Faculty Publications
Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas
Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern
English / German
192 Pages with 150 color Images
Jovis Verlag Berlin / USA: Distributed Art Press
Fall 2008
In "Learning from Las Vegas" Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown focused on the glamour of the Las Vegas Strip, analyzing the city for its postmodernist qualities while ignoring the Mojave desert immediately beyond. Exploring the city at the same time as Venturi and Scott-Brown, the renowned architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham sidestepped the postmodernist lure of the Strip and focused his attention on what he saw as the strikingly modernist spaces of the Mojave desert.
Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas presents neither a modernist nor a postmodernist view of the city and its environment. The text and images do not project ideals of urban development, nor do they solve social and environmental problems. Rather, they present a hybrid landscape shaped and reshaped by practices of everyday urbanization for a city now characterized as the "first" city of the 21stcentury. They offer a "third site", exposing the complex but often interstitial spaces of everyday production and consumption tied to physical and virtual place making as well as contemporary local and global investment. This perspective reframes the seamless surfaces of draped neon lights, curtain walls, and landscape features layered onto the Mojaveʼs stark topography, uncovering distinct strata that respatialize the social, cultural, and environmental implications of urbanizing a fierce yet fragile desert.
LIONEL H. PRIES, ARCHITECT, ARTIST, EDUCATOR: FROM ARTS AND CRAFTS TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner
403 pages, 325 illustrations (175 in color)
University of Washington Press
November 2007
Lionel H. Pries (1897-1968) was one of the most influential architects and teachers in the Pacific Northwest from the late 1920s to the late 1960s. As an inspirational professor at the University of Washington he helped shape the careers of Minoru Yamasaki, A. Q. Jones, Victor Steinbrueck, Paul Kirk, Roland Terry, Fred Bassetti, Wendell Lovett, Gene Zema, and many other prominent twentieth-century architects. As a practicing architect, he was a pioneer in the adaptation of Modernism to the setting of the Pacific Northwest an an early leader in the creation of Northwest regional modernism.
Lionel H. Pries, Architect, Artist, Educator celebrates Pries's professional life and legacy, tracing his evolution as a designer, architect, teacher, and artist. The book shows how Pries absorbed and synthesized disparate influences and movements in design - the California Arts and Crafts, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Mexican and Japanese motifs, the International Style, and other strands of the Modern Movement. This comprehensive, well illustrated book expands knowledge of Northwest history, culture and architecture, and of the history of American architectural education, as well as broadening understandings of twentieth-century American Modernism.
International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku
Ken Tadashi Oshima
320 pp., 220 illus., 20 in color
University of Washington Press
(January 2010)
After World War I, architects around the world aspired to transcend national boundaries devastated by conflicts, resulting in a flurry of artistic creativity. In Japan, a generation of young architects strove to create "international architecture," or kokusai kenchiku, a product of increasing international travel and communication, growth of the mass media, and technological innovation.
Ken Tadashi Oshima traces the many interconnections between architects from Japan, Europe, and America and their designs during the interwar years by examining the careers and buildings of three leading modernists in Japan: Yamada Mamoru (1894- 1966), Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984), and Antonin Raymond (1888-1976). Each espoused a new architecture encompassing modern forms and new materials, and all attempted to synthesize the novel with the old in distinctive ways. Combining wood and concrete, paper screens and sliding/swinging glass doors, tatami rooms and Western-style chairs, they achieved an innovative merging of international modernism and traditional Japanese practices. Their buildings accommodated the demands of modern living while remaining appropriate to Japan's climate, culture, and economy.
Until now, little scholarship on Japanese modernist architecture has been available in English, and scholars have tended to isolate the Japanese work from architecture in the European-American sphere of influence. Oshima reverses this trend, exploring the influences that flowed in multiple directions between architects in Japan and their counterparts in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.
Sadly, few of the buildings of Japan's interwar period withstood the destruction of World War II and the wrecking balls of subsequent decades of development. Yet Oshima uses a wealth of photographs that vividly capture the character of the burgeoning architectural media of the interwar years to generously illustrate the works and visions of these pioneering modernists.