"Jersey Devil ... is made up of four architects ... Around this core revolves a collection of friends and acquaintances from across the country who have participated over the years in the creation of Jersey Devil projects ... this is ... a traveling band of 'architects, artists, craftsmen, and inventors ... committed to the interdependence of building and design' ... Jersey Devil is unlike most firms in that the architects physically build what they design"--Page 12.
For 25 years the architects who make up Jersey Devil have been constructing their own designs while living on site in tents or Airstream trailers, making adjustments to their structures in response to problems encountered during the building process. Jersey Devil is a name that has been attached to work by Steve Badanes, John Ringel, Jim Adamson, or any combination of the above, plus many other people who have participated in their diverse projects. This loose-knit group of designer-builders has created projects that critique conventional practice, both the process of making architecture and the accepted definitions of architecture itself. Jersey Devil's architecture shows a concern for craft and detail, an attention to the expressiveness of the construction materials, and a strong environmental consciousness. Devil's Workshop contains complete project descriptions, photographs, drawings, and plans on more than a dozen projects, including the Snail House, the Silo House, the Hoagie House, and the Seaside Pavillion. Essays analyze Jersey Devil's work, providing an insight into the design-build process and its historical context, and discussing the formal qualities inherent in these projects.
Steve Badanes, Jim Adamson, and John Ringel believe an architect's job does not stop at designing a building, but that it extends to constructing it as well. Now working into their fifth decade, Jersey Devil, the loose-knit group they founded in 1972, bands together under this design/build ethos that an architect's place is just as much on the job site as it is at the drawing board. The trio pioneered design/build practice and their influence has spawned more than one hundred design/build programs. Jersey Devil's process and expertise are unpacked in this Architecture Brief, providing students and teachers with a toolkit for design/build education. Through stories, didactic commentary, and sample exercises, the Design/Build complements nuts-and-bolts content with Jersey Devil's philosophy and perspective, allowing the book to impart practical instruction while acting as a valuable guide for navigating the elusive challenges of design/build. Themes touch on socially responsible architecture, intuition and intentionality, detailing and fostering craftsmanship, group work and collaboration, off-the-shelf components and nonstandard applications, educational reform, ethos and risk, good life and play, the politics of building, and university-community relations.
In the course of its extraordinary history, the Jersey Devil has been exorcised, shot, electrocuted, declared officially dead, and scoffed as foolishness--none of which has had any effect on it or the people who persist in seeing it!This mysterious creature is said to prowl the lonely sand trails and mist-shrouded marshes of the Pine Barrens, and emerge perioducally to rampage through the towns and cities of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, leaving many communities in near-hysteria.The authors show that while a few appearances have been out-right fraud and others have likely been the result of mass hysteria, this creature has been seen by enough sane, sober, and responsible citizens to keep the possiblity of its existence alive and tantalizing.Over 50,000 in print
The Design-Build Studio examines sixteen international community driven design-build case studies through process and product, with preceding chapters on community involvement, digital and handcraft methodologies and a graphic Time Map. Together these projects serve as a field guide to the current trends in academic design-build studios, a window into the different processes and methodologies being taught and realized today. Design-build supports the idea that building, making and designing are intrinsic to each other: knowledge of one strengthens and informs the expression of the other. Hands-on learning through the act of building what you design translates theories and ideas into real world experience. The work chronicled in this book reveals how this type of applied knowledge grounds us in the physicality of the world in which we live.
Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings in a style Mockbee describes as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture."".
A survey of community design centers highlighting ten national programs, such as the Rural Studio and Studio 804 at Kansas State. Includes recommendations for strengthening these initiatives. The work demonstrates that exemplary design is a significant component of effective community development. Since the late 1990s, the National Endowment for the Arts, under the direction of Mark Robbins, has been promoting design excellence through an ambitious series of symposia, best-case design studies, and prototype projects. The results of these programs are now documented in a new series of publications, each focusing on design in the public realm and the potential for innovative architecture, landscape architecture, and planning.
Is there an allure of spoiled places? Spoil islands are overlooked places that combine dirt with paradise, waste-land with “brave new world,” and wildness with human intervention. Although they are mundane products of dredging, these islands form an uninvestigated archipelago that demonstrates the potential value and contested re-valuation of landscapes of waste. To explore these islands, Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago navigates a course along the U.S. east coast, moving from New York City to Florida. Along the way, a general populace squats, picnics, and reflects on the islands, while other forces are also at work. New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses first deplores then adopts Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, UN Secretary General U Thant meditates on the East River’s Belmont Island, businessman John D. MacArthur rejects the purchase of Peanut Island, artist Christo surrounds Miami’s spoil islands, Key Westers debate the futures of two spoil islands that mark their sunset view, and artist Robert Smithson augments this archipelago materially and conceptually. Historical and contemporary stories highlight each island’s often contradictory ecologies that pair nature with infrastructure, public concerns with private development, rationalized urbanism with artistic impulse, and order with disorder. Spoil islands put you in places you normally wouldn’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—be. To examine these marginalized topographies is to understand emergent concerns of twenty-first-century place-making, public space, and natural and artificial infrastructure. Today, spoil islands constitute an unprecedented public commons, where human agency and nature are inextricably linked. Spoil Island will be of interest to anyone working in the areas of architecture, cultural history, cultural geography, environmental studies, or environmental philosophy. Linking the islands with their environmental aesthetics, Charlie Hailey provides a lively and critical topography of places that play a part in current events and local situations with global implications.
