Book Description
Architect Stanley Saitowitz has designed a great number of projects that share the qualities of early modern architecture: they are unassuming, simple, honest, anti-classical, anti-elite. Inspired by the seminal works of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Giuseppe Terragni, Saitowitz has developed an approach he calls "human geography," an attitude that is carefully cognizant of the relationship between architecture and setting. This monograph, the first on Stanley Saitowitz Office, presents fifty projects from more than thirty years of practice.

The work is divided by building type. The bar houses are Saitowitz's reconsideration of a modern prototype: bars of space, which the architect calls "houses of constructed emptiness," that measure but do not interrupt the terrain. Urban houses—both affordable, multifamily housing and single-family lofts—are indeterminate in relation to plan, free in regard to program, and express a volumetric quality within their dense city settings. Also featured in the monograph are schools and a series of designs that explore the formation of Jewish architecture: the Holocaust Memorial in Boston, a menorah for the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and synagogues in La Jolla and San Francisco. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Whether it's a house in the Hamptons, an addition to a famous museum, or anew building for an Ivy League campus, contemporary architecture doesn't getany more coolly, cleanly serviceable than Gwathmey Siegel, the large firmthat since 1965 has executed some of the most high-profile private andinstitutional commissions in the United States (with a few abroad).GwathmeySiegel's history of concise, user-friendly innovation is well reflected here,in this comely monograph of 26 residential, corporate, academic andmuseum/arts-related projects spanning 35 years; per custom, it should be ahernia-inducing 10-pound hardcover, but instead is a near-palmsizedpaperback that still manages to convey the sweep and scale of GS's work in itsexcellent full-color photography with succinct annotations byfirm founder Charles Gwathmey. Appropriately, the fun kicks off withthe now-famous house and nearby studio Gwathmey designed for his parents in the Hamptons' Amagansett in 1965. Its basic principles of several levels,volumes, and niches intricately carved into a basic cube would play out againand again in the firm's work, which always manages to cunningly incorporate all sorts of technical solutions and aesthetic charms into volumes whoseouter limits possess the simple, geometric logic of buildings that children have long fashioned from a few wooden squares, rectangles, and cylinders.TheGwathmey Residence and the other Hamptons residences featured here (like the1972 Cogan and the 1983 de Menil), as well as houses in southern California,Vermont, and Switzerland, collectively illustrate 35 years of palatialpostmodern minimalism, a stripped-down, late 20th-century bookend to therococo wedding cakes commissioned by the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and otherassorted robber barons of the century just preceding.

But because GS's residential projects, as diversely striking as they are,continuously manage to look (especially from the outside) like anything butplaces where people actually live, the book's subsequent sections offeralmost a sense of relief--these are the kinds of projects at which the firm excels, and those upon which it has built its considerable reputation: thegleaming, Meier-esque white tiles and columns of its 1987 office building for IBM in Greensboro, North Carolina; an ingenious new set of unapologetically modern innards (1973) jutting out of the august, old stone exterior ofPrinceton University's Whig Hall, whose original wood interior was destroyedin a fire; an elegantly high-tech Science, Industry and Business Library forNew York City (1996); blond wood, luminous marble, and stainless steelfitted inside the 1911 Beaux Arts envelope of the former B. Altman department store; and--perhaps the firm's most high-profile (and controversial)commission to date--the 1992 renovation and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Guggenheim Museum, also in New York City--an undertaking thatmanaged to vastly increase the museum's gallery and administrativespace and address omissions or weaknesses in the original structure, all whilelinking it to a discreetly handsome limestone rectilinear addition thatdeferred not to a gamut of political interests but to Wright's original plansfor a proposed annex.

Many other notable projects are included in the book as well, including anarray of new buildings for Cornell University and an addition to Harvard'svenerable Fogg Museum, not to mention the warm-toned Museum of Contemporary Art (1996) that has redefined downtown Miami, and a renovation/addition for the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (1997). Acomplex multivolume, multilevel, multiline configuration that somehowmanages remarkably to leave the gallery's charming, original red-brickstructure from 1927 as its centerpiece, it is this last entry which serves as a fitting final reminder that no one takes simple shapes and fashionsthem into something chic, clean, and clever quite as deftly or respectfully as Gwathmey Siegel. --Timothy MurphyBook Description

Product Description
This is a reprint of Kathryn Smith's ground-breaking study of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most important and complex commissions. Wright worked on the arts complex and residence for over a decade, and the house he designed for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, Hollyhock, is one of the treasures of Los Angeles. This book was the first to use the extensive Wright files and is illustrated with many rare drawings and period photographs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Some surprises await the reader
This book is an interesting juxtaposition of two things--Frank Lloyd Wright's complex dealings with a maverick, and some very rare, beautiful photos.

The first part of this is probably of interest to only Frank Lloyd Wright's fans. But those photographs are something else.

Most people know only the exterior of Hollyhock House--cold, forbidding, monolithic; but are unfamiliar with its breathtakingly beautiful interior--in this book, displayed with some photos in vivid color. In my opinion, the interior of this building is the most beautiful of all Frank Lloyd Wright houses; a masterpiece of interior design in the Prairie Style. As an added bonus, there are some extremely rare photos of Residence B--long-demolished, it was a Frank Lloyd Wrightmasterpiece, probablyunique in its use of mitred wood and corbeled posts. (I've never seen a house like it in my entire life).

The photos make this book a must-read, must-have part of your collection, suitable for display on a coffee table.

The best book on Hollyhock House
As the author of this book, I know that I have brought together a collection of drawings, archival photos, plans and drawings made especially for this publication that document and analyze one of Wright's largest and most famous commissions during the period of the 1920s.His work with Aline Barnsdall was extrememly complicated and covered over a decade in his career.My book puts the Hollyhock House in context of the larger commission for Olive Hill.Drawings are reproduced from several sources, mainly the Wright Archives.Hundreds of letters and documents were consulted.A section of color photographs shows the house in detail with fully furnished interior views.This book is a must for the library of every reader interested in Wright.I hope you enjoy it and value it too. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Cleaner Production, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Education is the foundation for achieving sustainable development. With the purpose of facing sustainable challenges in terms of climate change, water and energy consumption, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) has promoted the culture of energy efficiency in new generations of professionals that will work in the field of building construction. A group of 21 students taking the final official Diploma in Architecture were involved in a project of analysis of energy performance of UPC buildings in order to identify and implement cost-effective ways of promoting a greater environmental responsibility. The development of works focused the attention on introducing energy audits in existing university buildings, analysing the following aspects: surveying construction drawings, building characteristics, energy consumption, use of natural lighting, energy-saving lighting controls, water consumption, and high-efficiency HVAC systems. The ultimate goal was to draft a proposal for greater respect for the environment, and for corrective measures aimed at reducing the environmental impacts. ... Read more