- Martin Filler
-
Martin Filler Born Martin Myles Filler
September 17, 1948
Colorado SpringsEducation Columbia College, Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology Occupation architecture critic Notable credit(s) The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, Progressive Architecture and Architectural Record Martin Myles Filler (September 17, 1948) is a prominent American architecture critic.
Born in Colorado Springs, CO, Filler received a BA in Art History from Columbia College in 1970 and an MA from Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology in 1972. He is best known for his long essays on modern architecture that have appeared in The New York Review of Books since 1985, and which served as the basis for his 2007 book Makers of Modern Architecture, published by New York Review Books. Robert Hughes praised it as "by far the most intelligent and shapely writing on architecture done in recent years," and called Filler the "one regular critic in the American press whose pieces are a guaranteed pleasure to revisit–or to read for the first time."[1]
Filler began his career in 1973 at Columbia University's Teachers College Press. From 1974 to 1977 he was the editor of Architectural Record Books at McGraw-Hill, where he produced anthologies of writings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford. He began contributing book reviews to Architectural Record magazine in 1974, and three years later became an associate editor at Progressive Architecture. In 1979 Filler started his long association with Condé Nast Publications, where he was an editor of House & Garden until the magazine ceased publication in 2007. From 1990 to 1994 he was also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote profiles on major figures in the arts including Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Paul Mellon, I.M. Pei, Irving Penn, and Jacob Rothschild.
His writings on architecture, art, and design–more than 1,000 articles to date–have appeared in a broad range of periodicals, newspapers, scholarly journals, and exhibition catalogues in the United States, Europe, and Japan, including some 50 pieces for The New York Times. During the early 1980s, Art in America ran his eleven-part series on an emerging generation of avant-garde architects including Frank Gehry and others yet to achieve widespread recognition. From 1999 to 2003 he was the architecture critic for The New Republic, and in that latter year was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Filler's criticism is noted for its clarity, erudition, and outspokenness. In a New York Times Op-Ed Page piece he denounced the Gwathmey Siegel addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum as "the most appalling act of architectural vandalism since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station".[2] In The New York Review of Books he termed the rebuilding of post-reunification Berlin "a fiasco of immense proportions, the greatest lost opportunity in postwar urbanism,"[3] and characterized the bird-like structures of the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava as "kitsch."[4]
Known for his expertise in modern design, Filler served as a guest curator for the Whitney Museum of Art's exhibition High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design (1984) and the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960 (2001). In 1978 he married the architectural historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter, with whom he collaborated on the Whitney show. Together they wrote and conducted interviews for three documentary films by Michael Blackwood: Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture (1983), Arata Isozaki (1985), and James Stirling (1987).
References
- ^ Robert Hughes. Master Builders. The New York Review of Books. Published: September 27, 2007, p.46-48
- ^ Martin Filler. Playing 'Beat the Clock' With the Guggenheim]. The New York Times. Published: July 30, 1988, p.25
- ^ Martin Filler. Berlin: The Lost Opportunity. The New York Review of Books. Published: November 1, 2001, p.28-31
- ^ Martin Filler. The Bird Man. The New York Review of Books. Published: December 15, 2005, p.28-34
External links
- Filler author page and archive from The New York Review of Books
Categories:- 1948 births
- American architecture writers
- Critics employed by The New York Times
- People from Manhattan
- Living people
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
