Here are speeches, essays, and articles, collected from over forty years of vigorous engagement. John Silber speaks as a philosopher, educator, parent, and political observer and participant (ahead in the polls, he would have been elected Governor of Massachusetts had he not run afoul of Channel Five’s beloved Natalie Jacobsen. The famous incident is recounted in high style in Tom Wolfe’s foreword). Silber tackles issues including education at all levels, culture and the media, democracy and international affairs. Delivered from 1971 to 2012, the speeches offer his incisive reflections on the Vietnam War, Watergate, student activism of the seventies, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, developments in science and technology, the increasing power of the media, global corporations, and many other issues. His style is lively, crisp, and pointed, spiked with his acerbic wit and guided by an ongoing search for wisdom. Mr. Silber was a model of probity and integrity in both his private and his public life, an intellectual pessimist and a congenital optimist. Even as he brought Boston University from a sleepy and fast-declining “streetcar college” to a major educational institution, he spoke out on topical issues and principles on which our human fulfillment and national identity depended. Inspiring many and infuriating some, his was a life that mattered and his voice was one worth listening to.

Seeking the North Star: Selected Speeches

Biographies & Memoirs

Silber, John

Professionals & Academics

David R. Godine, Publisher

Have you ever wondered why the Guggenheim is always covered in scaffolding? Why the slashes on the exterior of Libeskind's Jewish Museum, supposed to represent Jewish life in prewar Berlin, reappear, for no reason, on his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto? Or why Gehry's design for an MIT lab for sensitive research has glass walls? Not to mention why, for $44.2 per square foot, it doesn't keep out the rain? You're not alone. In Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber dares to peek behind the curtain of "genius" architects and expose their willful disdain for their clients, their budgets, and the people who live or work inside their creations. In his twenty-five years as President of Boston University, Dr. Silber oversaw a building program totaling more than 13 million square feet. Here he constructs an unflinching case, beautifully illustrated, against the worst trends in contemporary architecture. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting the practical needs of clients and the public. He urges the directors of our universities, symphony orchestras, museums, and corporations to stop financing inefficient, overpriced architecture, and calls on clients and the public to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs.

Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Quantuck Lane Press

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