#onsite2

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805. Shigeru Ban /// The Case Study House 10 (Naked House) /// Kawagoe, Saitama, Japan /// 1999-00

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Hiroyuki Hirai. Source: Architectural Record 04/2001; Eugenia Bell, “Shigeru Ban”, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.)

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803. Lake / Flato (David Lake & Ted Flato) /// Casey House (Hill Country Jacal) /// Pipe Creek, Texas, USA /// 1997

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Leigh Christian. Source: Lori Ryker, “Off the Grid: Modern Homes + Alternative Energy”, Layton: Gibbs Smith, 2005; Donna Kacmar, “BIG little house: Small Houses Designed by Architects", London: Routledge, 2015.)

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801. Sean Godsell /// Earl Carter and Wanda Tucker House /// Breamlea, Victoria, Australia /// 1998-00

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Hisao Suzuki, Sean Godsell Architects.)

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804. Rural Studio /// Anderson and Ora Lee Harris House (Butterfly House) /// Mason’s Bend, Alabama, USA /// 1997

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Timothy Hursley. Source: Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, “Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency", New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.)

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800. Peter Zumthor /// Truog House (Gugalun) /// Versam, Graubünden, Switzerland /// 1990-94

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Helene Binet, Felipe Camus. Source: Peter Zumthor, “Works: Buildings and Projects 1979-1997″, Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999.)

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806. Rick Joy /// John Palmer and Annabel Rose House (Catalina House) /// Tucson, Arizona, USA /// 1998

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © Bill Timmerman, Timothy Hursley. Source: Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, “Rick Joy: Desert Works”, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.)

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802. Brian Mackay-Lyons /// Craig Rubadoux and Mary Cameron Studio /// Rose Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada /// 1989

OfHouses guest curated by onSITE, part II. (Photos: © James Steeves. Source: Malcolm Quantrill, “Plain Modern: The Architecture of Brian MacKay-Lyons”, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.)

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Dear friends, for the next three weeks OfHouses will be guest curated by onSITE Architecture from Paris, France. onSITE Architecture is an architectural office founded by Marie and Keith Zawistowski. Marie Zawistowski was born in Paris, France and studied architecture at the Ecole d’Architecture Paris Malaquais. Keith Zawistowski was born in New Jersey and studied architecture at Virginia Tech. They met at Auburn University’s Rural Studio while both working as students with architect Samuel ‘Sambo’ Mockbee to design and build a charity house for Lucy Harris and her family. In 2005, Keith and Marie received a Graham Foundation Grant for “Traditions of Today and Tomorrow” - their study of traditional building practices in Ghana, West Africa. They have since married and established onSITE Architecture to continue their collaboration, making buildings, which are deeply rooted in the unique identity of people and place. By working from within the context of their projects, Keith and Marie strive to make buildings which are economically, culturally, and environmentally sensitive. Together, they co-founded and co-direct the designbuildLAB, a project-based experiential learning program focused on the research, development and implementation of innovative construction methods and architectural designs. designbuildLAB students collaborate with local communities and industry experts to conceive and realize built works of architecture that are both educational and charitable in nature. The aspirations of the program are simultaneously to reinforce the knowledge and skills necessary to the students’ successful and meaningful practice of architecture and to support development efforts in distressed communities by enriching the quality of their built environment. In practice, onSITE is a laureate of the 2014 AJAP “French young architects award” and has received multiple design awards including an Excellence Award from the Virginia Society American Institute of Architects and the prestigious “Prix Françoise Abella” from the French Beaux Arts Academy. In teaching, Marie and Keith were the first Professors of Practice at Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban studies, a position they held for 7 years. They are currently tenured professors at the French National School of Architecture in Grenoble, France. Both the designbuildLAB and their Designing Practice professional practice course have been recognized with numerous education awards including the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards’ “Grand Prize for the Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy” and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s inaugural “Design/Build Education Award” for “best practices in design/build education”. Keith and Marie have been listed among the “top 100 individuals and teams working at the intersection of design and service” by Public Interest Design. The Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects recently recognized Keith with the Award for Distinguished Achievement and Marie with Society Honors “for their extraordinary joint efforts to advance the art and science of architecture”. In addition to frequent publications of onSITE and designbuildLAB work, Marie and Keith have co-authored numerous articles and lecture widely. Marie and Keith Zawistowski prepared for OfHouses a very consistent selection of houses, published now in its second part, for which they wrote this short introduction:

The Regionalist School

At a time of increasing value in international brand identity, architecture is increasingly relegated to the production of commodity images: highly iconic sculptures, that belong to everywhere and nowhere and which fade as quickly as they rise. Manufactured products are rapidly replacing locally sourced materials, untrained laborers are replacing skilled craftsmen, and jet-setting “starchitects” with throngs of technicians are replacing regional masters with patiently trained apprentices. As Brian Mackay-Lyons puts it, “the massive firms are buying up the small and midsized firms and architects are becoming mobile human capital”. Some have embraced the change as inevitable progress and are enjoying the ride, some are casual actors just playing their role and some are demoralized victims of circumstance, but others have taken a stand and entrenched critical practices: cultivating places that they understand and enriching cultures that they know. British architectural critic Robert McCarter has referred to this group as “The Resistance”. McCarter argues “A conceptual chasm separates our time from the time when Wright began his career by apprenticing in the office of Adler and Sullivan rather than attending the university, learning through making in what may be called “the tradition of practice;” a fully integrated experience binding all principles of the ethical practice of architecture – the economic, functional, ecological, constructive, structural, material, aesthetic, sensorial, social, and cultural aspects that together affect our experience of inhabitation. Implicit … is “the understanding that the separation of architecture into specialized areas of expertise – currently the norm in both education and practice – is as destructive of disciplinary integrity as separating thinking from making, form from structure, space from use, or proportions from materials.” The foundations of this anti-theoretical “theory”, what Kenneth Frampton would later term “Critical Regionalism” can be found in Abbé Marc-Antonie Laugier’s narrative of the primitive hut from his 1755 “Essay on Architecture”, illustrated by Charles Dominique Eisen. The narrative explores the anthropological relationship between man and the natural environment as a fundamental basis for the creation of architecture. Architecture in France during this period was defined mainly by the Baroque style with its excessive ornamentation and religious iconography.  Laugier’s essay proposed that nobility was found in what was necessary for architecture, in the practical and the experiential rather than the iconic. Over the course of the coming weeks we will present some of the seminal works of this Regionalist School. Not the skyscrapers, museums and transportation hubs of the global megapoli, but two generations of simple houses born from the idea that durable, timeless and culturally significant works of architecture emerge from an intimate understanding of nature and culture. This is the work of critical practices, often intentionally small, who have found focus in serene places, taking the time to draw, to make models and even to actively share in the realization of their own projects. This work is the foundation of “The Resistance”.

(Cover: Rural Studio /// Lucy Harris House (Carpet House) /// Mason’s Bend, Alabama, USA /// 2002. Cover photo: © Timothy Hursley.)