Reviews | Books Architecture From the Outside In Robert Gutman DANA CUFF AND JOHN WRIEDT, editors Princeton Architectural Press, 2010 344 pages $40.00 (paper) In her introduction to this new collection of Robert Gutman’s essays, Dana Cuff suggests that the noted sociologist of architecture ‘‘maintained a productive outsider status.’’ Yet his office was deep in the bowels of Princeton’s Architecture building, and his essays demonstrate that his relationship to his research subject was far from objective. Gutman did not teach sociology for architects or provide ‘‘social input’’ to the work of the school’s design studios (unless independently engaged by students). Nor, like his peer Herbert Gans in his study of Levittown Pennsylvania, did he move in, collect data, and move out. Gutman—who retained his tenure at Rutgers throughout the years he taught as a lecturer at Princeton—moved in with his research subjects and never left. Along the way, he was not just studying them, but also shaping their futures as students, educators, and practitioners. Guttman’s research and, ultimately, his influence is fully evident in the essays collected in Architecture from the Outside In, which Gutman himself compiled prior to his death in 2007. Grouped around five themes—Practices, Buildings and Projects, Sociology and Architecture, Housing, and Architecture and Education—the essays illustrate forty years of a changing dynamic between sociology and architecture, yet they also demonstrate a consistent thread in the concerns of Gutman himself. He is best understood in the context of the sociology of knowledge. 1 For Gutman ‘‘the architect is a social actor’’ among other actors who are ‘‘engaged in a struggle with other interest groups to define a certain aspect, or aspects, of buildings.’’ 2 Dana Cuff’s introduction to the anthology, along with some of the dialogues scattered throughout the book, helps to situate the subject- focused organization within a larger chronology of both Gutman’s work and larger trends in architectural practice that began during the short- lived, early post-modern moment of interaction between the design disciplines and the social sciences. In the essays ‘‘The Questions Architects Ask’’ and ‘‘Site Planning and Social Behavior’’ Gutman presents himself as a skeptic of architecture’s utopian and reformist desires while cautioning against a deterministic relationship between form and social impact. At the same time, in later essays, most notably those directed at Peter Eisenman’s House VI and Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Building, he questions the disjunction between the architect’s ‘‘design intentions’’ and a client’s needs, produced in part by the dynamic between ‘‘the ‘construction’ of social reality within the architectural tradition and, in turn, the construction of architecture in contemporary American culture.’’ 3 The project that emerged from this questioning was an ongoing critique of architectural practice. This is the work for which Gutman is best known in the architectural community through his book Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Acting as both researcher and consultant, Gutman explored the sociology of architecture itself, mining ‘‘the gap between the premises and expectations of the world that architects experience subjectively, and the ideas architects carry around in their minds and espouse out of habit.’’ 4 This territory is further explored in later essays on the psychodynamics of practice, which are presented in the opening section of the anthology and serve as a bracket for the discussions of the socialization of architects in the essays on pedagogy that form the final section of the book. Back at Princeton in the mid-1980s there was a room across from Gutman’s office in the basement: the computer room, where scary machines running AutoCAD 2.0 were hidden away lest they infect the activities going on in the studios upstairs. In the brief (and too modest) introductions to each section, Gutman begins to insinuate the ways in which technologies might serve to fill the gap between architect’s increasingly complex form-making and the production of complex buildings. Recognizing that architecture ‘‘represents the only situation where an artistic activity is actually licensed as a profession’’ (p. 74), for Gutman ‘‘design’’ meant the design of forms. The dialogues by Peggy Deamer and Keller Easterling that are included in the present volume are better at articulating how what Gutman suggested may be changing as technology and entrepreneurship are redefining the concept of design. Hence, the choice of the first essay in the book, ‘‘Architecture: The Entrepreneurial Profession,’’ cannot be taken lightly. Although written in 1977, it is the most prescient for 157 REVIEWS | BOOKS Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 157–163 ª 2010 ACSA