Contemporary Texas Architecture

- Showcases contemporary residential architecture and design across the state of Texas, by renowned America-based architects and designers - Augments Images Publishing's particularly large range of successful books on contemporary residential architecture and design - Features stunning full-color photography throughout, informative descriptions and detailed floor plans - Contextualizes with an introduction by an acclaimed expert on the profound influences of key architecture and design practitioners and the topic of building in variable environments throughout Texas Forget the Texas you thought you once knew, put aside those cattle ropin' preconceptions and make way for Texas Modern, a close look into the Lone Star State's innovative contemporary architecture and design scenes. Showcasing a stunning range of modern homes, this book will inspire best-design practice and spur on lifestyle dreams. Set out with beautiful full-color photography and laden with intricate plans and drawings, Texas Modern delves into the finer details of trending architectural styles. The exquisite kitchens, glorious living spaces, sumptuous bedrooms, luxurious bathrooms, spectacular outdoor entertaining areas, and other delightful spaces, including a private yoga studio, will have you seriously reconsidering any notion of architectural convention across this larger-than-life and totally unique American state.

Spectacular Modern Homes of Texas is the newest installment in Signature's spectacular book series. Brimming with beautiful photography and dreamy design, this book has something for everyone's taste and style. Showcasing a wide variety of approaches to modern design, readers will get a tour inside private homes designed by Texas' top interior designers and architects. Get a first class tour inside Texas most unique and stunning homes such as a posh Austin penthouse, a vertical glass house in Dallas, and a sprawling Hill Country estate with a historic farmhouse exterior and cutting edge modern interiors. Totally unique, just like the state of Texas, this book will stir the designer in you and be a beautiful decor piece on your coffee table. You've never seen Texas look so good.

"Geometry in Architecture, a revised edition of Pioneer Texas Buildings, juxtaposes the historic structures with works by twenty contemporary architects who are inspired by the pioneer tradition to show how seamlessly the basic geometries translate from one era to another. As in the earlier book, sketches and brief commentary by Clovis Heimsath explain how squares, triangles, and circles take shape in the cylindrical forms that comprise houses and other buildings. Then black and white photographs, the heart of the book, illustrate these geometric forms in historic and modern buildings."--BOOK JACKET.

A long-overdue book documenting a state with a growing population, this richly illustrated collection of homes displays the work of 34 Texas architects whose buildings embrace their region and place. These award-winning residences vary in style, scale, budget, and site, but they are all positioned to incorporate the Texas light, landscape, and local materials. More important, they are designed and constructed to deal with the prospect of climate change, including Texas-size hurricanes, tornadoes, heat, and drought. Readers will appreciate the regional rigor of these buildings sited on the Hill Country's arid escarpments, deep in the piney woods of East Texas, and in the insufferable heat of the southern coastal plain. Being Texas proud means being place proud, yet all of the projects showcase principles that are surprisingly universal.

A compelling survey of Texas houses that draw both on the heritage of pioneer ranches and on the twentieth-century design principles of modernism. Helen Thompson and Casey Dunn, the writer/photographer team that produced the exceptionally successful Marfa Modern, join forces again to investigate Texas modernism. The juxtaposition of the sleek European forms with a gritty Texas spirit generated a unique brand of modernism that is very basic to the culture of the state today. Its roots are in the early Texas pioneer houses, whose long, low profiles express an efficiency that is basic to the modern idiom. This Texas-centric style is focused on the relationship of the house to the site, the materials it is made of--most often local stone and wood--and the way the building functions in the harsh Texas climate. Dallas architect David R. Williams was the first to combine modernism with Texas regionalism in the 1930s, and his legacy was sustained by his protégé O'Neil Ford, who practiced in San Antonio from the late 1930s until his death in the mid 1970s. Their approach is seen today in the work of Lake/Flato Architects and a new generation of designers who have emerged from that distinguished firm and continue to elegantly merge modernism with the vocabulary of the Texas ranching heritage. Twenty houses are included from across the state, with examples in major urban centers like Dallas and Austin and in suburban and rural areas, including a number in the evocative Hill Country.

Representative homes built by 12 architects working in Mexico are profiled with text and numerous color photographs. Modernism as well as the natural and human environment of Mexico influences all the architects profiled. Categorized under the headings colorists, personal visions, and functionalists, the profilees include Jorge Robles, Agustin, Hernandez, Abraham Zambludovksy. Isaac Broid, Carlos Santos Maldonado, and J.B. Johnson. Also included is an introductory chapter that discusses the history of Mexican design from the Aztecs to the Modernists. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Twenty-one houses in and around Marfa, Texas, provide a glimpse at creative life and design in one of the art world’s most intriguing destinations. When Donald Judd began his Marfa project in the early 1970s, it was regarded as an idiosyncratic quest. Today, Judd is revered for his minimalist art and the stringent standards he applied to everything around him, including interiors, architecture, and furniture. The former water stop has become a mecca for artists, art pilgrims, and design aficionados drawn to the creative enclave, the permanent installations called “among the largest and most beautiful in the world,” and the austerely beautiful high-desert landscape. In keeping with Judd’s site-specific intentions, those who call Marfa home have made a choice to live in concert with their untamed, open surroundings. Marfa Modern features houses that represent unique responses to this setting—the sky, its light and sense of isolation—some that even predate Judd’s arrival. Here, conceptual artist Michael Phelan lives in a former Texaco service station with battery acid stains on the concrete floor and a twenty-foot dining table lining one wall. A chef’s modest house comes with the satisfaction of being handmade down to its side tables and bath, which expands into a private courtyard with an outdoor tub. Another artist uses the many rooms of her house, a former jail, to shift between different mediums—with Judd’s Fort D. A. Russell works always visible from her second-story sun porch. Extraordinary building costs mean that Marfa dwellers embrace a culture of frontier ingenuity and freedom from excess—salvaged metal signs become sliding doors and lengths of pipe become lighting fixtures, industrial warehouses are redesigned after the area’s white-cube galleries to create space for private or personally created art collections, and other materials are suggested by the land itself: walls are made of adobe bricks or rammed earth to form sculptural courtyards, or, in one remarkable instance, a mix of mud and brick plastered with local soils, cactus mucilage, horse manure, and straw.

It's been our distinct pleasure over the past few years to publish monographs on a select group of young architects and firms whose work represents the best of contemporary design thinking while retaining a distinctive regional sensibility. The Nova-Scotian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons fits neatly into this distinguished list, which includes Marlon Blackwell in the Ozarks, Rick Joy in the Southwest, andMiller/Hull in the Northwest. Those familiar with Nova Scotia understand the austere beauty of this Canadian landscape, with its wide open skies and rugged terrain pushing up against the Atlantic. MacKay-Lyons's work responds to this unique topography and to the vernacular building traditions that define its communities. His houses, commercial buildings, and public projects combine regional forms with local materials, technologies, and building practices to create works that are linked to their environments right down to their DNA.Peaked gables, shed roofs, and sliding doors are inspired by local barn types; corrugated metal cladding comes from the buildings used by the areas fishing industry; structural wooden frames are based on local ship-building traditions. These elements communicate a sense of place that is sophisticated, accessible, and free of sentimentality. Novelist and historian Malcolm Quantrill weaves together an intimate portrait of MacKay-Lyons and his work, elucidating the "peculiar regionality" of his subject's architecture. A New Voices monograph published with The Graham Foundation.