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 "The defining factor in our firm's work is that we practice architecture in Maine, amidst extraordinary and ordinary beauty."
Although it has become something of a cliche for architects to say they pay close attention to a building's site and surroundings, for Elliott + Elliott Architecture, residing, working, and building along Maine's rugged coast has translated not only into refreshing architectural forms whose roots in tradition are clear, but also into collaborative processes with local builders and artisans, in the spirit of the shipbuilders and craftsmen of the state's history. Houses of Maine offers an in-depth look at six houses, from the celebrated House on Casco Bay (a modern update to a nineteenth-century Cape Cod) to Pond House (a Mount Desert Island summer cottage inspired by local fishing shacks).  Verlyn Klinkenborg's regular column, The Rural Life, is one of the most read and beloved in The New York Times.
Since 1997, he has written eloquently on every aspect, large and small, of life on his upstate New York farm, including his animals, the weather and landscape, and the trials and rewards of physical labor, as well as broader issues about agriculture and land use behind farming today. Featuring drawings by Nigel Peake, best-selling author of In the Wilds, More Scenes from the Rural Life gathers together 150 of Klinkenborg's best pieces since his last collection, The Rural Life, was published a decade ago.  Whether musing about the creative process, the merits of failure and criticism, or the challenges of keeping the studio lights on, designers make good, and opinionated, copy.
The Designer Says, the follow-up to our best-selling The Architect Says, is a compendium of quotations from more than one hundred of history's leading practitioners. Quotes are paired on page spreads like guests at a dinner party. A designer from the nineteenth century might sit next to one working today or two contemporary designers may strike up a conversation. Listen in as they compliment, provoke, and one-up each other in this lively volume of insights. This portable collection makes the perfect gift for designers, students, and anyone curious about the ideas and personalities that shape the art of visual communication.  Buried within the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exists an astonishing group of historical relics from the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present day, many of which have never been on display.
Souvenir Nation presents fifty of the museum's most eccentric items including a chunk broken off Plymouth Rock; a lock of Andrew Jackson's hair; a dish towel used as the flag of truce to end the Civil War; and the microphones used by FDR for his Fireside Chats. Smithsonian curator William L. Bird, Jr., regales us with the story of each artifact's origins and the quirks of fate that brought it to the museum. Smithsonian curator William L. Bird, Jr., regales us with the story of each artifact's origins and the quirks of fate that brought it to the museum. An accompanying exhibition opens in Washington, D.C.'s Smithsonian Castle in Fall 2013.  Trainor's gardens create sensory memories that foster a deep connection to the land.
Australian-born landscape designer Bernard Trainor has made it his life's work to capture the wild soul of his adopted home of Northern California. Neither a naturalist nor an architect, Trainor uses the tools of both to create stunning large-scale gardens that unfold over many acres. Across airy hilltops, craggy seasides, and other one-of-a-kind tracts, Trainor applies simple, understated frames to rugged natural panoramas, the better to bring them into focus. Landprints showcases ten of his most ambitious and inspiring gardens through gorgeous photography and detailed project descriptions.  Right in the heart of one of the nation's most densely populated urban areas sits an idyllic realm of graceful meadows, dense woods, placid lakes, and fresh air.
Brooklyn's 585-acre Prospect Park offers a rural refuge to thousands of visitors every day. Created nearly 150 years ago by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of New York's Central Park, the duo considered Prospect Park their true masterpiece. Prospect Park, the first monograph on this exquisite public space, makes it easy to see why. Presenting a wealth of archival and newly commissioned photography and insightful text, David P. Colley and Elizabeth Keegin Colley trace the park's colorful history from its creation in the mid-nineteenth-century to its decline in the 1970s and restoration in the 1980s, up to the park's new Lakeside Center facility, opening in 2013. |
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