Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. Subsequently Birkerts established his own practice, evolving a design process and a philosophy with its own original profile. Birkerts’ designs, from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis to the Corning Museum of Glass to the Houston Arts Museum and recently the Latvian National Library, shows him exploring with ever greater resource and inventiveness the expressive possibilities of symbol and metaphor. Form, he believes, expresses function, and does so with its own rich, meaningful vocabulary. Birkerts uses visual metaphors to link program, client, and landscape in a resonant solution. His methodology of using metaphor – meaning – as a first principle, as a generator of design concept, is unusual in the profession, but it is vitally connected to his Latvian heritage and his family background as the son of a folklorist and writer. This heritage is given a new turn here, for the biographical text of the book has been written by his son, Sven Birkerts, who is a noted literary critic and author of the influential book "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age". The book is richly illustrated and complemented by descriptive assessments of the projects by Martin Schwartz, who is an architect and writer and who teaches at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan.