase is of stainless steel and terrazzo rather than marble. No lions guard the door. But the new Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library, which is to be dedicated this morning at Madison Avenue and 34th Street, is every bit as grand, in its way, as the library's great main building at Fifth Avenue and 42d Street. It is just that the grandeur is of a late-20th-century sort: less a matter of grandeur than of comfort; less of sprawling physical space than of accessible cyberspace.

James W. Rouse, the visionary developer who built new towns in the countryside, shopping malls in the suburbs and "festival marketplaces," like Faneuil Hall in Boston, in older downtowns, and later used the profits from these ventures to help generate housing for the poor, died yesterday at his home in Columbia, Md. He was 81. The cause was Lou Gehrig's disease, said a spokesman for the Enterprise Foundation, the organization Mr. Rouse set up in 1982 to help community groups build housing.

The architect Charles F. McKim considered the Harvard Union, the sumptuous Georgian building of 1902 that was his first building on the Harvard campus, to be an assertion of the democratic spirit in an increasingly elitist university. He saw it as a clublike place for those Harvard men who could not afford to join the private clubs that were increasingly coming to dominate the university's social life. McKim, the celebrated senior partner of McKim, Mead & White and the architect of such monuments as Pennsylvania Station and the University Club in New York, would doubtless have been puzzled to hear his building described at the end of the century as the ultimate symbol of Harvard's elitism. But that is just how it has been portrayed in a preservation battle that has pitted faculty against faculty, alumni against alumni and both groups against the administration, reaching an astonishing level of public rancor for an architectural issue on a college campus, or anywhere else for that matter. The university decided some time ago to turn the Union, which since 1926 had been Harvard's freshman dining hall, into a new academic center to be shared by Harvard's various humanities departments.

IT IS BETTER TO BE GOOD THAN original,Mies van der Rohe said, and his words could well apply to Richard Meier. Mr. Meier's architecture -- elegant, utterly refined, modernist to the core -- has not changed in any fundamental way since he made his stunning debut in the 1960's, and he has been both praised and criticized for this. To some he is a bulwark of consistency against an architectural world beset by fashion and trendiness. To others he is a one-trick pony with nothing new to say. The new Museum of Television and Radio, which opened last month in the center of Beverly Hills, is not going to convince anyone that there is a new Richard Meier waiting to be discovered. This building is as white and sleek as anything Mr. Meier has ever done, and it looks not terribly different from the many museums and institutional and commercial buildings he produced in the 1970's and 80's.

WHY ARE THEY beating down the doors to get a look at these things? Why, why, why? By last weekend, 139,644 people had pushed their way into the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to get a look at "Faberge in America," which the museum describes as "the first national exhibition tour of the greatest American collections of the work of legendary jeweler and goldsmith Peter Carl Faberge" but which most visitors think of as their one chance to see 15 of the jeweled Imperial Easter Eggs commissioned by the Russian czars. Seize the moment, they cry; the eggs don't roll this way very often.

Four of New York's most prominent cultural institutions will join together to produce a series of exhibitions in June to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publisher Adolph S. Ochs's purchase of The New York Times. The unusual collaboration, which involves the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Pierpont Morgan Library, celebrates the stewardship of Ochs, whose acquisition of the paper for $75,000 in August 1896 marked the beginning of the modern history of The Times. When Ochs bought The Times, it was a nearly bankrupt also-ran among New York's dailies, fighting a losing battle for circulation against the sensationalist papers that dominated late-19th-century journalism. Insisting that the market had room for a more serious journal, Ochs shaped The Times into the widely respected paper it became.

THE Irish are New York's ur-ethnic group. They were here first -- which is to say that they were the first to immigrate in real numbers and complicate the neat world the Dutch and the British had made for themselves -- and they were the first to struggle as a group with the issues of discrimination and assimilation that still define the immigrant experience today. "Gaelic Gotham: A History of the Irish in New York," which opened this week at the Museum of the City of New York, is an attempt to look at the sum total of the Irish presence in New York. The show casts its net wide. The tale it sets out to tell begins with elite figures in the city's history who preceded the great waves of immigration (like DeWitt Clinton, who is probably mistakenly remembered as British rather than Irish), then moves on to the hundreds of thousands of Irish who settled in New York from the mid-19th century through the early 20th, becoming everything from ditch diggers to political powerhouses; it concludes by looking at the complex, ambiguous identity the Irish have in the city today, as they are at once an ethnic group and the bedrock of the city's established history.

Studies in Tectonic Culture The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. By Kenneth Frampton. Edited by John Cava. Illustrated. 430 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. $50.

OAK PARK, ILL., SEEMS LIKE AN ordinary suburb. If you drive through it quickly you see an average Midwestern small town: solid, leafy trees; broad, straight streets lined with banks and shops; lots of churches, and block after block of good old American houses of every architectural style. But Oak Park is not just any suburb, and it does not take long to discover what makes it different. This town, about 10 miles west of Chicago's Loop, is where Frank Lloyd Wright lived and practiced for the first 20 years of his professional life (1889-1909). Scattered among its clapboard and colonial homes, and those of neighboring River Forest, are more than 30 houses designed or renovated by Wright, and numerous others designed by his followers -- the architects who collectively came to be known as the Prairie School.

IN A TENSE POLITICAL CLIMATE, with budgets being cut sharply and Congress watching the Smithsonian Institution and every other Government program like a hawk, the secretary of the Smithsonian felt he had no choice but to insist that the head of one of the institution's divisions keep the controversial views of a prominent researcher on his staff quiet. After all, he realized, the researcher's work could be perfect fodder for "ill-wishers" who would seize upon it as proof that the Smithsonian was cut off from the mainstream of American thinking, and a skeptical and peevish Congress would have an open invitation to squeeze the institution's budget yet again. Far better not to publish this work, the secretary urged in a letter, lest it be read in Congress "by any representative of the numberless constituents, whose dearest religious beliefs are so wounded in a government publication."

IT'S STILL NOT ENTIRELY CLEAR what it meant for the history of architecture, but the day in 1972 when Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier banded together to produce a spare, black-and-white book called "Five Architects" was surely the beginning of high-end architectural marketing. In 1973, when the book was published by George Wittenborn, Mr. Gwathmey, the youngest of the group, was 35; the oldest, Mr. Hedjuk, was 44, and they were little known beyond a circle of academacs and a handful of clients for whom they had built small houses in places like Princeton and eastern Long Island. Shortly, they were The Five, standard-bearers of a movement to elevate modernist architectural form into a serious theoretical pursuit. After that they rose, in a stunning trajectory, from the status of cult figures of the late 1970's to full-fledged celebrities of the 1980's.

Julius Posener, an architect, critic and teacher who was an active figure in the European Modernist movement for much of the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Berlin. He was 91. Mr. Posener studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule Berlin in the 1920's but designed relatively few buildings himself. Uncomfortable with the narrow focus of so many modern architects, he came quickly to see his primary role as one of interpreter and teacher of the developing modern movement. His focus was more open-minded and humanistic than that of many Modernists, and in his writings and teaching he sought to connect architecture to the quality of life by looking as deeply into political, economic and social concerns as into purely esthetic ones.

The first thing to go was the silence. The snow will be around for what seems like forever, if current weather predictions are to be believed, but the silence has already disappeared. And that was what really transformed the city -- not the whiteness of the snow but the silence of the streets. It was not until the buses and trucks and taxis were gone that you realized how automatically you tune out their din. White noise, replaced by white stuff. Take away the sound, and the city not only felt different, it also looked different, the way a silent movie looks like another thing altogether from a feature film without its soundtrack. That movie's over. Three days later, New York no longer looks, as it so briefly did, like those classic photographs of the 19th-century city: skaters in Central Park with the Dakota rising majestically in the background, rows of Beaux-Arts buildings with cornices and lintels dripping with snow.

FILM IS A GREAT architecture critic. Prose has its uses, to be sure, but few paragraphs about the urban condition can damn cities with the power of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in 1926 or sum up the ambition and the passion behind a single building with the intensity of King Vidor's "Fountainhead" in 1949. On film, architecture is vivid, if often wildly exaggerated, and it can take on the presence of a full-fledged character -- or more. Who remembers the people in "Metropolis"? The vision of urban hell that Lang produced is far more potent. Can anybody discourse at length about the cast in "Blade Runner"? Not nearly as easily as you can talk about the futuristic Los Angeles envisioned for the film by Syd Mead. And what architecture critic has demolished the anonymous modern city of steel and glass as deftly as Jacques Tati does in "Playtime"?

ARCHITECTS LIKE TO think they control the future of the landscape. Martin Bucksbaum and Max Karl knew better. Each had an impact on the American landscape that was more transforming, in its way, than that of nearly any architect or city planner practicing today. Focusing on the aspirations of the middle class, Bucksbaum and Karl helped to shape the world of suburbia -- changing the nature of the American town and proving that the physical form communities take does not just happen but is brought into being by conscious decisions. It's not quite right to say that Martin Bucksbaum invented suburban sprawl, either in his native Iowa or anywhere else. But when Martin and his brothers, Matthew and Maurice, decided in the early 1950's that, instead of putting their family's fourth supermarket in someone else's building, they would become landlords themselves, it marked a turning point in the growth and development of the Middle West. The Bucksbaums' first shopping center, the Town and Country, opened in Cedar Rapids in 1956, and they went on from there to become one of the largest builders of shopping malls in the United States. They shed their family's grocery business before the Cedar Rapids center even opened, decisively staking their future on erecting what Matthew Bucksbaum would later call "the new downtowns."

IT WENT LARGELY UNNOTICED, but 1995 brought the 100th birthdays of both Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller. Neither man was around to mark the occasion -- Mumford died at 94 in 1990, Fuller at 87 in 1983 -- and I doubt that either one of them would have thought much of my noting their centennials together. The two could not have been more different: Mumford, the scholar, moralist, deep believer in the dangers of technology and the virtues of small communities; Fuller, the apostle of technology, celebrant of the liberation he was sure science would bring to mankind. "The Myth of the Machine" is how Mumford sternly titled one of his books. "Spaceship Earth" is what Fuller gleefully named the world.

Do bamboo trees look better with a Nevelson (or a Calder or a Dubuffet or an Oldenburg) in front of them? That is the question. And the answer is no. The public atrium in the former I.B.M. Building at 590 Madison Avenue, at 57th Street, one of the most celebrated public spaces to have been built in Manhattan in the last generation, reopened last week after a discreet renovation. New management -- the I.B.M. Corporation sold the building in 1994 to the developer Edward J. Minskoff -- has added eight works of sculpture to the space, cleaned it up and rechristened it "The Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison."

When the big, glaring marquees and the sleazy, garish storefronts are taken down, the most astonishing thing turns out to exist on West 42d Street: architecture. Tonight, the street's oldest theater, the Victory, reopens after an $11.4 million restoration, the first stage in the fulfillment of a promise to reclaim all of 42d Street's historic theaters that goes back to the announcement of a major urban renewal plan for the area in 1981. And the effect is to transform the city's roughest street into one of its gentlest. Renamed the New Victory, the 500-seat theater between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, an ornate, domed house that opened in 1900 as the Republic, will serve as the city's first full-time performing-arts center for children. It will be a kind of Lincoln Center for families, bringing a mix of plays, dance events, operas and film to a street that until recently was the last part of the city that anyone would associate with children.

THE ARCHITECT CHARLES Moore, who died in 1993, was his profession's Pied Piper of the playful, its chief celebrant of the casual. His relaxed, brightly colored work was the antithesis of formality, surely the least buttoned-up buildings produced by an architect of international renown. Whatever your view of his work, Moore would seem like the last architect you would choose to design a business school. They do not always do things by the book at the University of California, Berkeley, however, and so when it came time to design a new home for Berkeley's Walter Haas School of Business, the university went right to Moore and his Santa Monica firm, Moore Ruble Yudell. It was an iconoclastic decision that has to be considered one of the brilliant moments in the history of architectural commissioning.

LEWIS MUMFORD AND PATRICK GEDDES The Correspondence. Edited by Frank G. Novak Jr. Illustrated. 383 pp. New York: Routledge. $45.

THEY were dark, windy, dirty and partly abandoned for years, but never let it be said that the Chelsea Piers have not had their brushes with history. A complex of four piers jutting into the Hudson River from 17th to 23d Streets, they were completed in 1910 to accommodate a new generation of large ocean liners, and in 1912 were the destination of a brand-new ship called the Titanic. Three years after the Titanic failed to call as expected, the piers were the place from which the Lusitania set off on its last voyage, and in the 1930's these piers were the spot from which the fabled United States Olympic team of 1936, including Jesse Owens, departed for Munich. Sinking ships and athletic triumphs: it's a striking pair of images. Given the fact that $100 million has been spent in turning this vast structure into a huge new sports-and-entertainment complex, either one could be seen as an omen for the piers' future. This huge project, which represents one of the most ambitious private investments on the waterfront in any city in the United States, could sink like the Titanic, or it could soar like Owens.

ALPHABET CITY Written and illustrated by Stephen T. Johnson. Unpaged. New York: Viking. $14.99. (All ages)

It costs more, and there is less of it -- thus is the new subway token a true object of the 1990's. It is smaller, lighter in weight and lighter in color than every token the Transit Authority has used except the very first, the one issued in 1953 for 15 cents. The new token, of course, costs $1.50, which somehow suggests, even in these inflated times, that it ought to carry a bit more heft. Not in the mind of the Transit Authority, which seems to feel that Token Lite is the spirit of the day. The new token is almost as feather-light as a dime, and about the size of a nickel, though it will take 30 nickels to buy one, and don't ask, please, how frequently the trains it will buy you access to run compared with the trains of yore. Suffice it to say that this new token buys you a lot more platform time.

LAST SPRING, THE BEST-KNOWN fact about the film "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" was that it was not "Hoop Dreams," the acclaimed documentary about inner-city basketball players that was widely expected to win the Oscar for best documentary -- until it turned out not even to be nominated. The Oscar went to "Maya Lin" instead. Now, "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" has a chance of becoming known for itself. A feature-length look at the architect-artist whose most celebrated work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the film was little seen last year, despite its Oscar eligibility. But last week it began a nationwide commercial release, starting in Washington, and on Friday it will open in New York and Los Angeles. Its producers, Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, and Ocean Releasing, the distribution company they own, are trusting that Ms. Lin's increasingly high profile, plus the lingering halo of the Oscar, will lift this film out of the limbo in which the overwhelming number of full-length documentaries end up.

LAST SPRING, THE BEST-KNOWN fact about the film "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" was that it was not "Hoop Dreams," the acclaimed documentary about inner-city basketball players that was widely expected to win the Oscar for best documentary -- until it turned out not even to be nominated. The Oscar went to "Maya Lin" instead. Now, "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" has a chance of becoming known for itself. A feature-length look at the architect-artist whose most celebrated work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the film was little seen last year, despite its Oscar eligibility. But last week it began a nationwide commercial release, starting in Washington, and on Friday it will open in New York and Los Angeles. Its producers, Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, and Ocean Releasing, the distribution company they own, are trusting that Ms. Lin's increasingly high profile, plus the lingering halo of the Oscar, will lift this film out of the limbo in which the overwhelming number of full-length documentaries end up.

The country not only talked about the trial, it was obsessed with it -- and not just for a day or two, but for week after week after week. This murder trial involving a glamourous celebrity seemed to crowd everything else out of the newspapers, which gleefully printed every detail they could get their hands on. There were so many reporters covering the trial that there was no room for the public in the courtroom. "The trial is being reported to the ends of the globe," observed The New York Times. Sound familiar? Nearly 90 years before O.J. there was Harry K. Thaw, the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, who in 1906 murdered the celebrated architect Stanford White, who he believed -- correctly -- was having an affair with Thaw's wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. So it wasn't quite like the O.J. Simpson trial: the wife's lover was the victim, not the wife, and the jealous husband who was accused of pulling the trigger wasn't the most famous character in this drama, White was. But this saga, too, revolved around a well known public figure, a beautiful woman, a jealous husband accused of committing murder, and a vast fortune prepared to pay anything for the best defense.

SPACE, at its best, is comforting. It protects and encloses; it gives definition, it provides support. Even though only the four walls that surround a space are concrete objects, there is still a sense that space, in its way, is as tangible as the walls and doors and floors and ceilings around it. Space has a feel, and the effect of that on human encounters is profound. What, then, of cyberspace, which now seems to be the favored venue for all kinds of human encounters? People now talk of cyberspace as if it were as physically real as the Piazza San Marco or the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria: it is where they meet, where they communicate, where they decide whether or not to do business, to become friends, to become lovers. To people who live their lives staring at computer screens, cyberspace has a presence as real and as full of promise as the lights of Broadway. It is monumental and noble and intimate, all at once. It is able to do all that real architectural space can do and more.

A PSYCHIATRIST COULD DO nothing to solve this city's problems -- Jerusalem has no subconscious at all," Yehuda Amichai, Israel's most revered poet, remarked recently. "Everything is out in the open, even the infighting." It was a sunny, intensely hot morning earlier this summer, and Amichai was sitting in his small cottage in Yemin Moshe, an exquisite neighborhood of 19th-century stone houses set along flower-bedecked walkways, not far from the center of Jerusalem. "Where else do you see Jews dressed like 19th-century Russians and Arabs dressed like Arabs and people in modern dress, all at each other?" he continued. "You could say that this city is an open madhouse. But its great accomplishment is that it has succeeded in not being a museum. It is heavenly and earthly together, and that is what will sustain it -- the real life."

Eugene M. Schwartz, who with his wife, Barbara, assembled one of the nation's leading collections of contemporary art, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 68. The cause was a heart attack, his wife said.

Abraham W. Geller, an architect known as much for his steadfast commitment to the modernist gospel as for the buildings he designed, died yesterday at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. He was 83. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Marion Geller.

HOW TO MAKE A COURT IN Israel? It is not as easy an architectural problem as you might think. In the United States, architects have usually fallen back on classical architecture as the easiest way to project the air of dignity, moral authority, permanence and grandeur that courthouses are expected to have. But there is no such refuge here, where there is no real classical architectural tradition. It is a paradox, given the Roman presence in the history of this land, that classicism is more legitimately a part of the architectural heritage of America than of this country, but so be it. In Israel, Corinthian columns do not a convincing courthouse make. The foundations of architecture here are threefold: a fondness for simple geometries, a reliance on the traditional vernacular of the Middle East and a tendency toward pragmatic, no-nonsense directness. Architecture is not fluff in Israel; for too long, this country was too poor and too beleaguered to think of buildings as doing much more than providing cover from the rain. But in the last decade, as Israel has become more certain of its continued existence, the notion of a permanent architecture has begun to take root -- and nowhere to better result than in the new Supreme Court building, which marks a critical point in the architectural maturation of this country.

WHERE BETTER TO COME to grips with the struggle between modernism and history than Kyoto? This city's new concert hall by Arata Isozaki might conceivably exist in Tokyo, or Osaka, or even Frankfurt or Barcelona: it is good enough to hold its own amid the architecture of any of these cities. But it has particular resonance in Kyoto, where Mr. Isozaki's implicit theme -- the difficult synthesis between traditional architecture and the modernist style -- is the stuff of daily life. People who have not been to Kyoto often imagine it as some kind of theme park of traditional Japanese architecture, where the landscape of ancient temples and Zen gardens is broken only by a few elegant hotels and ryokans, or Japanese inns. In fact, Kyoto is Japan's fifth largest city, and its heart is as full of traffic and noise and garish signs and wretched new buildings as any other place in Japan. Kyoto also has the most extraordinary array of Buddhist temples and gardens to be seen anywhere in the world, but they must be sought out and are mostly to be found on the city's perimeter. In the center, the real world of today holds sway.

It billows in the wind, it glows in the sun, it is tailored as primly as a dress and engineered as heavily as a battleship. "Wrapped Reichstag," by Christo and his wife, Jean-Claude, is at once a work of art, a cultural event, a political happening and an ambitious piece of business. It has got Berlin into more of a celebratory mood than anything since the fall of the wall five and a half years ago, and as the immense project of wrapping the 101-year-old German Parliament building in more than a million square feet of aluminum-colored fabric nears its completion, crowds gather day and night to gawk, to cheer as sections of cloth are unfurled, and to watch for glimpses of the New York artist couple who are treated here like rock stars.

IF LOUIS KAHN HAD BEEN Japanese, he would have been Tadao Ando. But perhaps that is too easy. Mr. Ando, a 53-year-old former boxer, self- trained as an architect, who last week was named the 18th winner of the Pritzker Prize, could not be more different in background or temperament from Kahn, who died in 1974. True, Mr. Ando's brooding and powerful concrete buildings do bear some similarity to Kahn's own. But the real reason it seems so natural to think of Louis Kahn and Tadao Ando together is that Mr. Ando's work possesses a degree of moral authority not seen in architecture since Kahn. The Pritzker, the international award that has often been called architecture's Nobel, has, since it was established in 1979, gone to a wide range of architects, from theorists like Aldo Rossi to commercial practitioners like Gordon Bunshaft. With this year's award to Mr. Ando, the Pritzker takes a strong stand in favor of commitment to the highest esthetics and craftsmanship.