Just as last week's Places in Time III post featured a trio of books that were initially listed in my earlier holiday gift books post, two of the three monographs featured here were also on that list. As happened when I wrote this post, each book begins with a rhetorical question pertaining to monographs.
This post features the last reviews of the year. A week from today I'll have a year-capping roundup of my favorites from the many books featured on this blog in 2023.
Is it possible to love a monograph on a designer whose work you're largely indifferent to? Es Devlin is a phenomenally famous artist and designer who is best known for creating the sets and backdrops for U2, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, and other big-name musicians, and for such events as the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. Her London studio's designs for these and other performances, such as plays on London's West End, are provocative and attention-getting, befitting their spectacle nature ... but they're just not my thing, they don't strike my fancy. Her immersive installations, on the other hand, though I've yet to experience one, resonate more strongly with me; these include
Forest of Us in Miami and
Memory Palace from 2019. And while
I like the design and the labyrinthine layout of the monographic exhibition now at the Cooper Hewitt that is also called
An Atlas of Es Devlin, the appeal of her work to me is just fractional: yes on installations, no on the rest.
But reviewing a book or exhibition or some other creation is not about taste and personal preference; it's about judging the thing on its own merits and determining how good or bad it is relative to similar creations. For books, monographs are a genre in and of themselves, and some are better than others; some are notable for being hybrids. Though big, expensive, and with a print run in (I imagine) the tens of thousands,
An Atlas of Es Devlin — the first Es Devlin monograph — is as much an artists' book as it is a monograph and exhibition catalog. The spreads displayed here give a taste of the way Devlin, editor Andrea Lipps, who also curated the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, and book designer Daniel Devlin veered from the typical construction of a book — they cut circles in the pages, inserted smaller page sizes and even smaller gatefolds into the binding, used a variety of papers, etc. — to give it an artists-book feel, but on a considerably larger scale: the book is more than 900 pages, though given the atypical nature of the book it's nearly impossible to count the exact number. It is so big it comes in a specially made orange cardboard box for storage and protection.
Just as the
exhibition features an "iris" formed by overlapping and shifted circles cut into the gallery wall, the hardcover book opens with ten pages with circular cutouts that frame a photo of Devlin on the floor of
Memory Palace. The circular openings are rung with statements apparently in Devlin's hand, and radiating from the circles are complex, layered timelines of her studio's prolific output — the last a sign of how in-demand an artist and designer she is. But, befitting an artists' book, these pages go even further, adding raised dots and lines that accentuate parts of the timeline, veer from it entirely, and/or push us to find some meaning amongst the information saturation. The book then shows some full-bleed photographs of her studio's output before launching into the process-based presentations that comprise the largest chunk of the book. The presentation is chronological, moving from "A Student's Sketchbook" (spread above) that spans from 1985 to 1995 to the designs for plays, performances, and installations she is known for, one after the other for at least 250 pages. After those come conversations Devlin had with fellow creatives during COVID lockdown, then more projects, then another 250 or so pages of completed projects in color photos. The book is packed, fully.
The parts that make me appreciate the book so much are the process-oriented project presentations. Very few projects are presented simply; most are accompanied by a smaller inserted page and/or a gatefold — something that requires readers to do extra "work" that heightens their awareness and increases their absorption of Devlin's creative process. Each project, furthermore, is keyed to one of the color photographs in the last half of the book, requiring more flipping-back-and-forth "work" and providing a peek at the finished products. Put another way, it's impossible to nonchalantly flip through this book. The design and construction of the book force a slow movement and entice a steady gaze. One gains so much in handling the book that they need not read every description of every project to understand a lot about Devlin as an artist and designer. I can't think of a more ambitious goal for a monograph than the way An Atlas of Es Devlin gives readers such an intimate understanding of her creative thinking.
Is it better for a monograph to have project descriptions written by the architect or by an external writer? The first type ideally give readers some insight into the architect's creative process, though at times these descriptions can read as promotional materials aimed at potential clients. Descriptions of the second type benefit from some objectivity and most likely a critical position, but they might suffer from a lack of information and the sense, on the reader's part, of not learning enough about the illustrated projects. Most monographs fit into one or the other, including the two other monographs in this post: Es Devlin's monograph features project descriptions in her words, while the latest monograph on Jones Studio was written by curator Marilu Knode. Like the first volume of
Caruso St John Collected Works, put out last year by MACK but
reviewed on this blog in early 2023,
Volume 2 has a mix of project descriptions written by the architects and coming from magazines and other external sources, the latter often years earlier and outside of the context of the book.
If we look at the "Chicago and Milan" chapter, one of seven chapters in
Volume 2, two projects are presented:
Nottingham Contemporary, the UK gallery completed in 2009; and the
Europaallee Mixed-use Building built in Zurich in 2013. The words of the architects, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, are used for Nottingham Contemporary, in which we learn about the intentions behind their winning competition scheme and the inspirations for the lacy pattern on the facade's concave panels. The longer, more in-depth presentation of Europaallee is accompanied by an article by Ellis Woodman from a 2014 issue of
Architectural Review. The architects' mixed-use building is part of the Europaallee development west of Zurich Hauptbahnhof, which was
master planned by KCAP and is made up of low- and mid-rise buildings organized about a pedestrian street; Caruso St John's building is at an important spot at the western end of the street, adjacent to a square and near a new pedestrian bridge that connects this main part of Europaallee to a sliver of the development on the north side of the railway tracks. I've seen their building on trips to Zurich, though I can't say I paid much attention to it, as the whole Europaallee project — with buildings by Gigon/Guyer, Max Dudler, David Chipperfield, and others — is characterized by unrelenting grids of windows. It's a bit like
Tativille come to life. The Caruso St John building is in line with the rest, though Woodman admits that the narrowing of the piers between windows as the building rises — an element in the competition scheme that would distance the building from the earlier "joyless" building by Dudler — "came to present a significantly less austere image than was suggested by the initial renderings."
Although Woodman is primarily positive in his assessment of Caruso St John's Europaallee Mixed-use Building, it makes me think that very few architects would actually incorporate critical texts like this in their monographs. That Caruso St John did so here is following from the format of
Volume 1, in which texts by critics about the architects' projects are included, as are texts by others — architects, critics, historians, etc. — as long as they pertain to the issues explored by the architects in some way or serve as some theoretical foundation for their work. So Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered"
first published in Lipincott's Magazine in 1896, is also found in the "Chicago and Milan" chapter, as is "The Existing Environment and Themes in Contemporary Practice," an essay by Ernesto N. Rogers from a 1954 issue of
Casabella; these two essays give the chapter, which otherwise just features the two projects in Nottingham and Zurich, its name. Although the essays are presented without comment, the relationship between them and Caruso St John's work can be grasped without difficulty, as Sullivan's essays coming a few pages before the "tall" 13-story building at Europaallee attests. Even without an awareness to such ties, I greatly appreciate the inclusion of inspirational and important texts; it is one element that sets this series of monographs apart from others.
In addition to the projects spanning from 2000 to 2012 and the inclusion of articles and essays written by others outside of the context of the monograph, the book also features texts by Adam Caruso and Peter St John. Befitting the series, these texts come from other publications, from lectures and interviews, most of them within the years covered by the volume. An example is Peter St John's "Aldo Rossi's Gallaratese Housing," first published in Building Design in 2012. The architect first experienced Rossi's famous building in 1980, when he was a 20-year-old student on a scholarship, also seeing the buildings of Terragni and catching the The Presence of the Past, the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale. He recounts his first impressions of the building, discusses it relative to Rossi's famous texts The Architecture of the City and A Scientific Autobiography, and revisits the building to find it "more charming than before." A few pages later we read Caruso and St John's text on Pasticcio, a composition of fragments of classical architecture in Sir John Soane's Museum in London, and see their installation of the same name at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. That is followed by restoration work at Soane's Museum, a new chancel for St Gallen Cathedral in Switzerland ... the whole book unfolds in this manner: one unexpected piece after another, adding up to a thorough and varied portrait of the duo's quiet and occasionally timeless architecture.
Should monograph present many projects in just a few pages, or very few projects across more pages? Two years ago, Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers put out
Jones Studio Houses: Sensual Modernism, a monograph billed as "a self-imposed limited look at the 40-year-plus career of Eddie Jones." The thick, square book limited itself to houses (minus
Jones Studio's own "house") and featured just ten of them, highlighted by
Prairie Raptor, a stunning house in Oklahoma whose sculptural peak was inspired by Herb Greene's
"Prairie Chicken" built in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1954. Digesting the book with its many photographs and drawings accompanied by short blurbs by famous names lauding Jones's architecture, it was clear the book was an incomplete portrait of the studio run by Eddie and his brother and first partner Neal Jones — a first course, if you will, to a larger, more well-rounded presentation of their work.
With more than 40 built and unbuilt projects spanning more than 40 years,
STRIVE is that main course. If a food analogy for an architecture monograph feels a bit contrived, note that three of the book's five sections take on "Family Table" titles. Instead of a literal family coming to the table to eat, the "family" is made up of Jones and the other architects in the studio, and the "table" is a collaborative work surface about which everyone's desks are arrayed. "Family Table #1," as it's called in the book, was in an office building in downtown Phoenix designed by Alfred Newman Beadle in 1978. In 1984, Eddie moved the studio he had established in 1979 (Neal joined in 1986) from his house to the Beadle-designed building, and years later he expanded within it to create the open-plan family-table office space. (Some further synergy between Beadle and Jones can be found in the fact both of them relocated from the Midwest to Arizona: Beadle from Minnesota, Jones from Oklahoma.) Jones Studio stayed in the Beadle building for 32 years, moving into the purpose-built "Home and Studio" in Tempe that begins the book's "Family Studio #3" chapter. The floor plans in
STRIVE show how the literal table in the Beadle building is also at the heart of the now seven-year-old
Jones Studio Office; the table and branching desks are described in the book as the "nerve center" of the studio and an "open mosh pit of ideas."
So, you might be asking, what about "Family Table #2"? This is the most interesting of the trio, at least in the context of the book, and in two ways. First, for the exhibition
southwestNET: Jones Studio, Inc. that took place at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006, the studio moved its operations into the gallery for its three-month duration, from May to September. Indeed, the studio — the family — literally became the exhibit, sitting at custom-designed desks that converged to form "Family Table #2." Photos in the book show a somewhat typical architecture office, with computers, phones, and lots of papers in the middle of a gallery with drawings on the wall, drawings suspended from the ceiling, and museum goers taking in the scene. The second thing of interest is that the exhibition was curated by Marilu Knode, who considers it "one of the most exciting of my career." She was later approached by Jones Studio to tell the story of the firm in what would become
STRIVE. Her writing and consistent voice detached from the making of the projects help make this monograph so good, especially compared to the many monographs that are written in-house and read like marketing copy and therefore lack firsthand insight. People who actually read Knode's words that accompany the buildings will learn A LOT about the studio's process and what makes each project so interesting, beyond the obvious skill with which they've been designed.
Having looked at numerous architectural monographs, I've come to the conclusion that the project that occupies the middle section of a monograph is often the most important — both for the architect and for the book itself. The five chapters of
STRIVE start with "Jones Studio: The Early Years" and end with "Focused Future," chronological bookends for the three "Family Table" chapters. Given this structure, the second of those, "Family Table #2," sits in the middle of the book's nearly 500 pages. While the firm was working at the
southwestNET exhibition, they submitted an RFQ for the
Mariposa Land Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona. In 2007, Jones Studio got the job, which became a "colossal, firm-altering undertaking." While Knode's words partly reinforce my hypothesis for middle-project importance, the project's documentation in photos, drawings, and numerous texts over more than 40 pages cement it. The building, completed in 2014, is also found on the cover — another sign of the project's importance in the impressive Jones Studio portfolio.
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