Robert McCarter

A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential architects Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999) was a Dutch architect, writer, and teacher who helped redefine Modern architecture in the second half of the 20th century. As an advocate for architecture’s engagement with history, culture, climate, and the lived human experience of buildings and urban spaces, he created designs that privileged place and the daily rituals in the lives of its inhabitants over universal ideals. In this volume, enlivened by 300 illustrations from the Aldo van Eyck archive, Robert McCarter provides the first comprehensive study of van Eyck’s 50-year career since his death, guiding readers through the architect’s buildings and unrealized projects, with a focus on the interior spatial experience and on the design and construction processes. Highlighted projects include the Amsterdam Orphanage, the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague, and some of the hundreds of playgrounds he famously designed over the course of his career. McCarter also investigates how van Eyck’s writings and lectures convey the importance of architecture in the everyday lives of people around the world and throughout history. By presenting his design work together with the principles on which it was founded, McCarter illuminates van Eyck’s ethical interpretation of architecture’s place in the world.

A comprehensive monograph on Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great masters of modern architecture This comprehensive monograph on the renowned twentieth-century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, explores both his major architectural designs and many of his minor projects in detail. Robert McCarter analyses Wright’s work chronologically, exploring each building’s spatial experience, material and tectonic character, and relationship to the landscape. Now in a fully revised and updated new edition, this definitive account of the life and work of the modern master features an extensive selection of archival drawings, specially commissioned photographs, redrawn plans, and detailed drawings, as well as a complete list of Wright’s buildings and projects compiled by the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

The book provides a detailed insight into the entire design and construction process, featuring essays by Marlon Blackwell, Robert McCarter and Carlos Jimenez, as well as lavish photography, architectural plans and details. It exposes how a series of expectations are created from the outset, with unanticipated spaces unfolding as the visitor is simultaneously drawn horizontally into the landscape and further into the house. Impeccably conceived and finished throughout, the building establishes both a tangible material presence and an abstract setting in which to enjoy the wonders of nature, art and social occasion.

‘The most complete monograph on the pioneering modernist.' – Fast Company This acclaimed book is the most comprehensive published on architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), looking in detail at all the houses, furniture, and public buildings he designed in Europe and the United States – from his beginning at the Bauhaus through his collaboration with Walter Gropius, and the establishment of his own practice in the USA. Written by acclaimed architect and writer Robert McCarter, the first edition of this book was described as a ‘serious study’ (Financial Times) that would help in ‘realigning Breuer’s position in the canon of modern masters’ (TLS). The complete monograph on the last of the first generation of Modernist architects, Breuer is the only book that examines both his design as well as his architecture, with detailed descriptions of his work – including commercial, residential, furniture, and unrealized projects, including all of his iconic furniture (such as the Wassily and Cesca chairs) and buildings (including the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York). Back in print due to popular demand, this new edition has a beautiful new cover featuring the global headquarters of Sotheby’s in New York.

Robert Ernest was an architect of rare promise and remarkable early success, whose award-winning career was cut short by cancer at age 28 in 1962. Despite the brevity of Ernest’s life, his education and practice were intertwined with some of the most important figures in architecture, including his interactions with Louis I. Kahn and Paul Rudolph. Ernest’s exceptional architectural designs, though honoured during his lifetime with three Progressive Architecture Awards and one Record Houses Award, have never been documented in a comprehensive manner, and are now almost completely lost to disciplinary history. Yet the materials in the architect’s personal and professional archives — upon which this book is almost entirely based — clearly indicate that Ernest was a remarkably talented and unusually gifted architectural designer, whose future promise and potential were inestimable. Ernest’s two built works, both realised before he had turned 28, his one work built after his death, as well as the remarkably innovative unrealised projects documented in his archives, indicate that had Ernest lived to a normal lifespan, he would have without question been one of the most important architects of his generation, with the potential to design precedent-setting buildings equal to those realised by the most recognised architects in the 60 years after his death.

These seventy-five works are the harvest of seventeen years of exploration from our office in San Francisco. With this admired city as backdrop, we search for ways to produce fitting contemporary architecture in its highly conservative terrain. These local efforts have provided opportunities to also work nationally. The projects describe allied explorations of Outsides and Insides, Places and Programs, Contexts and Contents. Outsides are about building the evolving city with continuity. More than 80% of the fabric of cities is housing, so urban grain is predominantly composed of dwellings, and multifamily housing has become a focus of our work where we have explored ways to be both contextual and contemporary simultaneously. Insides are about blankness, emptiness to provide indeterminate shelter which frees occupants to inhabit space at their will.

The esteemed monograph on the globally-revered modern master – includes Roosevelt Island, Four Freedoms Park, which was completed after Kahn’s death The significance of the work of Louis I Kahn, one of the greatest influences on post-WWII world architecture, has skyrocketed in the twenty-first century. Robert McCarter’s bestselling and critically acclaimed monograph explains how Kahn redefined Modern architecture and why his work remains a fundamental source for architects and designers today. Now thoughtfully updated, this comprehensive and extensively illustrated overview features both built and unbuilt projects, including Yale University Art Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum, and the Salk Institute, along with his work in India and Bangladesh, as well as a project realized forty years after Kahn’s death – New York City’s Four Freedoms Park. An indispensable reference work on one of the most important figures in 20th-century architecture. McCarter analyzes each of Kahn’s major buildings from the design process, methods and materials of construction to ‘walk-throughs’ of the spaces themselves and the book includes selected writings by Kahn as well as the complete chronology of Kahn’s projects, compiled by William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager of the Louis I Kahn Archives. Each project is illustrated with photographs and drawings that convey the spirit of Kahn’s work, as well as the inspirations that led to the design and buildings featured include such architectural icons as Yale Art Gallery, Kimbell Art Museum, and the Salk Institute, along with Kahn’s work in India and Bangladesh. This is an indispensable reference work on one of the most important figures in 20th-century architecture.

The acclaimed survey of the life and works of the celebrated Italian modernist master, Carlo Scarpa, from the highly regarded architectural author, Robert McCarter The work of Carlo Scarpa challenged, and continues to challenge, accepted notions of modern architecture. While several books have been published on his work, none has approached the breadth and depth of this classic monograph by Robert McCarter, who is celebrated for his meticulously researched, experientially based, and jargon-free accounts of key figures in modern architecture. This book is the definitive study of Scarpa’s many accomplishments, including such works at the Canova Museum, the Castelvecchio Museum, and the Brion Cemetery, among others. It features in-depth ‘walk-throughs’ of a selection of Scarpa’s key projects, embracing Scarpa’s approach to experientially based design and presents sketches and architectural plans, together with a complete list of works, realized and unrealized, including his much-loved interiors and glassware, as well as the buildings themselves.

The architecture of WG Clark is inextricably grounded in its place, the Atlantic coastal states of the American South. Over the course of his forty-year career as a modern architect practising in historic contexts, Clark has constructed a small but significant body of work of unparalleled high quality and experiential richness. Clark's remarkably resolved spatial compositions are formally restrained and contextually appropriate, and while relatively few in number, have nevertheless exerted an outsize influence on architects around the world. Clark's regional grounding, slow and measured pace of design, and modest publicity has provided him with the time-in-place necessary for thinking and creating at the very highest level. Like the relatively few works of Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, the works of WG Clark have attained canonical status, and his redefinition of architectural design as being grounded in the history of the discipline, as well as in the particularities of its place, has proved to be of ever-increasing relevance to contemporary practice.

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the influential and award-winning firm based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have an international reputation. Producing a wide range of projects both in Canada and further afield, they work in a sophisticated modern vernacular idiom, drawing inspiration from a rich local heritage of building types and reinterpreting them according to the best practices of 21st-century architecture. It is above all for their dignified and beautiful houses perched on the wild, rocky coasts of Nova Scotia that the firm is recognized. Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, this remarkable body of work is based around a number of plan types that answer to the particular local climate: open to the sun but sheltered from the winds, and built using traditional materials that are allowed to weather, these dwellings embody the architects’ engagement with their unique surroundings and material culture. This new monograph covers MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects’ complete work. Introductions by renowned architectural writers set the scene, while individual projects are illustrated through evocative photographs and detailed plans and drawings. What emerges is a celebration of an architecture that is both practical and deeply poetic.

The architect Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture was not what a building ‘looks like’ on the day it opens, but what it ‘is like’ to live in thirty years later. In this book Robert McCarter presents a persuasive defence of why and how interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and why the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work of architecture after it is built.We live in an age dominated by images. We often feel we ‘know’ architecture and the places it makes, both old and new, through the photos of buildings we see in print and online, without ever inhabiting their spaces. McCarter argues that we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms, and makes a powerful case for the primacy of the interior experience in architecture.The Space Within explores how interior space has been integral to the development of Modern architecture from the late 1800s to today, and how generations of architects have engaged with interior space and its experience in their design processes. In doing so, they fundamentally transformed the traditional methods and goals of architectural composition. As McCarter argues, for many of the most recognized and respected architects practising today, the conception of the interior spatial experience continues to be the starting point for design. Through historical and current examples of architectural works he takes us through how this is done, and eloquently places us within the spaces.

Comprehensive monograph on one of America’s greatest living architects by award-winning author and architecture critic Robert McCarter. This in-depth monograph is devoted to one of the leading United States architects on the contemporary scene: Steven Holl (b.1947). Richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs and Holl’s own watercolours, the book introduces the artist's personality and works, and the studio he founded in 1976, Steven Holl architects. Holl studied architecture at the University of Washington at Seattle, and later in Rome and at the Architectural Association in London. He has worked both in the United States and in Europe, and a great deal in the East, especially in Japan. His most important designs, outstanding in their respect for the cultural and historical environment in which they are set, include the Makuhari residential complex in Japan, the St. Ignatius chapel at the University of Seattle, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the extension of the Cranbrook Institute of Science at Bloomfield Hills in Michigan. A professor at the Graduate School of Architecture of Columbia University, Holl has held courses and given lectures in several other institutions in the United States. He has won many awards, including the Arnold W Brunner prize for architecture in 1990, and the Alvar Aalto medal in 1998. Robert McCarter has known and taught with Holl for over 30 years and provides an authoritative and personal examination of Holl and his work. A must-own book for architects as well as for students of the discipline. Richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs and Holl’s own watercolours.

Award-winning Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger (born 1932) is one of the most important and critically influential figures in international architecture of the past half-century. He has consistently championed a fundamentally humanist modern architecture, rooted in its place and history, while simultaneously opening up new possibilities for dwelling. Today Hertzberger is rightly regarded as the world's foremost designer of schools, a building type he has almost singlehandedly redefined, and his innovative and fundamentally humane workplaces constitute some of the most compelling contemporary reinterpretations of this type of building. In this volume, acclaimed author and practicing architect Robert McCarter examines Hertzberger's most important architectural works through an analysis of the architect's design process and guiding ideas, particularly as these reflect Hertzberger's engagement with the modernist tradition, architectural history, urban space and the human experience of architecture.

Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References opens up a unique and richly layered view of the architectural work and thinking of this internationally renowned Dutch architect. Underlying Arets’ practice, research and teaching is his concept of "a wonderful world", an optimistic outlook on how the world will evolve in the next 75 years.In addition to portfolios of 60 exemplary projects and designs by his studio, this book presents 5 lectures, and 5 debates between Arets and other thinkers and practitioners, as well as an extensive series of 10 interviews with Arets. More than simply presenting his work alongside essays and project descriptions, Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References reveals the interaction between Arets’ biography and his architectural thinking, teaching and design in the evolution of his distinguished career. As well as being a congenial interview partner, Robert McCarter, Professor of Architecture at Washington University (St. Louis), provides an insightful concluding essay on Arets’ dialogical practice. The multi-layered content finds perfect form and expression in the exceptional book design and layout by Irma Boom Office.