Description: Get architects to write about their mentors and they may disclose more of themselves than when writing or talking about their own work. Such revelations are among the pleasure of this book. The 24 contributors are well known. Some reveal themselves to be quite selfless, some to be self-absorbed, but all show themselves to be people who think and learn, and whose ideas do not spring full-blown from their heads, as Paul Goldberger accurately says in the foreword. Some have written gemlike tributes, notably Tadao Ando to Le Corbusier and Norman Foster to Paul Rudolph. Others are more solipsistic, particularly Michael Graves, FAIA, on Le Corbusier. A full five eulogize Corbu, which doesn't come as a surprise. But that Rudolph is honored by four albeit four Yalies is telling, and especially that one of them is Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA, who has spent most of his career rebelling against Rudolphian Modernism. And who would have guessed that Henry Cobb, FAIA, would select H.H. Richardson as his mentor, in part of his intuitive capacity, which we would not be wrong to call genius. Or that Richard Meier, CAIA, with his many built references to Corbu, would nevertheless single out Wright and Fallingwater? But remember, this is a book about memory, and, as John Irving wrote in A Prayer for Owen Meany, You think you have a memory, but it has you.

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