Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.)Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York Review Books.  Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.