Strange Details: Writing Architecture

Strange Details: Writing Architecture by Cadwell, Michael. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780262532914.

A lively and unconventional appreciation of pivotal buildings by Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn that reveals enough idiosyncrasies and conceits to make any rationalist shudder—and invites a deeper appreciation of the prosaic construction detail. Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpas Querini Stampalia Gallery—steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns—Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing affects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who "made strange" with the most resistant aspect of architecture—construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma.Cadwell explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpas Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wrights Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Miess Farnsworth House, and the reinforced concrete of Kahns Yale Center for British Art. Each of these architects, he finds, reconfigures the rudimentary facts of construction, creating a subtle but undeniable shift in a buildings physicality. And for each of them, nature is strange, and its strangeness infects; nature unmoors exhausted cultural ideas, constricted analytical procedures, and outmoded production techniques. An awakening to natures strangeness forces a new sense of the world, one that we can detect in these architects configurations of the worlds materials—their strange details.