Review: “Out There: New Architecture Across America”

On the evening of Sept. 9, together with our friends at n+1 and New York Review of Architecture, Punch List will be hosting “Ground Zero Plus 25.” The event, at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, will feature architects, artists, and critics making sense of what the World Trade Center site means today, a quarter-century after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. We hope you’ll join us. All the details can be found here.

And now for this week’s dispatch:

For a brief moment a couple of decades ago, it looked like the regionalists might take American architecture back from the superstars.

Firms led by Rick Joy, James Cutler, Julie Snow, Jim Olson, and David Lake and Ted Flato, to name a few, along with architect-educators following in the footsteps of the late, great Samuel Mockbee, were managing to make work that did everything a flashy starchitect-designed museum or condo tower couldn’t: namely, connect with place, history, community, and the needs of the planet while expressing architectural character through vernacular techniques and a frank materiality.

This lean, pragmatic approach looked especially appealing in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, which sapped architecture of capital. If the changing of the guard was never quite complete—if clients, media, and the public held on to their fascination with architectural celebrities, keeping the incentives for high-design formalism and self-promotion very much in place after the economy recovered—at least a wide beachhead was established for a more patient and honest way of practicing.

Fast forward twenty years, and a new generation of American firms, looking to those older mentors, is doing work that reemphasizes—and reimagines—the role of region and history in contemporary architecture. (Or maybe it’s better to say that two or three generations of American architects have continued steadily to practice in this mode, with younger firms joining the fold over time, and that the design press has decided, once again, to turn its attention their way.) Their work is collected in a handsome, doorstop-sized new book, “Out There: New Architecture Across America,” edited by Robert Ivy, Cathleen McGuigan, and Peter MacKeith and published by Merrell.