by Patrick Snadon, Emeritus
School of Architecture and Interior Design
University of Cincinnati

While the history of Modernism in the United States is currently being written by art and architectural scholars, Elizabeth Garber’s book, IMPLOSION, gives us an alternative view.  Her father, “Woodie” Garber, has received little scholarly attention to date, but was Cincinnati’s most extreme, experimental, and creative Modernist architect.  Modernism in all the arts has long had the aura of an heroic, male endeavor—particularly in architecture, where women were largely excluded.  Elizabeth Garber writes afresh about Modernism from a woman’s point of view and takes us behind the scenes to show what sacrifices were made by women and families in the creation of Modernist buildings.  As the history of Modernism in America is slowly assembled, the struggles, contentiousness, and anger, as well as the creativity, of an architect-father like Woodie Garber may begin to seem less unusual than we might think on a perusal of this amazing memoir.  Like her father, Elizabeth Garber has produced a highly creative piece of art that shows readers what the stresses of major building commissions and of Modernism itself looked like at home, away from the all-male camaraderie and competition of the office.

In the process of analyzing her and her family’s life, Elizabeth Garber has written an important book on Modernist architecture.  Her father resembles Frank Lloyd Wright in his unswerving devotion to Modernist ideals —though his loyalties to the abstractions and technologies of International Style Modernism differ greatly from Wright’s Organic Modernism.  But Garber’s chaotic, self-centered, and rather mad personal life resembled that of Wright.  Unlike the heavy, stone walls of Taliesin, however, which at least partly concealed Wright’s family difficulties and scandals, Garber chose to live his life—along with his captive family—in an open, glass, fishbowl of a house in Glendale, a socially stuffy suburb of conservative Cincinnati.  Elizabeth Garber’s elegant and limpid prose resembles the transparency of this stunningly beautiful house, where moments of tyranny and abuse creep upon us with a shock.  In fact, the celebrated “democracy” of glass walls and open planning can instantly become a patriarchal prison where no space is private and everyone is subject to the master’s visual, acoustical, and psychological control.  Far from a sensational account, however, Elizabeth Garber’s memoir is told with an art and restraint that makes it both appealing and convincing.  What she “builds” is the picture of an unstable but seductive Modernist utopia that takes its toll on all within its bounds.

The “Implosion” of the title refers to another domestic environment:  that of a giant, glass and steel dormitory tower that Woodie Garber designed for University of Cincinnati, against which its student residents revolted violently–as in other 1960-70s rebellions.  Finished in 1971 at great personal expense to the architect and his family, it was conceptually brilliant but a colossal social failure and was dynamited in 1991, delivering the coup-de-grace to Garber’s career.  But between glass house and glass tower, many stunning Modernist buildings came from Garber’s hand.  Although Cincinnati has been unkind to his work, what remains of it greatly enriches the city and deserves sympathetic treatment in both scholarly and preservation terms.  One hopes that eventually an architectural monograph on Garber might accompany his daughter’s extraordinary tribute to him.