This book is focused on recent work. Most of the projects are from the past five or six years. The work has been done with a small team of talented people who have spent their days working together for many years. Our office is a single open room, and we listen to and learn from each other constantly. My partners and associates especially--John Winder, Ulysses Lira, Michael Luke, Nell Kaye, and Ed Kim--have all been deeply involved in the buildings and projects. Together we have developed the direction and discovered the means, plotted the course--often with only the barest sense of direction--and learned how to iump the hurdles to realize this work.

After a hundred years of modernism, architecture has reached a fork: one path leads to form and meaning, the other to space and experience. Form and meaning follow from Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, from Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Alvar Aalto, Jarn Utzon, and Eero Saarinen. Many architects working today travel this path. With the assistance of computers their work is proliferated with unprecedented arrays of shapes and con-figurations of forms. Robert Venturi, in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, began the critique of modernism that produced the license for this work. He shifted architecture's desire from space to meaning, encouraging personal style and individualism and using the history of man-nerism and the baroque to argue against the purism and uniformity of modern architecture. Calling for nonconformity, ambiguity, and contradic-tion, he was interested in disturbance, counterlogic, and restlessness. The body of work sponsored by Venturi's writings is provocative, challenging,and disruptive. These architects argue that the production of new form results in freedom from geometry and memory, establishing new meaning.But the buildings themselves, so concerned with shape, become striated worlds; they are anything but free.

introduction

Landscape Houses

Di Napoli Residence

Byron Meyer Residence

Lieff Guest House

Zakin Residence

Davis Ranch

Khan Residence

Sontag/Kinney Residence

Crystal Springs Residence

Laibson Residence

Omega 3 Residence

Singer Studio

Stone Residence

Urban Houses

Chenette Residence

Clive McCarthy Residence

Shaw Residence

Goldberg Residence

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