William S. Saunders

The foreword to this monograph on Connecticut- and New York-based architect Roger Ferris is penned by Robert M. Rubin. Although a Wall Street man, his name should be familiar to preservationists: he owns and has restored Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre in Paris. With a strong interest in architecture (he's working toward a doctorate in Columbia's history/theory program), he has commissioned Ferris for a number of projects, most notably the clubhouse and master plan for The Bridge Golf Club in Bridghampton on Long Island (yes, that club). It's one of Ferris's most well known projects, and at eight years old one of the oldest in the monograph, which highlights built works but also includes a number of projects on the boards. Excelling in residential architecture and the ability to capture the domestic scale in a modernist palette, it's fitting that Rubin commends Ferris's design of the clubhouse for, among other things, taking up "less total square footage than your average McMansion."… (altro)

Starting with issue 35 of its biannual magazine, Harvard GSD is exploring the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism (urban planning and urban design), by looking inwards at their "cores" rather than outwards to their relationships with other fields. This may run counter to the popular thinking of inter-disciplinary processes and breaking down boundaries (or at least bridging) between disciplines, but as Dean Mohsen Mostafavi puts it his introduction to this issue, "we cannot speak of cross-fertilization...unless we understand and possess the know-how, creativity, and conventions distinct to each of these disciplines."

What follows are contributions by familiar names in academic circles: Preston Scott Cohen, K. Micheal Hays, Stan Allen, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Mario Campo, and many others. I particularly like Cohen's essay on "the hidden core of architecture" relative to late 19th-century changes in the construction and the subsequent shift to an architecture of facade and appearance; his call for transforming the core is a good one. Reinhold Martin's dissection of two books on "digital culture" and Farshid Moussavi's analysis of 30 St Mary Axe are other highlights. The other essays come at the theme from a multitude of ways, though given that it's the GSD academic flourishes prevail.

(Review first posted to my blog in July 2013: https://archidose.blogspot.com/2013/07/book-briefs-15-even-more-journals.html)… (altro)