A book review by Anthony C.Antoniades, AIA
Architect-Planner,
Former Professor of Architecture UTA
I don’t know how many people understand what it takes to see your book in print;
I mean a book that you have written yourself; that includes ideas and thoughts that are absolutely yours;…and furthermore a book that includes sketches and paintings and drawings you have made yourself; and even more further, a book that you either designed and made the layout yourself or that you supervised its design and layout production, based on a moke-up you may have made and probably you kept patiently in your archives.
In that respect Le Corbusier was probably a very happy man, as equally happy was perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. There is another level of satisfaction for architects, who eventually manage to substantiate on their own the intellectual and creativity process that lead to the making of their work.
There are great books on other architects, but there are very few that qualify as artifacts of ART and THOUGHT , of the type of creativity described above.
It is Zvi Hecker’s “Sketches” !!!
His “Sketches”, by Hatje Cantz-Berlin 2012, is a great Book, a total Artifact of thought, experience, ideas, life-struggles, original opinions and attitudes toward many aspects of architecture; it is a most INCLUSIVIST product of creativity by a man of our time , who knows the world from first hand and personal experience.
For me it was a visual and mental delight !
Next to Toshio Nakamura’s “The Glass House”, on Pilip Johnson’s Glass house, I place this book equal, even though for other reasons ; A real treat of the recent years of Architectural writing and discourse, a HAIKU of knowledge and suggestions, a HAIKU of JUICY ideas and Visual presentation. A non-academic work like those of which the recent market has been flooded, yet by a highly cultured and highly experience architect, whose name and works have been with us since the early years of his association with Alfred Neumann and the articles on them in L’Architecture d’Aujourdhui, way back, in 1963. An author of the rare species, which I call, “Academic through experience and action”, a work of the simple and honest man-architect, with “food and stimulation” for future work for many scholars…
Dynamism, mysticism, humor and refined spirit ! Minimal texts disciplining the most dynamic drawings , the chaos and conflicts of contemporary life, the struggle between history and the present, the repose and eternal value of precedent, the rhythm and affinity of architecture and music ! Whirling winds in red, Tornadoes and lightning , light and dark, color and music…waves, mountains and caves, mass and extraction of mass, polyhedra, spirals and lightning bolt linearity, handwritten letters and history, plans, sections, elevations, axonometric cuts, Piranesi and Bruce Goff, Gehry and Bart Prince, Böcklin and Kandinsky…inevitable thoughts on Beethoven and Schonberg, Adolf Loos vs Walter Gropius, Friends and Enemies…! Travels through life, via the clouds of the intellect, a MAN ARTIST…who as he writes someplace, does Architecture for living.
A book not mincing words; highly political , without claiming to be so, yet so cleverly politically and authority “teasing”! A man arrested by the police and put in jail for defending the rights of the artist-architect, who later in life, as a MAN-HUMAN-INCLUSIVIST AND JUST, will state : “ In today’s unstable world the democratic society is increasingly in need of the army and the police to prevent the spread of conflicts and to impose the rule of law and political authority. The architect’s role is to humanize these fast-growing demands.”(p. 232 , with reference to the KMar Complex in Shiphole).You must know Zvi and all his life, in order to really get the deeper meaning of such statements…his actual cosmotheoretical polemic
Anthony C.Antoniades, AIA
SOURCE : ACAARCHIVES
(PHOTO : NECHAMA) | ANTONIS ANTONIADES & ZVI HECKER
RAMOT HOUSING IN JERUSALEM ZVI HECKER PHOTO | (PHOTO ACANTONIADES)READ ALSO: THE EIFFEL TOWER