Lake Flato

Presenting their new and recent projects, Lake|Flato Architects demonstrate the inexhaustible potential of the modern house to enter into a dialogue with nature. Lake|Flato Architects, based in San Antonio and Austin, believe first and foremost that architecture should be rooted in its particular place, responding in a meaningful way to the natural or built environment. Using local materials and partnering with the best local craftsmen, Lake|Flato seek to create buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. Now more than thirty years since its founding, the firm has grown along with the range and complexity of its projects, yet it still considers the desire to build in partnership with the land to be an approach that remains valid and increasingly resonant. Lake|Flato’s first projects were houses, and these projects excite the firm still. By exploring the intimate relationship between family, place, and building, Lake|Flato create unique living environments that possess a compelling authenticity and beauty.

In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.

Few design firms are as celebrated as San Antonio–based Lake|Flato Architects, the winners of more than three hundred international, national, and regional awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ Firm of the Year Award. This book features the firm’s large-scale pursuits: arresting, airy, and sustainable public buildings. Featuring more than three hundred stunning color photographs, Lake|Flato explores sixteen recent projects from across the United States. The images—of Mississippi’s rustic-modern and ecologically resilient Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, the crystalline Witte Museum, the sinuous Confluence Park structures in San Antonio, and other spaces—are grouped by themes reflecting the designers’ ethos: nature, place, craft, and restraint. Architects Kengo Kuma, David Miller, Warren Byrd, Stefanos Polyzoides, Vivian Loftness, and Lance Hosey provide guest commentary, delving into the works and themes and connecting them to Lake|Flato’s larger mission of creating a meaningful architecture that brings people into contact with the natural environment while facilitating culture and community.

Though much of Robert Marino's work takes the form of additions to existing houses, the stunning rhythmic structure of these addenda infuses new life and energy into the existing structures. Trained both as an architect and an engineer, Marino is a master builder with an acute sense of space and structure. His distinctive use of materials, such as timber-framed or boxed elements as masonry components or lightweight steel bars, is a signature element in his work. This beautiful monograph explores his work, from residential additions to conversion of large commercial buildings.

"Architect Tom Kundig is known worldwide for the originality of his work. This paperback edition of Tom Kundig: Houses, first published in 2006, collects five of his most prominent early residential projects, which remain touchstones for him today. In a new preface written for this edition, Kundig reflects on the influence that these designs continue to have on his current thinking. Each house, presented from conceptual sketches through meticulously realized details, is the product of a sustained and active collaborative process among designer, builder, and client. The work of the Seattle-based architect has been called both raw and refined--disparate characteristics that produce extraordinarily inventive designs inspired by both the industrial structures ubiquitous to his upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and the vibrant craft cultures that are fostered there." --

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.

Highlighting thirty-five spectacular recently completed houses overlooking sea, lake, river, and ocean, selected for beauty and variety across the globe, Houses by the Shore features homes that demonstrate the extraordinarily diverse ways that today's leading architects and interior designers build and design homes on the water and new approaches homeowners are taking to life on the shore. Frequently elegant and uncluttered, these houses serve as models of smart and often exquisite design with lots of ideas for homeowners who don't necessarily live in a waterfront home, but who wish to have something of that appeal and sensitivity in their own space. A range of projects encompassing myriad geographic and cultural inspirations show some of the world's most inviting residences, built in stone and glass, in wood and steel and concrete. The houses vary in size and style, though all within the realm of the modern, from open plan homes that include terraces and rooms that flow from indoors to out, to spaces flooded with light and views. Each house is photographed comprehensively with detailed interior and exterior pictures and plans, and placed into context through the lens of widely respected editor Oscar Riera Ojeda and descriptive texts written by design critic Byron Hawes, to give readers a privileged look at the best of shore-side residential architecture. With its beautiful modernist homes set beside the golden sands of the gulf coast of Mexico or upon the romantic islands of Greece, from Finland to South Africa to New Zealand, Houses by the Shore is a paean to rooms with a view.

Off the Grid confronts the ecological and cultural problems associated with the way we get and use energy, and explains how it is possible to live in a beautifully designed home using much less--no matter where your home is located. Our homes are connected by a nearly invisible grid of infrastructure that binds us together. It is a system of electrical poles, wire, substations, hydroelectric dams, telecommunication towers, and water extraction and sewage systems. From within this system we work, play, and raise families. We have also created one of the greatest environmental challenges known to modern civilization. The signs of our impact upon the world can be recognized in the reports of environmental changes occurring across the earth, and they can also be seen in the growing failures of the energy grids across the world as the current system is stressed beyond its capacity. Technologies that can be used to live off the grid (geothermal energy use, wind turbines, photovoltaic arrays, micro hydropower, rainwater collection and reclamation, and more) are explained as author Lori Ryker shows how to choose and incorporate these sources according to geography and climate. Off the Grid beautifully illustrates that this is not just a concept for rural living; examples of homes that are -off the grid- to varying degrees are found in New York City; Ontario, Canada; Stuttgart, Germany; Belmont, California; Pipe Creek, Texas; Clyde Park, Montana; Twin Lakes, Minnesota; Laytonville, California; Venice, California; and New South Wales, Australia. Off the Grid shows how we can take responsibility for our future choices and conveniences now, and proves that off-the-grid living is a concept that can be easily understood and adopted by everyone, regardless of where you live or how much money you make. Lori Ryker grew up in Texas and has lived and worked in a variety of locations, including Boston, New York City, Portland, and Basel, Switzerland. She now resides in Livingston, Montana, where she teaches in the School of Architecture at Montana State University and is a partner, along with Brett W. Nave, of Ryker/Nave Design. Their work has been published in The House You Build, and Western Interiors and Design. Ryker holds a MArch from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Ph.D. from Texas A & M University. She is the author of Mockbee Coker: Thought and Process.