Todd Gannon

This book examines the life and legacy of Franklin D. Israel, an influential member of the Los Angeles school of architects. Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel (1945–1996) created innovative residential projects and office interiors that made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid account, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel’s buildings, and recent interviews with the architect’s colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel’s development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel’s influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work—all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty. Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography, chronicling one gay man’s engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture. It explores the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.

A Life in Architecture

Franklin D. Israel

Margaret Fletcher

Teresa Ball

Mark Scogin Merrill Elam Architects designed and built Knowlton Hall at the Knowlton School of Architecture on the campus of Ohio State University. This volume is part of a series that focuses on one work and includes sketches, models, renderings, drawings, and photographs of each design stage to illuminate the design and construction process.

Knowlton Hall, Columbus, Ohio

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

Mack Scogin

Merrill Elam

Some buildings are famous. Others deserve to be, but in their modesty remain satisfied to stand simply as excellent works of architecture. Such is the case with Ohio State University School or Architecture's recently completed Knowlton School of Architecture. Designed by the internationally respected firmMack Scogin Merrill Elam, Knowlton manages to project both a monumental physicality and a sense of subdued elegance. Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects/Knowlton Hall provides acomprehensive look at this impressive new work using sketches, models, renderings, working drawings, and photographs. As with all of the books in the Source Books in Architecture series, it is accompanied by commentaries from the architects and critics who explore both the technical andcontextual elements of the work.

Source Books in Architecture

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Knowlton Hall

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. It is the heart of the BMW factory complexthe dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation and motion. With an audacious and abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the BMW Central Building challenges the notion of building as static and is definitive evidence of architecture as art. Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at this instant modern masterpiece.

BMW Central Building Source Book in Architecture 7

Bernard Tschumi

Jeffrey Kipnis

Laurie A. Gunzelman

"Including an exhaustive presentation of sketches, models, computer renderings, working drawings, and photographs of the construction process and the finished work, this book documents the project at a level of detail that allows complete and careful study from its conception to its completion. This in-depth graphic presentation is accompanied by commentaries from the architect, as well as series editors Jeffery Kipnis and Todd Gannon, that further explore both the cultural and technical significance of this important building."--BOOK JACKET.

Bernard Tschumi/Zenith de Rouen

Ewan Branda

A Confederacy of Heretics examines the explosion of activity associated with the Architecture Gallery, the first gallery in Los Angeles dedicated exclusively to architecture. Instigated by Thom Mayne in the fall of 1979, the Architecture Gallery staged ten exhibitions in as many weeks by both young and established Los Angeles practitioners, featuring the work of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate, Jr., Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville, Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi), Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian), and Eric Owen Moss. Another young architect, Coy Howard, opened the events with a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, which hosted talks by each exhibiting architect. In an unprecedented move by the popular press, the events were chronicled in weekly reviews by the critic John Dreyfuss in the Los Angeles Times. Gathering an array of original drawings, models, photographs, video recordings, and commentary alongside new assessments by current scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics aims neither to canonize the participating architects nor to consecrate their unorthodox activities. Rather, the book re-examines the early work of some of Los Angeles' most well-known architects, charts the development of their most potent design techniques, and documents a crucial turning point in Los Angeles architecture, a time when Angeleno architecture culture shifted from working local variations on imported themes to exporting highly original disciplinary innovations with global reach. Taken together, the exhibition, symposium, and catalog that comprise A Confederacy of Heretics offer a unique lens through which to analyze a pivotal moment in the development of late twentieth-century architecture.

A Confederacy of Heretics

Knowlton School of Architecture

This volume takes an in-depth look at the Rotterdam bridge that brought UN Studio, the Dutch firm of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, into the architectural spotlight.

Erasmus Bridge, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

UN Studio

Eisenman Architects

The basic form of the American sports stadium has not changed much in the last century. But in an unexpected and controversial act of daring, the Arizona Cardinals football team selected awarding-winning architect and intellectual provocateur Peter Eisenman to design their stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Opened in the summer of 2006, Eisenman's latest work rejects all traditional and staid notions of the sports stadium. Inspired by and sectioned like a barrel cactus, its shell is composed of huge, steel paraboloid sections. The domed stadium boasts a steel-and-fabric retractable roof that allows lightto penetrate when closed while maintaining an airy feel inside. The most ground-breaking feature of the design is its grass roll-out field, which remains outside the stadium until game time, when it is rolled in on steel wheel sets powered by small electric motors. Eisenman Architects, the eighth volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark of excellence in civic and sports architecture.

Home Field Advantage - 8 University of Phoenix Stadiam Source Books in Architecture

Steven Holl

"The award-winning Simmons Hall, completed in 2002, is Steven Holl's 'vertical slice of a city', an urban microcosm on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. Motivated by the sea sponge and the idea of porosity, Holl invents a highly innovative structure that inspires its residents and compels them to revel in the unexpected. Immense interior voids, irregular and arrhythmic geometrical holes that form unexpected public spaces, as well as extraordinarily adaptable modular wooden furnisings, create a kinetic work-in-progress to be dictated by one's experience of the space and the whims of its occupants. Holl, whose tactile architecture has been celebrated as 'buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye', has channeled his love of sculptural shapes, details, and inventive and original use of light, space, color, and material in Simmons Hall to find its rightful place in the company of Alvar Aalto's Baker House, and Eero Saarinen's chapel and his Kresge Auditorium at MIT. [This book] features extensive photographic documentation by Andy Ryan of the construction and finished project. These images are accompanied by an exhaustive graphic presentation of sketches, model, rendering, and working drawings, interviews with Holl, and commentary from architects and critics that examine both the technical and cultural significance of this important structure"--Back cover.

Source Books in Architecture 5

Steven Holl Architects/Simmons Building

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

Todd Gannon

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