Martin Fillerwas born in 1948 and received degrees in Art History from Columbia. Nearly 1,100 of his writings have been published in more than thirty-five journals, magazines, and newspapers in the US, Europe, and Japan during his five-decade career. Since 1985 his essays on modern architecture have appeared regularly inThe New York Review of Books. His first collection of those pieces,Makers of Modern Architecture(2007), was issued in Spanish asLa arquitectura moderna y sus creadores(2012), followed byMakers of Modern Architecture, Volume II(2013). Filler was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He and his wife, the architectural historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter, were guest curators of the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition ""High Styles- Twentieth Century American Design"" (1985) and wrote the documentary filmsBeyond Utopia(1983),Arata Isozaki(1985), andStirling(1987). They live in New York City and Southampton.
""Martin Filler's Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III, from Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, is as moving as the other two editions in the series: not only are his portraits individualized, but their particularities are given broad and vast depth in history….Filler has a literate writing style [that]…could be better suited for creative literature because of the vivid word picture he draws of individuals, their works, and the generalized historical fabrics in which they belong….Filler carefully weighs the religious, social, personal, aesthetic, and political strains of his subjects, so we get a crammed-full picture, a three-dimensional image."" —Suzanne Frank, The Architects Newspaper ""Filler’s…concern is to show why these subjects remain of perennial interest to us—or, in some cases, do not. There is a great deal of pleasantly opinionated revisionism…Those who are interested in the way that architecture reveals the vagaries of the human heart will not be disappointed by this acerbic, occasionally poignant collection."" —Michael J. Lewis, Architectural Record