A Few Years of Writing: Interspersed with Some Facts of Life

With a body of work firmly at the heart of architectural theory and discourse, Robert

Maxwell is undoubtedly one of the most respected architectural writers and educators

of recent times. Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, Robert

Maxwell is a scholar known worldwide for critical writing that looks at modern and

contemporary architecture in relation to our wider culture, including art, literature and

music.

A Few Years of Writing: Interspersed with Some Facts of Life brings together

a collection of over 30 of Maxwell's writings from the late twentieth century to the

present, through which are woven events and occasions from his own diary that

expand on debates in the world of architecture throughout the period.

Texts include "Richard Rogers: an Evaluation", first published in Casabella in

February 1994; "Sounds and Sweet Airs at Stuttgart", a review of the Music School at

Stuttgart, in the RIBA Journal in October 1996; an obituary of Philip Johnson in The

Architectural Review, in March 2005; and "Eisenman: The Formal Basis of Modern

Architecture", in Building Design in September 2006. This engaging collection, at

once intimate and autobiographical, insightful and perceptive, as well as critical

and theoretical, results in a rich description of the culture of architecture across two

decades towards the close of the last century and during the early years of the

present.

A Few Years of Writing: Interspersed with Some Facts of Life is the first of two

books of Robert Maxwell's writing to be published by Artifice, with the second coming

out in Spring 2013.

Robert Maxwell is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and former Dean of Architecture at Princeton University. He has worked closely with James Stirling, and was a partner in Douglas Stephen and Partners before he became Professor of Architecture at the Bartlett. He writes extensively on architecture and the arts for various magazines and books.

Anthony Vidler is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in NewYork and internationaly recognised scholar, theorist and critic of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of numerous books such as Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 2008, and The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays, 2010.