The Architecture of Influence - by Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This study offers new perspectives and insights on American architecture but also tools through which to analyze architecture more broadly, foregrounding a revised history of architecture, reinterpreted through the lens of influence, and a revised history of influence, reinterpreted through architecture. Case studies feature work by Frank Lloyd Wright, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Philip Johnson, Venturi and Scott Brown, and Kallmann, McKinnell and Wood, as well as less canonical figures such as Demetri Porphyrios, Julia Morgan, and Charles Moore"--

Book Synopsis

How do we create the new from the old? The Architecture of Influence explores this fundamental question by analyzing a broad swath of twentieth-century architectural works--including some of the best-known examples of the architectural canon, modern and postmodern--through the lens of influence. The book serves as both a critique of the discipline's long-standing focus on "genius" and a celebration of the creative act of revisioning and reimagining the past. It argues that all works of architecture not only depend on the past but necessarily alter, rewrite, and reposition the traditions and ideas to which they refer. Organized into seven chapters--Replicas, Copies, Compilations, Generalizations, Revivals, Emulations, and Self-Repetitions--the book redefines influence as an active process through which the past is defined, recalled, and subsequently redefined within twentieth-century architecture.

Review Quotes

Despite an expectation within the profession for newness and the larger cultural value often placed on innovation, significant works by some of the best-known architects consistently rely on processes of citation and referentiality. Lawrence astutely reveals how practices of appropriation, duplication, and copying were not the exception but were rather an integral part of a pervasive norm. . . . Lawrence reveals the intricate and inescapable nature of referentiality within design. She also shows how more recent works read, revise, and reinterpret sources differently from older ones, since history is always filtered through contemporary media that frame our engagement with the past.-- "Architectural Record" (5/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

[A] genre-breaking discussion of the inter-relatedness of architectural creativity . . . debunking of the myth of individual genius. Lawrence's work offers a fundamental re-examination of 20th-century American architecture.-- "Booklaunch"

Amanda Lawrence's new book is most definitely original--not in the architecture it studies, but in its approach to these designs. Taking on what is generally regarded as the fraught subject of influence in architecture, Lawrence helps us see mostly familiar projects in an entirely new way, framing its impact as a two-way street: as architects borrow from the past, they also transform our understanding of that past. She lays out this argument deftly and with admirable step-by-step clarity in the introduction and then delivers her supporting evidence in the chapters that follow, each of them exploring and defining a distinct tactic in architecture's use of its history.

--Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology, author of American Autopia: An Intellectual History of the American Roadside at Midcentury

About the Author

Amanda Reeser Lawrence is Associate Professor of Architecture at Northeastern University and the author of James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist and coeditor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange.