Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

by Carol Herselle Krinsky

"During the years when modernism triumphed in American architecture, few architects worked more actively to promulgate that vision than Gordon Bunshaft, and none was more adept at translating the ideal images of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier into buildable, corporate realities. Standards of design and practice established by Bunshaft in conjunction with his firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came to be the measure by which much American work was judged, and the look of American cities changed accordingly. Carol Herselle Krinsky's analysis of Bunshaft's work is the first complete study of this important and at times difficult architect. Her analysis benefits not only from newly available source material but also from extensive interviews with Bunshaft himself. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of one of the major architects of the twentieth century as seen through his buildings and the efforts to bring those buildings into being. The book also takes into account Bunshaft's