“Every day, far from any megacity, a mayor cuts a ribbon to open a new community center, clinic, or school. A grandmother sets her groceries down on a stoop-side bench before entering a new small house in Seattle, tucked behind one of her children’s homes. A mountain biker zooms over a rolling bridge toward an inventive natural park in Vermont.”
With these images of morning in America, Robert Ivy, the former editor of Architectural Record, introduces the collection of buildings in cities other than New York, where the magazine is located, he and his successor, Cathleen McGuigan, and architect Peter MacKeith, have assembled under the title Out There: New Architecture Across America. “When people feel the rightness of their built surroundings in their own bodies,” he continues, “when they experience how a structure fits in the landscape, when new places positively alter and affect their perceptions, they stand in the presence of meaningful architecture.”
Over five hundred pages of color photographs with short texts (and 135 plans or sections), the authors make the argument that these projects live up to that romantic ideal of architecture that makes a difference in discreet, but significant ways in small, but also not so small (Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle) places.
Their conclusion is that if you work not by making forms that are radical in their material, form, or spatial effect, but rather that warp, extend, or open the building elements that exist in a given location, you will succeed at achieving the kind of effects Ivy sketches at the beginning of the tome.
Many of their examples are convincing. Some seem more based on whatever styles are currently out there in the magazines and Pinterest boards, while there are a few too many luxury private homes by the likes of San Francisco’s kings of modernist chic, Aidlin Darling.
Studio Dwell Architects House 1909 Chicago, Illinois, 2021 © Marty Peters, Marty Peters Photography.
But the amount of small housing projects, park pavilions, schools, and other relatively modest additions to the urban scenes of this country do make you smile –especially as they are presented in the luscious and, I suspect, sometimes redacted photographs—makes flipping through Out There more than worth it.
By chance, as it is organized alphabetically by the name of the firms, the book starts particularly strong. Omaha, Nebraska is the home of a firm called Actual, which is the alphabetically-advantageous moniker for the firm Jeff Day, a local professor of some renown and great talent, runs.
His work is generally small and incisive, ranging from the opening of a small house in Lincoln into an “Art Chapel” to the conversion of a truck into a “Mobile Stage.” When you do work focused on art and catch the image at the magic hour, it is hard to go wrong, and these opening pages took my breath away.
Skipping over Aidlin Darling’s multi-million-dollar homes and crafted renovations and similar projects by Kevin Alter (Alter Studio), you then arrive at another firm I had never heard of, Arcade. Based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Troy, New York, which has designed mobile cabins, here shown in a misty field blooming with wildflowers, and park activations whose minimalism make you wonder about the larger context in which they appear.
The delightfully named Archimania builds at a slightly larger scale in the also larger city of Memphis, having completed a new home for the local ballet company and a youth farm, as well as resolutely modern house whose “unapologetically bold” appearance in a neighborhood of traditional homes makes it a bit of an outlier.
DIGSAU Basecamp Delta Glen Jean, West Virginia, 2017 © Todd Mason/Halkin/Mason Photography.
And so we careen around the country, taking in Studio Ma’s Scottsdale Museum of the West, with its scrims, metal frames, and concrete volumes balancing around what humans have made of the Sonoran desert, to my hometown Philadelphia’s DIGSAU, whose gritty Construction Training & Education Center for a community college in Wilmington, Delaware is a particular favorite of mine, to the jagged manipulation of corrugated metal by Rand Elliott that houses the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.
Rand Elliott Architects Glass Ranch Logan County, Oklahoma, 2020 © Scott D. McDonald.
Only rarely do the projects get much bigger or more attuned to complex social issues. The work Jonathan Tate has done in New Orleans is one of the notable exceptions, encompassing a public charter school in Clarksdale, Mississippi and a cluster of housing in New Orleans.
The trade-off is that this work is considerably less refined, at least as it is presented here, than that of the cultural mini-projects elsewhere in the volume.
Out There makes a case for the variety and quality of design you can find across the United States and presents it with elegance. What it edits out are exactly the kind of buildings for which Mayors should be, and I think once did, cut ribbons: the complex civic and housing projects almost every community in this country desperately needs.
Bright Common Architecture & Design Alone House Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2018 © Sam Oberter Photography.
Where are the city halls, the DMVs, the public housing projects, or the public high schools? The answer is quite simply that such commissions almost don’t exist anymore. That is because we as a society do not wish to invest in ourselves in that manner.
Similarly, the idea that you can renovate or even a build a small home for less than a few hundred dollars a square foot and afford what you might call architecture has gone the way of the affordable car.
Still, it is heartening to see what architects who are out there doing it (a phrase, by the way, I believe Christian Hubert and I coined for the still-ongoing LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design lecture series we started in the early 1990) are able to achieve and maybe just as thrilling to see how photographers can make it look even better.
My remaining nits are that the editors could have been a bit more decisive in limiting their choices to projects that are truly in fly-over land (and that does not include Chicago) and, what is more important, that they could have concentrated more on those projects that reuse and open our existing structures, rather than using more unrenewable resources to plunk down new buildings on empty or emptied lots. The All-Saints Church Cunningham Architects made from a warehouse in Dallas is a beautiful exception.
The great thing about Out There is that made me want to get in a car or on a train or a plane to discover projects I had never heard of, from those in Philadelphia by Jeremy Avellinos, to the school and other projects Lisa Gray and Alan Organschi have sculpted out abstractions of local forms in New Haven, Connecticut.
As a Baedeker for recent American design, this book is a compendium that will not be soon surpassed.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of:The Shakers | The V&A Storehouse | Fins on Buildings | New Museum & The Studio Museum in Harlem | The Modern Museum | Monuments | Infrastructure | Interior Design | Viollet-le-Duc | Malibu High School | Architecture without Architects | Louis Kahn’s Fisher House | Meow Wolf | Generative AI | Frank Gerhy | Robert A.M. Stern | Lars Lerup | Princeton Art Museum | Victor Legorreta | Mexico City Underwater | On Vitruvius | On Olive Development | Calder Gardens | White House and Classical Architecture | Louis Kahn’s Esherick House | Ma Yansong’s Fenix Museum | The Cult of Emptiness | An Icon in Waiting | Osaka Expo | Teamlab | the Venice Biennale of Architecture | On Michael Graves | On Censorship or Caution? | Uniformity in Architecture | Book on Frank Israel | Legacy of Ric Scofidio| Fredrik Jonsson and Liam Young | DSR’s New Book | the Stupinigi Palace | Living in a Diagram | Bruce Goff | Biopartners 5 |Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk’s Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris’s Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell’s new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite’s architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA’s Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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