I’ve just finished reading Roxanne Williamson’s American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame (1991). Despite some interesting historical research into the professional connections between architects and their mentors/employers, it is not a very satisfying book. The first question to ask about fame is “Who is judging?” The public, the architectural profession, the critics, architectural historians? Williamson considered only the last group. She compiled an “Index of Fame” by consulting twenty histories of architecture and four encyclopedias, and counting the number of times individual architects were listed. Since most recent historians (Giedion, Hitchcock, Banham, Pevsner, Fitch, and Scully) were interested in the history of modernism, this naturally skewed the results. An architect such as Rudolph Schindler, who designed a handful of interesting private houses was more “famous” than Paul Philippe Cret, who built major civic buildings such as the Federal Reserve, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walter Reed Hospital, and much of the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. The second problem is that she treats fame as an absolute quality. But, as the old saying goes, “All glory is fleeting.” Sixty years ago, when I was a student, the architects we admired were Aldo Van Eyck, Peter and Allison Smithson, and Shadrach Woods, long since forgotten (none appear in Williamson’s book). But neither does the “Index of Fame” include Norman Foster, who, in the years since the research for this book was conducted (the late 1970s) has become the world’s most recognized architect (and the richest). If you are going to study fame—a dubious undertaking, in any case—you must incorporate a sliding time scale: famous today, not so famous tomorrow, and vice versa.