Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. Some light marking due to age. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> While other architects have been drawn into a polemical debate that marks the Postmodernist Movement Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (HHPA) have been quietly practicing for many years what others have recently begun preaching. Their unabashed eclecticism and willingness to juxtapose styles coupled with a prolific output have distinguished their work ever since the firm was founded in 1967. Here Michael Sorkin assesses their position in modern architecture as he surveys for the first time in book form their most noted projects. A firm with three principals-Hugh Hardy FAIA; Malcolm Holzman FAIA; and Norman Pfeiffer FAIA-their early work was identified with an aesthetic of exposed duct work and structural systems. More recently however they have moved toward a more freewheeling and eclectic use of commercially available products and materials which Sorkin defines as “functionalism with a human face.” The Denver Symphony Hall and the Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis are fully developed examples of this aesthetic. The range of the firm’s work is not easy to categorize. In addition to new buildings their work also includes several adaptive reuse projects as well as many theaters and auditoriums including their recent renovation that became the Madison Civic Center. In fact according to Sorkin they bring “a sense of the theatrical to whatever they do.” What else could explain their use of a baptismal font as an admissions booth in the Charlotte North Carolina Cultural Center? Paralleling their theatricality is a consistent sense of whimsy and play expressed in the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and the Mr. Healthy School in Columbus Indiana. The Salisbury School in Salisbury Maryland another example shows the frank decorative propensities that are also a distinctive trait of the firm’s work. (LL)