In my days in undergraduate architecture school, GA Houses
and other Global Architecture publications kept me in the
architecture library for hours. The large-format journals
with page after page of glossy photos, plans, elevations,
and bilingual text (giving a worldly feel to the undertaking)
contributed to an enjoyable escape from studio while also
creating inspiration via the myriad of ideas presented in
project and built form. This sure-fire recipe for inspiration
and salivation continues strong to this day, as GA churns
out issue after issue filled with the best -- or most eye-catching
-- contemporary and Modern architecture.
This issue that I found heavily discounted at a local bookstore
(GA publications suffer from a high price tag outside of
their native Japan) presents eleven residential projects
around the world. The projects are comprised of three "chunks":
three projects in America's desert Southwest, three projects
in Australia, and five projects in the magazine's homeland.
Steven Holl's cover project
in Arizona gets the most attention, though its outshined
by one my favorite projects in recent years, the Moriyama
House in Tokyo by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA.
The house is actually a number of houses on a larger-than-typical
plot of land: the client's residence and small studios.
Each piece is treated as a separate box, where the in-between
spaces become yards and walkways for the various residents.
Nishizawa's response attempts to reconcile the large scale
of the client's house with the small scale requirements
of the rest of the project, but it does more than that,
it also becomes a microcosm
of the city.
In addition to the new houses presented in GA 90's pages,
it also features Villages and Towns, what appears to be
an ongoing feature of traditional places around the world.
This issue looks at Alberobello
in southern Italy, known for its trulli,
stone dwellings with distinctive conical roofs. Why Global
Architecture includes these places I'm not exactly sure,
though I would guess that they're trying to equate the formal
novelty of contemporary architecture with the vernacular
forms of peoples and times gone by. Whatever the reason,
it makes for that much more delight and inspiration.
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