Dirk Denison 10 Houses
December 2018
Architect and educator Dirk Denison reflects on the diverse influences that have shaped his practice over 30 years in a volume featuring 10 remarkable houses designed in a broad range of modernist vocabularies – each finely tuned to its site and occupants. Taking the form of an in-depth conversation between architect and educator Dirk Denison and journalist Fred A. Bernstein, this volume chronicles Denison’s childhood in Detroit, travels and early encounters with the arts and architecture, and his education at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A perceptive interlocutor, Bernstein deftly draws upon Denison’s own insights into how these experiences have influenced his aesthetic sensibilities, design philosophy, and working processes over 30 years of collaborative practice.
MCHAP The Americas 2: Territories & Expeditions
March 2022
MCHAP The Americas 2: Territory & Expeditions is inspired on the discussions held during the second cycle of the prize, which took place in 2016. Based on the selection of the finalist projects—Weekend House by SPBR, New Campus for the UTEC by Grafton Architects, Pachacamac Museum by Llosa Cortegana Architects, Tower 41 by Alberto Kalach, Star Apartments by Michael Maltzan Architecture, and Grace Farms by SANAA—, the jury conversations and “discoveries” were very much conditioned by the ideas of nature and its intimate relation to architecture and landscape.
This book is part a reader, part a catalogue, part a visual essay/research on these matters. The texts and projects are in themselves contributions to the field as they show new understandings about the relationship between architecture and its environment as well as singularities and genealogies of the most prominent architectures of the Americas.
Barclay & Crousse: Landscapes of Intimacy
April 2021
Landscapes of Intimacy brings together five essential aspects of Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse’s practice: landscapes and microcosms, ambiguous space, indoor exteriors, matter and the map, and the thickness of intimacy, explored through a selection of twelve projects that include the Place of Remembrance, a series of houses in Peru, and the University of Piura’s Edificio E, which won the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) in 2018.
PRODUCTORA: Being the Mountain
May 2020
Being the Mountain examines the relationship between architecture and the ground it occupies, revisiting key moments in architectural history to uncover new potentials in this fundamental interaction. The result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice, the book positions the output of the Mexico City–based firm within this underexplored lineage: as a form of constructed topography. Contributions by Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, and Jesús Vassallo.
Naïve Intention: Pezo von Ellrichshausen
January 2018
This title is a resulting work of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) emerge, given to the firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen for their Poli House. Introduced by an essay about the vague contradiction between intentionality and chance, necessity and accident, reason and futility, authorship and anonymity, the book presents a selection of images that inform Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s cross production between art, architecture and academia. Each page contains a single picture and a brief caption describing it. Beyond a comprehensive depiction of the individual works, the monograph underlines transversal notions of inventory, format, scale, regulation and value within the pictorial representation. In the fashion of a personal album, each drawing, painting, photograph, model or building, evokes the mental world behind the couple’s production. This volume could be read both as a collection of ideas, one after another, or as the same one that persists over time.
Álvaro Siza Vieira: A Pool in the Sea: In Conversation with Kenneth Frampton
July 2018
This book documents a unique experience of a journey by Álvaro Siza Vieira, Vincent Mentzel and Kenneth Frampton to the early work of Siza in Porto. This book includes a vast collection of descriptions, drawings and photographs by Vincent Mentzel about the project, as well as a writing by Siza Vieira himself and other texts. Álvaro Siza was the 1992 winner of The Pritzker Architecture Prize. The book also includes an analysis of the bathers’ course by Pedro Vieira de Almeida, as well as testimonies of the architects Diogo Seixas Lopes, Manuel Aires Mateus, Michel Toussaint, Joao Manoel Gomes Da Silva, Luís Urbano, Diogo Seixas Lopes and Pedro Vieira de Almeida.
Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron: Treacherous Transparencies
June 2016
Treacherous Transparencies: Thoughts and Observations Triggered by a Visit to Farnsworth House analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. The architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day. Published in the context of the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP). Launch of the publication series by the inaugural MCHAP award winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for their project 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.
MCHAP Book One: The Americas Hardcover
October 2016
MCHAP: The Americas brings together leading architects and academics in a dialogue exploring the current state of architecture throughout the Americas and analyzes themes raised by the seven finalist projects (designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Steven Holl Architects, OMA/ LMN – Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, Smiljan Radić, Cristián Undurraga, Rafael Iglesia) from the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize recognizing the best built works in the Americas from 2000 through 2013. The book includes contributions from the inaugural MCHAP jury (IITAC Dean Wiel Arets, Kenneth Frampton, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Dominique Perrault, Sarah Whiting) as well as essays by Fabrizio Gallanti, Pedro Alonso, Luis Castañeda, Felipe Correa, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Horacio Torrent, Molly Wright Steenson, Mimi Zeiger.