Todd Gannon – författare

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham's writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham's habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham's early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the "clip-on" approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of "well- tempered environments" fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late- career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano.Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham'slate work, including fresh archival materialsrelated to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes ofHigh Tech, the manu-script he left unfinished athis death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham's previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel's (1945-1996) innovative residential projects and office interiors made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid narrative, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel's buildings, and recent interviews with the architect's colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel's development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel's influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work-all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty.Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography that chronicles one gay man's engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture while exploring the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture."This study is a necessity for students and scholars to understand the idiosyncrasies of Los Angeles architecture. Gannon sensitively articulates the mark that Frank Israel left on the identity of this complex, every-changing city."-Thom Mayne"Weaving together the creative and personal histories of one of all too many architects felled by HIV/AIDS, Gannon's engaging study reveals that the deliberate heterogeneity of Frank Israel's architectural palette and the broad reach of his ideas made his work a centripetal force that turned Los Angeles into a global architectural capital."-Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University

Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary. These sharp and insightful texts, whether addressing the impact of digital technology, the design of an effective hotel, the emergence of the Los Angeles vanguard, or the proper execution of a thesis project, combine frontline reportage, archival scholarship, trenchant prose, and impressive critical acumen to cut through the cacophony of recent architectural discourse with uncommon clarity, intelligence, rigor, and wit. Taken together, these essays provide essential orientation for practitioners, academics, students, and aficionados hoping to understand how contemporary architecture came to be where it is and to speculate on where it might go next.