Building Up and Tearing Down is Paul Goldberger’s new collection of fifty-seven essays is a comprehensive and intelligent account of the best — and worst — of contemporary architecture around the globe, available October 13, 2009. A considerable portion of this volume comes from his tenure as architecture critic of The New Yorker, as well as from his work for the New York Times and Metropolis, and is published by The Monacelli Press.
The essays cover a broad range of architectural and urban issues, buildings, architects, and cities and are organized in thematic sections: Buildings that Matter, Places and People, New York, Present and Past, Museums, and Ways of Living. Goldberger profiles places from Havana to Beijing and people from Louis Kahn to Charles and Ray Eames. Critical reviews address famous New York locales, such as Rem Koolhaas’s Prada store, SOM’s Time Warner
Center, and Renzo Piano’s New York Times building. Also featured are essays on museums, such as Richard Meier’s Getty and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, and public spaces, from Gehry’s Disney Hall to the buildings of the Beijing Olympics.
