All American: Innovation in American Architecture. . - US Arises - book review

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2003 by Raymund Ryan

By Brian Carter and Annette LeCuyer. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. [pounds sterling]24.95

Flanked by two pertinent, if unduly short essays entitled 'The Critical Edge' and 'Altered States', this is a compendium of independent American architecture. Such practice is neither subsumed within real estate and the corporate profession nor exposed -- yet -- to the vagaries of international design stardom. Little to see therefore of Edge City shopping malls or PoMo office buildings; little to read of the important cultural influence of, say, Meier and Eisenman or of Holl, Williams & Tsien, Morphosis and Moss. All American is an illustrated journey across the United States between the inevitable poles of Manhattan and West Los Angeles, a visit to 20 practices and 84 projects, mostly realized.

In fact this architecture -- and the authors' agenda -- is very much about realization. The chosen designers (average age 44) might be characterized as Builder Architects, many of them -- especially between the coasts -- as Framptonian Critical Regionalists. Thus we have poetic but pragmatic projects in Arizona from both Wendell Burnette and Rick Joy (The School of Bruder?); beautiful-looking houses in Minnesota and Wisconsin by Vincent James; and prismatic timber structures in Wyoming, Florida and Washington State by Boston-based Charles Rose. Even less likely firms chosen for inclusion, such as FORM and the generally ubiquitous Greg Lynn, focus on construction, albeit through the interpolation of computer technology. At whom is this book aimed? Uncaptioned photographs tend to cover three-quarters of each double-page spread, with the descriptive text, in a thin blue typeface, typically reduced to an eighth-page white square. ipso facto, plans or other drawings are relegated to the remaining one-eighth approx imate square, printed white-on-blue with so little information as to be merely iconographic. Positioning architecture in a 'conceptual territory of the real and virtual' are Liz Diller and Rick Scofidio (born 1935, and so destabilizing the group age profile). Here images of Daly Genik's factory refurbishment in Santa Monica (traffic lights, stalled cars, palm tree fragments) or Doug Garofalo's Markow Residence, Illinois (speculator suburbia visible to edge of frame) aid contextualization.

Ultimately, Carter and LeCuyer identify the term 'landscape urbanism' as a strategy to effect fabrication and the environment in America today.