Carefree California Cliff May And The Romance Of The Ranch House

Published in conjunction with the exhibition held Feb. 26-June 17, 2012 at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, as part of "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an precedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene."

A monograph of the informal style of the modern ranch house as reflected in the works of a forefront designer discusses his blending of California's Spanish-Mexican ranchos with cutting-edge technological features. 12,500 first printing.

"Drawing on the vast archival resources of its Architecture and Design Collection, the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum (University of California, Santa Barbara) presents an assessment of 50 years of design by Barton Myers (b. 1934), beginning with his work in the Toronto firm A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers (1967-1975) to his own offices in Toronto and Los Angeles, Barton Myers Associates (1975-present). Myers's strongest architectural ideas come out of the planning strategies of his early neighborhood activism in 1970s Toronto, his grounding in history, and his training in the classical traditions of site and space planning. Barton Myers is an avowed urbanist--a self-described radical in his early advocacy of old-fashioned qualities like density, mixed-use of new and re-purposed materials, and contextual planning in the late 1960s when that fundamentally conservative position was considered counter-culture. Myers' urban manifesto was codified in "Vacant Lottery," the title of the Design Quarterly issue co-edited by Myers and Canadian architect and educator George Baird in 1978 and which led to a renewal of interest in urban planning and offered a strategy for increasing population densities within cities while preserving the existing residential fabric. The term lived on long past the journal's circulation cycle as both an urban infill strategy and an acknowledgment of the ceding of city planning responsibility to the "lottery" of private developers. Myers's design practice has thus always been a social justice practice as well. Myers is also a brilliant designer of residential houses that take advantage of local landscape contexts and adaptive reuse of building materials, including steel and glass. Five essays - on urban planning, civic structures, reuse of historic buildings, single- and multi-family housing, and theaters - reinforce Myers's commitment to urbanism and reveal his flexibility with modes of modernism. Natalie Shivers introduces the early planning work in Toronto and traces the "vacant lottery" idea of neighborhood infill to the influential Grand Avenue project in Los Angeles. Howard Shubert examines the architectural and planning strategies, and political complexities, of several civic structures in Canada and the United States. Luis Hoyos explores Myers's additions and adaptations to historic buildings in diverse urban contexts. Lauren Bricker focuses on the use of steel and other industrial materials in Myers's houses and analyses the neighborhood-based designs of his multi-family housing. Charles Oakley describes the technical innovations, site planning, and historical underpinnings of Myers's theaters and performance complexes."

One of the visionary architects of the twentieth century, John Lautner designed dramatically innovative buildings with a rare sensitivity to site, vista, and structure. Accompanying a full-scale exhibition on Lautner at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum, this is the first publication to comprehensively explore his work, including his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright and the cultural and geographical context of Los Angeles, through an intensive examination of the archives of the John Lautner Foundation. Although Lautner's dramatic houses are well-known, this is the first time his work has been seriously examined by scholars. Historian Nicholas Olsberg contributes an analysis of Lautner's evolution, providing social and cultural context. Architect Frank Escher covers the relationship between his experiments in structure and poetics of space, and Jean-Louis Cohen discusses Lautner's place in new design tendencies.This richly illustrated monograph includes previously unpublished sketches, drawings, construction images, and Lautner's own photographs to unveil the evolution, originality, and logic of his designs, focusing on the atmospheres and vistas they establish and the connections to landscape and sensory fluidity that mark their innovative spatial arguments.

This volume analyzes the extraordinary patronage of modern architecture that the Tremaine family sustained for nearly four decades in the mid-twentieth century. From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, two brothers, Burton G. Tremaine and Warren D. Tremaine, and their respective wives, Emily Hall Tremaine and Katharine Williams Tremaine, commissioned approximately thirty architecture and design projects. Richard Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer designed the best-known Tremaine houses; Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright also created designs and buildings for the family that achieved iconic status in the modern movement. Focusing on the Tremaines’ houses and other projects, such as a visitor center at the meteor crater in Arizona, this volume explores the Tremaines’ architectural patronage in terms of the family’s motivations and values, exposing patterns in what may appear as an eclectic collection of modern architecture. Architectural historian Volker M. Welter argues that the Tremaines’ patronage was not driven by any single factor; rather, it stemmed from a network of motives comprising the clients’ practical requirements, their private and public lives, and their ideas about architecture and art.

An in-depth exploration of midcentury residential architecture in America, with extensive photos and design tips included. Post-World War II ranches (1946–1970) range from the decidedly modern gable-roofed Joseph Eichler tracts in the San Francisco Bay area and butterfly wing houses in Palm Springs, Florida, to the unassuming brick or stucco L-shaped ranches and split-levels so common throughout the United States. In this book Michelle Gringeri-Brown and Jim Brown, founders and publishers of the popular quarterly Atomic Ranch magazine, extol the virtues of the tract, split-level, rambler home and its many unique qualities: private front facades, open floor plans, secluded bedroom wings, walls of glass, and an easy-living style. From updated homes with high-end Italian kitchens, terrazzo floors, and modern furniture to affordable homeowner renovations with eclectic thrift-store furnishings, Atomic Ranch presents twenty-five homes showcasing inspiring examples of stylish living through beautiful color photographs, including before and after shots, design-tip sidebars, and a thorough resource index. Atomic Ranch reveals: Hallmarks of the ranch style Inspiring original ranch homes Ranch house transformations and makeovers Preservation of mid-century neighborhoods Adding personality to a ranch home Yards and landscaping A helpful resource section and index

The fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses. This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.