Site

Site: Marmol Radziner in the Landscape
Leo Marmol + Ron Radziner, Mona Simpson (Foreword)
Princeton Architectural Press, September 2019



Hardcover | 10 x 13 inches | 312 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1616898168 | $65.00

Publisher Description:

The spectacular houses of Marmol Radziner merge interior and exterior life as they engage the built and natural environment. With lush photography and an expansive format, Site: Marmol Radziner in the Landscape focuses on the evolving relationship between house and landscape, revealing what the architects describe as "the gradual erasure of boundaries between indoor and outdoor" spaces.

This collection of nineteen houses, shown in over two-hundred full color photographs that will make readers swoon, is organized by habitat---desert, urban, canyon, and woodland---and includes projects in Arizona, Southern California, Utah, Nevada, and the Netherlands. A foreword by novelist Mona Simpson provides a personal reflection on her experiences in a Marmol Radziner house, while an interview with Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner and detailed descriptions of their projects offer insights into the architects' philosophy and process.

dDAB Commentary:

When I think about Marmol Radziner, the California practice of Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, a few things come to mind: their restorations of modern houses designed by Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, Cliff May, and other famed SoCal architects; their embrace of prefab in modern residential houses; and the fact Marmol Radziner is a design-build firm, a rarity in the realm of architecture. In Site: Marmol Radziner in the Landscape, these distinctive traits are set aside in favor of a focus, as the subtitle makes clear, on the relationship between the houses they design and the landscapes they inhabit. Site presents 19 large houses (ranging from 2,100 to 12,000 square feet, with an average floor area is 5,678 sf) across four natural/geographic chapters: Canyon, Desert, Urban, and Woodland. Most of the houses are located in Southern California, though some are also found in Northern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, with one house — the book's closer, so perhaps a sign of things to come — in Europe: Villa Amsterdam, completed in 2017.

The short descriptions for each house, like the interview that comes before them, accentuate the importance of site and landscape in how Marmol and Radziner compose their residential designs. Unfortunately, no floor plans or site plans accompany the many color photos documenting the houses. This monograph, similar to the Oppenheim Architecture monograph reviewed last week, relies almost exclusively on the professional photos that beautifully capture the houses. The photos, free of captions, convey how the houses sit in their gardens, how the interior spaces look onto the landscapes, and how skilled the architects are at crafting comfortable living spaces in a modern idiom. With thick, embossed chip board covers that hint at the imagery inside, a large page size, and lots of color photos, Site is a very handsome coffee table book on very talented architects-slash-contractors. Yet I can't agree with Marmol and Radziner's assertion in the Preface that Site is not a traditional monograph, unless the omission of plans over even more photos of houses and gardens makes it such. In which case I'll take a traditional monograph any day.

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Author Bio:

Marmol Radziner, a California-based architecture firm established in 1989 by Leo Marmol, FAIA, and Ron Radziner, FAIA, is known equally for its own designs and its restoration of modern masterworks, including homes by Richard Neutra, R. M. Schindler, and John Lautner.

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