Looking Beyond the Icons

Renowned for his extensive work in architectural history and historic preservation as an educator, scholar, activist, and public lecturer, Richard Longstreth is one of the most important architectural preservationists of the recent past. Looking beyond the Icons offers a generous and diverse selection of his writings over the past twenty-five years. The author explores a variety of topics related to midcentury (ca. 1945-70) preservation efforts, including practical, intellectual, and psychological dilemmas associated with preserving the recent past, preservation-related deficiencies in the urban planning process, and preservation of specific types of buildings. This collection offers a new understanding of the richness and variety of mid-twentieth-century U.S. architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and provides a detailed analysis of both the imperatives for and the challenges involved in preserving this legacy.

architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and provides a detailed analysis of both the imperatives for and the challenges involved in preserving this legacy.

In their clarity, rigor, and broad reach, the essays in Looking beyond the Icons confirm the wisdom Longstreth has gained through his distinguished career in preservation, landscape studies, and architectural history.

--Buildings and Landscapes

Longstreth offers a master class in looking at the ordinary environment. He hopes that when we know it, we'll decide to keep it.

--Winterthur Portfolio

Longstreth's essays are thought provoking and offer a real-time history of an increasingly important aspect of the historic preservation movement.

--Choice

Looking beyond the Icons should be required reading for anyone with a personal or professional stake in the heritage and future of both historic preservation and the twentieth-century built environment. To those of us who have been actively engaged in working with the diverse legacy of modernism for the past three decades, Richard Longstreth has been a constant touchstone, a perennial source of insight and inspiration, always available to enlighten with wit and incomparable erudition. Here he addresses many key and often neglected areas of our heritage at scales ranging from the single-family house to the city and open rural landscape. He meticulously covers some of the most difficult and important preservation controversies of the past two decades, including a perfectly balanced and very timely assessment of the legacy of urban renewal. Finally, the introductory chapters on Style and Taste are sublime - they alone are worth the price of the volume.

Richard Longstreth is one of the most respected architectural historians working today. He is best known as an expert on America's commercial architecture and roadside vernacular, but, as this collection of essays demonstrates, his knowledge of the twentieth-century built environment is virtually encyclopedic. This is a thought-provoking volume that prompts one to rethink long-held assumptions about modernism--its failures and achievements as well as why it is worth preserving, no matter how ungainly its appearance or how ruthlessly it is perceived to have scarred the surrounding landscape.

--Robert Wojtowicz, Old Dominion University, author of Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning

These old and new essays by eminent historian and preservationist Richard Longstreth are united by a common cause: their passionate advocacy for preserving our built heritage since the mid-twentieth century--perhaps the least appreciated period in American architecture. The kind of exemplary, in-depth historical analyses that Longstreth presents here should be part of any preservation review. Looking beyond the Icons is an important, thoughtful, and eye-opening book.

--Dietrich C. Neumann, Brown University