"Miller/Hull's award-winning, energy-conscious designs combine with a love of local materials and structural expressiveness to define the essence of the Pacific Northwest style. Here, climate change plays a critical role and each Miller/Hull building responds with simple yet inventive forms, straightforward plans, sensible siting, and careful detailing.".
Every great architect offers an original vision, one that synthesizes and then transcends all that he or she has learned. Roland Terry's career follows that archetypal mode, yet Terry occupies a unique place in the Northwest architectural tradition. The elements that define his originality are subtle, a fusion of classic Northwest Modernist traditions leavened with a warm yet cosmopolitan sophistication, one that grew organically out of his education, his background in the thriving Seattle art and architecture communities of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and his experiences while traveling and living abroad. Poised between modern functionalism and rich traditionalism, Roland Terry's work embraces the best of old and new. His body of residential work in Seattle and elsewhere illuminates the subtle depth, power, and completeness of his design talents. He had a matchless skill at integrating his ideas with the needs of his clients, particularly with regard to interior design. As is evident in the book, these are houses made for the ages. Renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly wrote of Terry's work, "whenever I've visited a Roland Terry house it's been like visiting Matisse's chapel or Renoir's studio--one of those special days that you remember forever." This is not to suggest that Terry's commercial work pales in comparison. On the contrary: from the earliest incarnations of Seattle's Canlis Restaurant in the late 1940s through the myriad restaurants, shops, hotels, and offices designed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Terry created a striking and original body of institutional buildings and interiors, including the original Nordstrom flagship store in downtown Seattle, the Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the Kahala Hilton (now Mandarin Oriental) Hotel in Honolulu. A number of these groundbreaking commercial projects are included here to illustrate the remarkable diversity of architectural and decorative approaches that Terry and his partners and associates employed in creating comfortable, user-friendly public buildings. As is true with his residences, Terry never chased fads or trends in his commercial designs. Instead, he sought the timeless, essential, and complete response to the given design problem--and he did so with subtlety and style. During Roland Terry's long and eventful career, spanning more than half a century, it was his ability to see the whole picture, to envision a complete design embracing site, building, and interiors that remains unique to this day in the Northwest. Couple that singular talent with a rigorous attention to detail and a remarkable ability to integrate art into architecture--and you have an American original of the Northwest genre.
Light may be both particles and waves, but rarely is it considered a material for building - it is the essence of insubstantiality, too inconstant to be relied upon, a desirable after-thought in much 20th and 21st century architecture. For architect Thomas L. Bosworth, however, it is the primum mobile, and his extraordinary, almost praeternatural understanding of light as a living thing informs his sight, his vision, and his work. In a career that began in 1960 in the office of Eero Saarinen and continues with new projects on the boards today, he has consistently used natural light to inform his architecture, to give it both shape and meaning. Building With Light in the Pacific Northwest: The Houses of Thomas Bosworth, Architect is a review of some of Bosworth's most exceptional houses. Organized by plan type, they reveal, on the one hand, the consistency of his principles - landscape, natural light, handcraft, symmetry, axiality, and memory - and, on the other, his near-infinite capacity to conceive something entirely new and fresh with each house. A teacher and scholar, as well as practicing architect, Bosworth is a classicist, strongly influenced by Greek and Roman architecture and especially powerfully by the work and writings of Palladio. His work is equally motivated by land and landscape: architecture follows site, literally and aesthetically, and every house sits on and in its particular location with a perfect sense of rightness and inevitability. ILLUSTRATIONS: 243 colour & 17 b/w photographs & 130 illustrations
In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Paul Hayden Kirk and the group of architects whose work he inspired--all graduates of the University of Washington--created an architectural style of a quality unsurpassed by any other in the nation in its time. Their unique achievement lies in the design of small buildings--houses, medical clinics, churches, libraries. At the time most American buildings of that scale were built of wood, but for Kirk and his colleagues wood was elevated to be the defining feature and material of choice for interior and exterior surfaces and their always-exposed structures. They detailed the wood to express its own nature, either leaving it in its natural state or with a slight protective stain. Paul Hayden Kirk and the Puget Sound School is the first book to explore their work. It discusses forty key buildings in detail, describing and diagramming the features that unite and distinguish them, and illustrating them in more than one hundred color photographs, most created specifically for this book. It places the architecture of Kirk and his colleagues within the history of great American architecture.
The Pacific Northwest was far from the centers of modern architecture, but in the middle of the last century a group of architects designed for the region's land, climate, and abundance of wood. Paul Hayden Kirk was an unlikely leader of this movement, yet his work has inspired generations of architects. Illustrated with hundreds of photos and drawings, "Paul Hayden Kirk and the Rise of Northwest Modern" tells the story of modern design in a rugged landscape.
Meredith Clausen reveals the enormous power that Belluschi wielded as an arbiter of taste and decision-maker in the 1950s and 1960s; his role in shaping the policy of the State Department in its overseas building program; and his role in securing major commissions for favored architects such as I.M. Pei. Equally important is Clausen's discussion of Belluschi's role in the development of regionalism in the Pacific Northwest and its impact on the definition of modernism as it was emerging in the United States.
Few figures in the American arts have stories richer in irony than does architect Minoru Yamasaki. While his twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center are internationally iconic, few who know the icon recognize its architect’s name or know much about his portfolio of more than 200 buildings. One is tempted to call him America’s most famous forgotten architect. He was classed in the top tier of his profession in the 1950s and ’60s, as he carried modernism in novel directions, yet today he is best known not for buildings that stand but for two projects that were destroyed under tragic circumstances: the twin towers and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. This book undertakes a reinterpretation of Yamasaki’s significance that combines architectural history with the study of his intersection with defining moments of American history and culture. The story of the loss and vulnerability of Yamasaki’s legacy illustrates the fragility of all architecture in the face of natural and historical forces, yet in Yamasaki’s view, fragility is also a positive quality in architecture: the source of its refinement, beauty, and humanity. We learn something essential about architecture when we explore this tension of strength and fragility. In the course of interpreting Yamasaki’s architecture through the wide lens of the book we see the mid-century role of Detroit as an industrial power and architectural mecca; we follow a debate over public housing that entailed the creation and eventual destruction of many thousands of units; we examine competing attempts to embody democratic ideals in architecture and to represent those ideals in foreign lands; we ponder the consequences of anti-Japanese prejudice and the masculism of the architectural profession; we see Yamasaki’s style criticized for its arid minimalism yet equally for its delicacy and charm; we observe Yamasaki making a great name for himself in the Arab world but his twin towers ultimately destroyed by Islamic militants. As this curious tale of ironies unfolds, it invites reflection on the core of modern architecture’s search for meaning and on the creative possibilities its legacy continues to offer. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color illustrations of Yamasaki’s buildings, this book will be of interest to students, academics and professionals in a range of disciplines, including architectural history, architectural theory, architectural preservation, and urban design and planning.
