Lilian Pfaff

Alan Hess

Anthony Denzer

Jocelyn Gibbs

Debi Howell-Ardila

From 1946 to 1973, Whitney Rowland Smith and his partner, Wayne Williams, designed more than 800 projects, from residential, commercial, and public buildings to housing tracts, multi-use complexes, and parks and master plans for cities. Working in the wake of the first generation of avant-garde architects in Southern California and riding the postwar building boom, their firm, Smith and Williams, developed a pragmatic modernism that, through remarkable planning and design, integrated landscapes with buildings and decisively shaped the modern vocabulary of architecture in Los Angeles. Through a breathtaking array of images, Outside In unveils the core of Smith and Williams’s architectural practice. Their most influential designs, the authors show, are compositions of balanced opposites: shelter and openness, private and public, restraint and exuberance, light and shadow. Smith and Williams created spaciousness in their buildings by layering spaces and manipulating the relationship between structure and landscape. This spaciousness expressed modern ideas about the relationship of architecture to environment, of building to site, and, ultimately, of outside to in.

The Architecture of Smith and Williams

Outside In

Escher GuneWardena, founded in Los Angeles in 1996, reached international recognition through a range of projects: commercial spaces treated as conceptual art works; hillside residences representing poetic responses to particular site conditions; work in historic preservation including such icons as the Eames House and John Lautner's Chemosphere in Los Angeles. Their collaborations with artists such as Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley and Stephen Prina testify to their presence in the art world. "[Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena] are, in part, scholars, artists, architectural historians, designers and architects" Don Albrecht, Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of the City of New York.

The Architecture of Escher GuneWardena

Clocks and Clouds

Nicole Delmes

Michael Kasiske

Johannes Kister

The numerous designs by Ernst Neufert (1900-1986) and his son, Peter Neufert (1925-1999), which ranged from residences to industrial and office buildings, helped define twentieth-century German architecture. Especially influential, of course, were the many years that Ernst Neufert taught at the Technical University of Darmstadt as well as his Bauentwurfslehre, a theory of architectural design that continues to be a standard work to this day. The Neuferts' buildings stand for Modernism and the rebuilding of Germany after World War II. Ernst Neufert, for instance, designed the strictly functional Quelle distribution center in Nuremberg. Prestressed concrete offered technical opportunities for Peter Neufert's bold experiments in form, which clearly distinguished his buildings in the late sixties from those of his father. Using large-format photographs, this volume documents the first stage of six selected building projects by the two architects and attests to the quality and relevance of their designs.

Ernst Neufert, Peter Neufert

Lilian Pfaff

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