Search results for ""Author William S. Saunders""

When it comes to determining the relative quality of architecture, who is best equipped to make the distinctions? Is it the public who lives in and among the buildings? The people who commission and pay for the buildings? Art historians? Or architects themselves? These provocative essays take up the questions of what people value in architecture and how changing values influence opinions about it. In the intriguing opening essay, Michael Benedikt makes an argument for the role of architects in the delineation of value in architecture. He discusses the differences between icon and canon, a theme threaded through many of the essays. In addition to unexpected analyses of buildings such as Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, and the work of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Gehry, the collection includes a clear-eyed look at the role of architecture in addressing social problems. Ultimately, these essays assert that judging architecture requires more than a refined sensibility. Buildings also need to be evaluated by their impact on the people living within and around them. Contributors: John Beardsley, Harvard Design School; Michael Benedikt, U of Texas, Austin; Tim Culvahouse, California College of the Arts; Lisa Finley, California College of the Arts; Kurt W. Forster, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Germany; Kenneth Frampton, Columbia U; Diane Ghirardo, U of Southern California; Charles Jencks; David Leatherbarrow, U of Pennsylvania; Nancy Levinson; Hélène Lipstadt; Juhani Pallasmaa, Helsinki U of Technology; Timothy M. Rohan, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Roger Scruton; Daniel Willis, Pennsylvania State U. William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is the author of Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller and editor of three other Harvard Design Magazine Readers. Michael Benedikt is Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and director of the Center for American Architecture and Design at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Read more less

As rigorous as it is sumptuous, the work of Roger Ferris + Partners blends high style and modernist principles. This is the firm's first monograph. From family houses to historic restorations, hotels, and high-tech office spaces - the architectural firm of Roger Ferris + Partners has pursued uncommonly diverse projects at vastly different scales, all with an approach to design that synthesizes imagination and logic. Whether a 1,500-square-foot house on a narrow lot overlooking Long Island Sound, or the Royal Bank of Scotland’s US headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut - with a six-story glazed atrium and a “courtyard in the sky” on the roof of its two-story trading floor - a building that is “well conceived and artfully executed, cannot help but be beautiful.” Among Ferris’ major projects are a golf clubhouse that has turned a conservative typology on its ear with bladelike forms inspired by a racing engine turbine, and a partially sunken service entrance in which impresario Robert Wilson has staged theatrical productions. A design for a restaurant includes not only a central, glass-enclosed kitchen elevated 18 inches above the floor, but an art installation that periodically projects scrolling text on the dining room wall. In every project, the fulfillment of the client’s functional needs is rendered in the most elemental and legible way, resulting in both formal elegance and dramatic power.

Read more less