These four books examine a range of interesting projects, from modernist residences to stylish restaurants.
Four Takes on Houses and Interiors
The Iconic House: Architectural Masterworks Since 1900, by Dominic Bradbury. Thames & Hudson, 376 pages, $35.
Updated from the 2009 edition, this global survey features modern houses that longtime British design journalist Dominic Bradbury considers groundbreaking and influential. It opens with Victor Horta’s Hotel Solvay in Brussels and ends with Tom Kundig’s Studhorse house in Winthrop, Washington. The 100-plus dwellings are shown with photographs, plans, and concise texts. Bradbury is awestricken by “the intoxicating breadth of ideas, inspiration and original thought contained in these buildings.” You will be too.
Hudson Modern: Residential Landscapes, by David Sokol. Monacelli Press, 261 pages, $60.
David Sokol, a New York journalist (and RECORD contributor) who specializes in architecture, focuses on 18 modernist residences recently built in and around the Hudson River Valley. They are weekend retreats designed by, among others, such top talents as Steven Holl, KieranTimberlake, Joel Sanders, and Tsao & McKown. In style, they are unpretentious; in scale, modest. Whether they represent a distinct Hudson River school of architectural thought is debatable. They could be anywhere—they just happen to be in the Hudson River Valley. On the other hand, they are beautifully crafted and well thought-out contemporary takes on classical Miesian style.
Interior: A Novel, by Thomas Clerc; translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 337 pages, $27.
Thomas Clerc is a professor of French literature and the author of several books, including The Man Who Killed Roland Barthes. This book may be called a novel, but it is more a true-life literary tour, room by room, of the narrator’s modest 540-square-foot apartment in Paris’s 10th arrondisement. He meticulously documents the mundane contents and the memories and literary associations they evoke, whether it be a game of Clue or an old glass milk bottle from Ireland. The objects are so unrelentingly ordinary, I have to ask, “Why bother?” If the flat is a metaphor, I don’t get it. Nonetheless, it would be fascinating to see how this approach could be used by an architect to reveal himself or herself though a description of domestic objects. Think of what Rem Koolhaas or Denise Scott Brown might come up with.
Nourishing the Senses: Restaurant Architecture of Bentel & Bentel, by Dr. Carol Rusche Bentel, Dr. Paul Bentel, and Peter Bentel; edited by John Morris Dixon. Visual Profile Books, 231 pages, $60.
Founded in 1957, the Locust Valley, New York, firm Bentel & Bentel, with a 30-year specialty in hospitality work, is now run by the sons of the founders and Dr. Carol Rusche Bentel. Here they reveal the creative process and thinking behind the designs of such successful and stylistically varied Manhattan restaurants as Gramercy Tavern, Craft, Le Bernardin, and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art. Through extensive photography, line drawings, and concise writing, the architects show they are masters at harmonizing food, service, and design for a diverse roster of clients. While the firm is modern to the core (with warmly crafted overtones), it is more motivated by the character of a client’s restaurant than any given style. As Peter Bentel has written, “We think of our design work as portraits of the owners and how they engage the world.”
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