Gabriele Neri's Book on New Yorker Cartoonist Alan Dunn Examines Architecture Satire

Gabriele Neri's book Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic, published by MIT Press on 26 May, examines the career of the longtime New Yorker contributor who used cartoons to critique Modernism. Dunn began submitting spot cartoons about buildings to The New Yorker in the mid-1920s, later contributing to Architectural Record from 1937, and continued working until his death in 1974. His 1963 New Yorker cover juxtaposed Walter Gropius's Pan Am headquarters with the 1920s Helmsley Building, presenting a dialectical argument about a bland future overshadowing a richer past. Dunn's populist critique of Modernism, exemplified by a cartoon of an exasperated viewer before Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum, appealed to writers such as Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Terence Robsjohn-Gribbings. His work foreshadowed Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture by four years, as well as Japanese Metabolism, Postmodernist classicism, Robert Venturi's Learning From Las Vegas, and the inside-out style of Richard Rogers. Dunn described his satire as 'a titillating feather rather than a sword.' The book, 360 pages with 139 color and 60 black-and-white illustrations, is priced at $45 paperback. The review is by Keith Miller, an editor at The Telegraph and contributor to Apollo and The Literary Review.