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 “Who is judging?” 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 listed. Since most recent historians (Giedion, Hitchcock, Banham, Pevsner, Fitch, and Scully) were interested in the history of modernism, this naturally skewed the results. An architect such as Rudolph Schindler, who designed a handful of interesting private houses was 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 she treats fame as an absolute quality. But, as the old saying goes, “All glory is fleeting.” Sixty years ago, when I was a student, the 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, in any case—you must incorporate a sliding time scale: famous today, not so famous tomorrow, and vice versa.
I am currently reading Williamson’s book, and am most interested in the firm histories and professional genealogy diagrams. Williamson acknowledges the fleeting nature of fame, and the bias to modernism in her selection of a particular reference work to provide a baseline for her study, one that is far enough in the past to distinguish fame from celebrity.
Her thesis boils down to fortune favoring the talented tyro who was employed by an architect during the period he or she was producing the breakout work that made him or her famous.
Interesting features of this model include that the successor does not need to be a protégé, master and minion don’t have to like each other, and it is important that the younger not stay too long in the employ of the elder. She concludes the positive effect of this alignment is the bright young thing’s observation of possibility, of how aggressive commitment to one’s design vision is necessary to Get the Thing Built.
For myself, the benefit of an architect’s or firm’s fame is when it inspires others to research and write books that endure longer than their subjects, and which I can then read at my leisure.
Note: Williamson authored a report on the University of Texas campus in Spring 1965, and is well aware of Paul Cret and the value of his built legacy.