Recent Publications
Publications
The origin of this journal is not far to seek. It is my custom to listen to the complaints of my students and discuss with them the problems of the contemporary architect beyond the limits of the drafting room.
When I returned from a weekend in the summer of 1950 I reported to them that Mies van der Rohe had said to me “We know what design is.” When I returned from a New Year’s excursion in 1951 I reported to them that Frank Lloyd Wright had said to me “I am the background.” While expressing their admiration of these two eminent architects the students refused to accept their judgements as final.
Yet, inexperienced as they are in life and even in their trade, they were unable to offer alternatives to these expressions of personal satisfaction. So we came to the conclusion that they should create a medium of expression for themselves through which the potentialities of contemporary expression in architecture might be explored without programmatic implications.
This first number of Perspecta is but a beginning. It proposes to establish the arguments that revolve around the axis of contemporary architecture on a broader turntable, encompassing the past as well as the present and extendable into the future. To all architects, teachers, students Perspecta offers a place on the merry-go-round.
George Howe
George Howe—"Training for the Practice of Architecture"
Henry-Russell Hitchcock—"The Evolution of Wright, Mies & Le Corbusier"
Frank Lloyd Wright—"Church for the First Unitarian Church of Madison, Wisconsin"
“New Directions of Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson & Buckminster Fuller”
Vincent J. Scully, Jr.—"Michelangelo’s Fortification drawings: A Study in the Reflex Diagonal"
Fello Atkinson—"The Architecture of American Commerce"
Henry Reed, Jr.—"Monumental Architecture"
