The New Farm

The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture 

Daniel P. Gregory
Princeton Architectural Press, June 2020

Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 192 pages | 150 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1616898144 | $45.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Recent generations of farmers have reinvented the family farm and its traditions, embracing organic practices and sustainability and, along with them, a bold new use of modern architecture. The New Farm profiles sixteen contemporary farms around the globe, accompanied by plans and colorful images that highlight the connections among family, food, design, terrain, and heritage.

Visit a Tasmanian sheep shearers' quarters with a dramatic coastal view and a bamboo-wrapped farm shed in Kentucky. Learn from a fourth-generation poultry breeder and newcomers who have stepped off the corporate ladder and into the barnyard. Projects include an olive oil grove and mill in California, the storied Stone Barns Center in New York, and organic farms in Canada and across Europe. An introduction places the design of these farms in a lineage of celebrated architects including William Wurster, William Turnbull, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Marc Appleton, and Tom Kundig.

Daniel P. Gregory is a longtime magazine and website editor and author of Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House. He graduated from Yale, received his PhD in architectural history from UC Berkeley, and lives in the Bay Area.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

Reading the publisher's description for The New Farm, I was pleased to see that the book includes a farm I've actually been to (I've been to few): Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. Located in Westchester County, just north of New York City, the dairy built for the family of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1930s was converted into an educational center, offices, and restaurant earlier this century, with architecture and master planning by Machado & Silvetti. But flipping through the sixteen case studies of "contemporary rural architecture," I could not find Stone Barns. Turns out that it and nine other farms are discussed in the introduction but not in depth in the rest of the book. While this means I haven't set foot on any of the "featured farms" (not all are open to the public, mind you), I still found the book very enjoyable, arising primarily from its focus on a typology rarely explored in architecture media.

Of the sixteen projects described by Daniel P. Gregory in The New Farm, all but one of them are built. The exception is Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in Lindsborg, Kansas, near Salina, where MASS Design Group is designing the Good Shepherd Conservancy. When completed, the project will "preserve and protect biodiversity through a unique model of agricultural education, ecological resilience, and food system innovation," per its mission statement. Gregory speaks with the ranch's "poultry whisperer" Frank Reese, who shows the author the site of the future conservancy. Gregory thinks of it as "an innovative poultry university" and therefore "a truly modern farm." 

Although Gregory writes more about Reese and the farm than its future architecture, the rest of the book balances these two poles, with as many words about how each farm works as about how each farm looks. A few of the standouts are Churchtown Dairy, another old Rockefeller farm in New York State, this one with an impressive double-decker round barn (second spread below) that's used by cows in the winter and people the rest of the year; the striking Mason Lane Farm in Goshen, Kentucky, designed by De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop; and the Schönenberg Farm in Basel, Switzerland, designed and owned by an architect who once worked for Herzog & de Meuron. It's an eclectic mix of projects that clearly embraces the trend away from agribusiness and toward smaller operations that are more firmly rooted in the land they farm upon.

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