Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Architecture to Landscape The monograph is the workhorse of architectural publishing. It's at once the easiest genre to do (pick the projects, collect the images, convince a famous colleague to contribute a foreword, get a graphic designer to give it some glamor, and then you're practically ready for the book party) and to disdain ("effectively, a great big practice brochure," as Kester Rattenbury noted in an Icon overview of architectural publishing). But lately I've been thinking that the monograph is ripe for rehabilitation—that the problem isn't that these big fat picture books are self-promotional but that they're formulaic. S, M, L, XL, after all, managed to be a six-pound advertisement for the career—the mystique—of Rem Koolhaas and an inventive exploration of the genre. With its unexpectedly compact trim size and unabashedly bloated page count, it upended the coffee-table conventions of the category and inspired more than a few extra-thick imitators. (Whether this particular development has been salubrious is still open to debate. In his very smart review of the publication, Martin Filler described S, M, L, XL as "user-hostile," and personally I suspect the unwieldy volume is more grazed than read . . . which may of course have been exactly the point.) What makes the monograph especially ready for more such reconceptualizations is the Internet. The rise of digital communications and, more specifically, the proliferation of professional web sites are freeing the monograph from its traditional role. Now that the chronological and/or typological record of projects can be web-based, the monograph no longer need function as a large-format, perfect-bound curriculum vitae. Now the monograph can be—well, whatever its author-designers want it to be. Ideally this sort of freedom will challenge practitioners to make books that are both conceptually rigorous and beautifully wrought—to toss the template and see the making of a book as an invigorating creative journey. An elegant case in point is Architecture To Landscape, a monograph on two houses by architects Salvatore LaRosa and Ronald Bentley, both of whom are partners in the New York firm B Five Studio. Edited by James Russell (whose authorial credits include the AJ blog "Sticks and Stones," and who is—necessary disclosure—a friend) and designed by Lawrence Wolfson, the book is an elegant and thoughtful study of two private houses, and of how they were shaped to relate to the particularities of their landscapes. One house is deep in the woods of Bucks County, Pennsylvania; it happens to be the architects' own weekend place, a comparatively modest structure created over many years, in a process that began with the LaRosa and Bentley camping on the property in order, as Russell writes, "to come to intimate terms with the site." The other house is an estate in Easthampton, New York, and it isn't modest at all; but you might say it wears its wealth with pleasing reticence. The residences are lovely, and so is the design of the Easthampton landscape, by Douglas Reed of Reed/Hilderbrand. But what really interests me here is how richly the book presents the projects. The key decision, I think, was to devote the entire volume to just two buildings. Architecture to Landscape features dozens of photographs (by no fewer than seven photographers), and not just the beauty shots that you might have already seen (both houses have been published previously, in professional magazines and also in the New York Times Magazine). We see the Bucks County house evolve over more than a decade, and we see it also in different seasons, in both color and black-and-white images. Architecture to Landscape also includes plans and elevations and—a lovely touch—a scattering of tiny images of design influences, which range from Asplund's Woodland Chapel to Mies's Jackson Hole Resort House to Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown's Brant House. This sort of illustrative depth is extremely rare in architectural publishing (even in El Croquis), and it draws you in, as do the thoughtful essays (by Russell, Gary Hilderbrand, and Peter Rowe). Architecture to Landscape does not push the boundaries of the genre, as did Koolhaas and his co-author Bruce Mau. But it does—with its clarity of conception and intensity of focus—exemplify a very satisfying approach to revitalizing the print monograph in our age of endlessly accessible electronic imagery. posted by nancylevinson @ 8:24 pm | Permanent link