Smith House II

Michael Prokopow author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oro Editions

Published:6th Jun '18

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Smith House II cover

Over the course of his distinguished career, architect Arthur Erickson (1924-2009) designed numerous houses, each an exercise in transforming the needs of his clients into tangible form in the context of site and place. Artists Gordon Smith (b.1919) and Marion Smith (1918-2009) of Vancouver were the only Erickson clients to commission him to design two homes. The first (1955) was a straightforward exercise in post-World War II modernism that represented the transplantation of prevailing North American design-thinking to the mountainous rain forests of coastal Vancouver. The second house (1966) - Smith House II as it came to be known - likewise situated in a forest but with the added benefit of ocean and island vistas, was simultaneously a deft reworking of the stylistic and spatial culture of the first house and a remarkable, path-breaking study in cultural transposition, interpretation and adaptation. Emphasising its disavowal of conventional demarcations of space and the movement within and through it, the house translated the material and aesthetic sensibilities of 17th-century Japanese domestic architecture to the circumstances of mid-20th-century North America (and the northerly Pacific coast).

"Smith House II certainly deserves celebration in a monograph. The diminutive size of this volume and the previous titles in the series may well carve out a niche for small-scale, budget-priced handbooks in a market dominated by luxury tomes."--Harold Kalman "BC Booklook "

ISBN: 9781940743387

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 290g

80 pages