| Description |
258 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 26 cm |
| Summary |
"James Stewart Polshek (b. 1930, Akron, Ohio) is an American architect living in New York City. He is the founder of Polshek Partnership in 1963, the firm at which he was Principal Design Partner for more than four decades. Polshek worked for I.M. Pei prior to starting his own firm. He served as the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from 1972 to 1987. Polshek is unusual among top-tier architects for taking the position that architecture is more craft than fine art, and that architects have some measure of social responsibility. Polshek currently serves as the architect commissioner on the NYC Design Commission. Committed to principles of community, history, and environment, Polshek has devoted his fifty-plus-year career to serving the common good. James Stewart Polshek has witnessed changing architectural tastes, worked with numerous high-profile personalities, and designed many of America's most prominent buildings. His notable and immediately recognizable projects include the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the renovation and expansion of Carnegie Hall in New York City. Polshek feels that the true importance of architecture lies in its ability to solve human problems, not stylistic ones. A building is too permanent and too influential on public life and private comfort to be created primarily as "public art". Modern abstractions or nostalgic borrowings from the past cannot themselves generate ideas for structures of lasting value. Only buildings that serve broader social, political, or cultural purposes can achieve this. In this book, Polshek explains the principles he feels an architect should adhere to while balancing the myriad constraints the world poses. It also has multiple photographs and designs for the many buildings he has done during this time." -- From Amazon.com |
| Bibliography |
Bibliography: pages 254-256 |
| Subject |
Polshek, James Stewart.
|
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Architects -- United States -- Biography.
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Architecture -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
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Architecture -- United States.
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| Genre/Form |
Autobiographies.
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| LC no. |
87045545 |
| ISBN |
0847808769 (hard) |
|
0847808777 (paperback) |
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