Sight Lines: Looking at Architecture and Design in Canada

One of today's leading architecture and design critics, Adele Freedman has been influencing readers of such diverse publications as ARTnews and Progressive Architecture for years. Her article on mavarick architect Peter Dickinson for The Globe and Mail (where she is a staff critic)--a revised and expanded version of which begins this book--won the prestigious National Newspaper Award for feature writing.
Sight Lines brings together the best of Freedman's work, from the New Yorker-style profile of Dickinson, through articles on other internationally renowned architects and designers, to specific projects like the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D. C. She offers fascinating insights into the work of such figures as Jane Jacobs (author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities who left America for Toronto during the Vietnam War), Frank Gehry (the Los Angeles-based Canadian who designed the famous Loyola Law School), Gae Aulenti (who converted an abandoned Paris railroad station into the fabulous Gare D'Orsay museum), and Prince Charles (whose "monstrous carbuncle" speech, assailing the "arrogance" of the architectural profession, will never be forgiven by post-modernists). She also offers a tribute to Ada Louise Huxtable, the most venerable writer on architecture in this century, and in a final section asseses a wide range of modern archictecture, from the futuristic Canadian Museum of Civilization to more utilitarian co-op projects. Enlivened throughout by Freedman's vibrant writing, and illustrated with thirty-five black and white photographs, Sight Lines will interest anyone who cares about modern architecture and design.