Robert McCarter - Böcker

A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential architectsAldo van Eyck (1918–1999) was a Dutch architect, writer, and teacher who helped redefine Modern architecture in the second half of the 20th century. As an advocate for architecture’s engagement with history, culture, climate, and the lived human experience of buildings and urban spaces, he created designs that privileged place and the daily rituals in the lives of its inhabitants over universal ideals. In this volume, enlivened by 300 illustrations from the Aldo van Eyck archive, Robert McCarter provides the first comprehensive study of van Eyck’s 50-year career since his death, guiding readers through the architect’s buildings and unrealized projects, with a focus on the interior spatial experience and on the design and construction processes. Highlighted projects include the Amsterdam Orphanage, the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague, and some of the hundreds of playgrounds he famously designed over the course of his career. McCarter also investigates how van Eyck’s writings and lectures convey the importance of architecture in the everyday lives of people around the world and throughout history. By presenting his design work together with the principles on which it was founded, McCarter illuminates van Eyck’s ethical interpretation of architecture’s place in the world.

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the influential and award-winning firm based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have an international reputation. Producing a wide range of projects both in Canada and further afield, they work in a sophisticated modern vernacular idiom, drawing inspiration from a rich local heritage of building types and reinterpreting them according to the best practices of 21st-century architecture. It is above all for their dignified and beautiful houses perched on the wild, rocky coasts of Nova Scotia that the firm is recognized. Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, this remarkable body of work is based around a number of plan types that answer to the particular local climate: open to the sun but sheltered from the winds, and built using traditional materials that are allowed to weather, these dwellings embody the architects’ engagement with their unique surroundings and material culture. This new monograph covers MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects’ complete work. Introductions by renowned architectural writers set the scene, while individual projects are illustrated through evocative photographs and detailed plans and drawings. What emerges is a celebration of an architecture that is both practical and deeply poetic.

The evolution of modern architecture has been inextricably entangled in issues of politics, nationalism, and the environment, creating a tension between local context and global development that is unresolved to this day. In this context, few writers have exerted as much influence on architectural theory and practice as Kenneth Frampton. In this illustrated volume, twenty-nine contributors from around the world amplify and pay tribute to his writing and thought. Intended for all those concerned with the built environment, this book offers further evidence of how this scholar, humanist, and teacher has shaped our understanding of the working reality of the architect. The premise of Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld is rooted in Frampton’s understanding of how architecture must engage with both cultural and constructional imperatives; and it addresses strategies for grappling with contemporary concerns such as regional identity amidst urban globalization, and tectonic culture and landform in the construction of place.Supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The architect Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture was not what a building ‘looks like’ on the day it opens, but what it ‘is like’ to live in thirty years later. In this book Robert McCarter presents a persuasive defence of why and how interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and why the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work of architecture after it is built.We live in an age dominated by images. We often feel we ‘know’ architecture and the places it makes, both old and new, through the photos of buildings we see in print and online, without ever inhabiting their spaces. McCarter argues that we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms, and makes a powerful case for the primacy of the interior experience in architecture.The Space Within explores how interior space has been integral to the development of Modern architecture from the late 1800s to today, and how generations of architects have engaged with interior space and its experience in their design processes. In doing so, they fundamentally transformed the traditional methods and goals of architectural composition. As McCarter argues, for many of the most recognized and respected architects practising today, the conception of the interior spatial experience continues to be the starting point for design. Through historical and current examples of architectural works he takes us through how this is done, and eloquently places us within the spaces.

The acclaimed survey of the life and works of the celebrated Italian modernist master, Carlo Scarpa, from the highly regarded architectural author, Robert McCarter The work of Carlo Scarpa challenged, and continues to challenge, accepted notions of modern architecture. While several books have been published on his work, none has approached the breadth and depth of this classic monograph by Robert McCarter, who is celebrated for his meticulously researched, experientially based, and jargon-free accounts of key figures in modern architecture. This book is the definitive study of Scarpa’s many accomplishments, including such works at the Canova Museum, the Castelvecchio Museum, and the Brion Cemetery, among others. It features in-depth ‘walk-throughs’ of a selection of Scarpa’s key projects, embracing Scarpa’s approach to experientially based design and presents sketches and architectural plans, together with a complete list of works, realized and unrealized, including his much-loved interiors and glassware, as well as the buildings themselves.

The esteemed monograph on the globally-revered modern master – includes Roosevelt Island, Four Freedoms Park, which was completed after Kahn’s death The significance of the work of Louis I Kahn, one of the greatest influences on post-WWII world architecture, has skyrocketed in the twenty-first century. Robert McCarter’s bestselling and critically acclaimed monograph explains how Kahn redefined Modern architecture and why his work remains a fundamental source for architects and designers today. Now thoughtfully updated, this comprehensive and extensively illustrated overview features both built and unbuilt projects, including Yale University Art Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum, and the Salk Institute, along with his work in India and Bangladesh, as well as a project realized forty years after Kahn’s death – New York City’s Four Freedoms Park. An indispensable reference work on one of the most important figures in 20th-century architecture. McCarter analyzes each of Kahn’s major buildings from the design process, methods and materials of construction to ‘walk-throughs’ of the spaces themselves and the book includes selected writings by Kahn as well as the complete chronology of Kahn’s projects, compiled by William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager of the Louis I Kahn Archives. Each project is illustrated with photographs and drawings that convey the spirit of Kahn’s work, as well as the inspirations that led to the design and buildings featured include such architectural icons as Yale Art Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum, and the Salk Institute, along with Kahn’s work in India and Bangladesh. This is an indispensable reference work on one of the most important figures in 20th-century architecture.

‘The most complete monograph on the pioneering modernist.' – Fast Company       This acclaimed book is the most comprehensive published on architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), looking in detail at all the houses, furniture, and public buildings he designed in Europe and the United States – from his beginning at the Bauhaus through his collaboration with Walter Gropius, and the establishment of his own practice in the USA. Written by acclaimed architect and writer Robert McCarter, the first edition of this book was described as a ‘serious study’ (Financial Times) that would help in ‘realigning Breuer’s position in the canon of modern masters’ (TLS). The complete monograph on the last of the first generation of Modernist architects, Breuer is the only book that examines both his design as well as his architecture, with detailed descriptions of his work – including commercial, residential, furniture, and unrealized projects, including all of his iconic furniture (such as the Wassily and Cesca chairs) and buildings (including the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York). Back in print due to popular demand, this new edition has a beautiful new cover featuring the global headquarters of Sotheby’s in New York.

A comprehensive monograph on Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great masters of modern architectureThis comprehensive monograph on the renowned twentieth-century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, explores both his major architectural designs and many of his minor projects in detail. Robert McCarter analyses Wright’s work chronologically, exploring each building’s spatial experience, material and tectonic character, and relationship to the landscape. Now in a fully revised and updated new edition, this definitive account of the life and work of the modern master features an extensive selection of archival drawings, specially commissioned photographs, redrawn plans, and detailed drawings, as well as a complete list of Wright’s buildings and projects compiled by the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

The life and architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) have been much-studied, yet there is a consistent division between analyses of his architecture, which exclude any discussion of his daily life, and books that tell the often sensational tale of his life, with barely a passing reference to the buildings themselves. The result is that, despite the large number of volumes on Wright, the most essential part of his life – his life as an architect, working, as he said, ‘in the cause of architecture’ – remains virtually unexplored.Frank Lloyd Wright offers an account of Wright’s life as an architect, the ideas, beliefs and relationships that shaped his life and work, and the manner in which these affected, and are reflected in, his architecture. During a tumultuous life and extensive career which includes such hugely defining buildings as the Guggenheim Museum, Fallingwater, Taliesin, Unity Temple, and the prolific Prairie Houses, Wright endeavoured to shape the emerging and evolving American democracy, its mode of dwelling, and its relation to the traditional conception of the city. Fusing ancient construction geometries with contemporary ideals of Transcendental philosophy, Wright sought to develop an appropriate architecture for the new world of the twentieth century. In doing so, he served as the primary inspiration for the emergence of Modern architecture around the world.Robert McCarter examines how Wright's architecture crystallized key conceptions of both private dwelling and public citizenship for American society, and relates how, through his work and writings, Wright developed relationships with key leaders of the arts, industry and society. He analyses how and why Wright maintained that architecture was the ‘background or framework’ for daily life, never the literal ‘object’ of our attention, as well as Wright's belief that architects have the most significant ethical responsibilities to improve the larger society and culture to which they belong. In exploring Wright's life, times and culture, Robert McCarter shows how Wright was an architect of astonishing ability, whose works continue to shape the world around us, fifty years after his death.

These seventy-five works are the harvest of seventeen years of exploration from our office in San Francisco. With this admired city as backdrop, we search for ways to produce fitting contemporary architecture in its highly conservative terrain. These local efforts have provided opportunities to also work nationally. The projects describe allied explorations of Outsides and Insides, Places and Programs, Contexts and Contents. Outsides are about building the evolving city with continuity. More than 80% of the fabric of cities is housing, so urban grain is predominantly composed of dwellings, and multifamily housing has become a focus of our work where we have explored ways to be both contextual and contemporary simultaneously. Insides are about blankness, emptiness to provide indeterminate shelter which frees occupants to inhabit space at their will.

The book provides a detailed insight into the entire design and construction process, featuring essays by Marlon Blackwell, Robert McCarter and Carlos Jimenez, as well as lavish photography, architectural plans and details. It exposes how a series of expectations are created from the outset, with unanticipated spaces unfolding as the visitor is simultaneously drawn horizontally into the landscape and further into the house. Impeccably conceived and finished throughout, the building establishes both a tangible material presence and an abstract setting in which to enjoy the wonders of nature, art and social occasion.

Robert Ernest was an architect of rare promise and remarkable early success, whose award-winning career was cut short by cancer at age 28 in 1962. Despite the brevity of Ernest’s life, his education and practice were intertwined with some of the most important figures in architecture, including his interactions with Louis I. Kahn and Paul Rudolph. Ernest’s exceptional architectural designs, though honoured during his lifetime with three Progressive Architecture Awards and one Record Houses Award, have never been documented in a comprehensive manner, and are now almost completely lost to disciplinary history. Yet the materials in the architect’s personal and professional archives — upon which this book is almost entirely based — clearly indicate that Ernest was a remarkably talented and unusually gifted architectural designer, whose future promise and potential were inestimable. Ernest’s two built works, both realised before he had turned 28, his one work built after his death, as well as the remarkably innovative unrealised projects documented in his archives, indicate that had Ernest lived to a normal lifespan, he would have without question been one of the most important architects of his generation, with the potential to design precedent-setting buildings equal to those realised by the most recognised architects in the 60 years after his death.