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The
Miller|Hull Partnership: Public Works by The
Miller|Hull Partnership
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Hardcover, 256 pages
Pugh
+ Scarpa: Report 2005 edited by Bruce Q. Lan
China Architecture and Building Press, 2005
Hardcover, 190 pages
The buildings of Seattle's Miller|Hull
Partnership would hardly, if ever, be mistaken as the
buildings of Los Angeles firm Pugh
+ Scarpa, and vice-versa. Yet the two firms share certain
characteristics: a deep-rooted (not greenwashed) sustainability,
socially responsible design, a regional emphasis, and a
mix of public and private building types. These two monographs
exhibit these strengths of each office, as well as their
respective unique working process and formal vocabulary.
The Miller|Hull Partnership began
in 1977, but the firm's output for most of its first decade
was comprised of residential projects and cabins, two types
that continue to this day in an office known for public
commissions. The latter are the focus in this second monograph
on the firm produced by Princeton Architectural Press --
Architects
of the Pacific Northwest is the 2001 predecessor.
The quality of the dozen buildings featured in the latest
book is phenomenal, particularly so when one realizes they
are just a sampling of the firm's larger public oeuvre.
Various building types are presented (office buildings,
infrastructure, educational, multi-family residential, etc.),
and all are treated with care, exhibiting the engineered
aesthetic that combines exposed structural steel with glass,
concrete and wood. The last aesthetically roots the buildings
in their Pacific Northwest context, though it is how the
designs deal with siting and topography that indicate how
skilled the architects have become at navigating the area
they call home. Not surprisingly, the one project outside
this region -- Chicago's 156 West Superior Street -- basically
regurgitates one of the firm's earlier buildings for Seattle,
appropriately refining its steel sections and details for
the land of Mies van der Rohe and the glass curtain wall.
Down the Pacific coast in Los Angeles,
Pugh + Scarpa creates architecture that is as rooted in
its milieu as Miller|Hull's tectonic regionalism. This handsome,
bilingual monograph -- part of a series on contemporary
US architects from the China Architecture and Building Press
-- captures the Santa Monica-based office's creative ways
of interacting with the various landscapes of the metropolis,
be it the streets, the hillsides, the single-family sprawl,
office building interiors, or sites of industrial reuse.
Known most for the solar panel-clad Colorado
Court Apartments -- included here with a Lawrence Scarpa
interview -- Pugh + Scarpa's veer from the formal simplicity
of that project to a couple sculptural gems in Culver City
and Silverlake, a conversion of warehouse buildings to creative
office space and a hillside residence, respectively. Interspersed
among these projects in these pages are more single-family
houses, a number of interiors and some unbuilt works. What's
missing are dates for each project, but the ordering appears
arbitrary, jumping around in time without any clear notion
of why one project comes after another; any progression
of ideas that comes with chronological ordering is lost.
Instead, and maybe more appropriately, the book reads like
LA itself, like driving down a street and confronting building
and building without any apparent relationship to each other.
The office embodies the pluralistic attitude of the city,
refusing to put a "Pugh + Scarpa" stamp on what
they create.
or 
for Miller|Hull
for Pugh + Scarpa
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