Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture and Design

Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bauhaus collects the unparalleled writings of legendary British wordsmith Janet Abrams for the first time. From pivotal figures in international modernism to the pioneers of digital media, Abrams explores the ideas, theories, and emotions that fueled their work.

The book's twenty-six profiles—written in Abrams's signature, personal, often hilarious style—include Reyner Banham, Berthold Lubetkin, Philip Johnson, Paul Rand, Phyllis Lambert, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Muriel Cooper, April Greiman, and Michael Bloomberg. It brings together essays that originally appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic, in Blueprint, I.D. magazine, The Independent, and in books and catalogs from the 1980s through the early 2000s. A foreword by Blueprint's founding editor, Deyan Sudjic, and new reflections by Abrams, set the stage.

About the Authors

Janet Abrams's career as a writer and editor spans several decades, cities and disciplines, from architecture and design to photography and ceramics. Trained as a journalist in her native England, she first moved to the US in 1983 as a Fulbright Scholar to do her Ph.D. at Princeton University, and was soon appointed US correspondent for Blueprint, the new British design monthly. Back in London in the late 1980s, she wrote on architecture and photography for The Independent, and on visual arts for Sight & Sound and New Statesman & Society. In the 1990s, she became writer-at-large for I.D. Magazine in New York, and a member of the editorial team that won multiple National Magazine Awards. She has also contributed to Ceramic Review, Domus, frieze, Metropolis, New York Times Magazine, Ottagono, Print and Southwest Contemporary, as well as numerous books, exhibition catalogs and monographs. From 2000-2008, as director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, she ran an interdisciplinary research program on contemporary design and was co-editor, with Peter Hall, of Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories.

Deyan Sudjic was the founding editor of London-based Blueprint magazine and served as the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is a former director of the Design Museum in London. His most recent book is The Language of Cities.