Summary

SHoP is not nearly as "out of practice" as they claim. The prominent New York-based firm, founded in 1996, is at work on numerous projects--multistory housing, academic buildings, and master plans. SHoP--a truly collaborative office--did not achieve such success by keeping with the traditional structure of architecture firms, however. The partners look outside the profession for inspiration and ideas, in both their buildings and their business model, keeping in line with their mission to create real-world architecture that considers how design, finance, and technology can work together. They are known for streamlining the design and construction process using evolving computer-aided design technologies to produce innovative architectural forms. This method also helps them to reduce client spending by collaborating with manufacturers and trade contractors during the design process, rather than after all the plans have been laid out. This volume will explore six of the firm's ideologies--practice, typology, politics, finances, sustainability, and technology--based on six major projects as well as fifty smaller projects. This unique organization will allow readers to see and better understand the firm's work and business strategies, as well as provide ideas to improve their own building projects.

Author Biography

An architecture and design journalist, Marc Kristal is a contributing editor of Dwell, a former editor of AIA/J, and has written for Metropolis, the New York Times, Architectural Digest, Elle DTcor, and numerous other publications. In 2003, he curated the exhibition “Absence Into Presence: The Art, Architecture, and Design of Remembrance” at Parsons School of Design, and in 2009, he was part of the project team that created the Greenwich South planning study for the Alliance for Downtown New York. Also a screenwriter, Kristal wrote the film Torn Apart. He lives in New York.

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Excerpts

Introduction

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a particular way of working. I begin by making notes based on my thoughts about a subject and my research into it. This is followed by interviews, which I record and then transcribe—a time-consuming process, but one that enables me to discover things I missed while absorbed in the original conversations. I cut the notes and transcripts into strips of paper—sometimes hundreds of them—and lay them out on the floor, arranging and rearranging them until their order represents the story I want to tell in the way I want to tell it. With a pencil and yellow pad, I draft whatever it is I’m writing, then type it up with the Olympia manual I’ve had for forty-plus years, rewriting and retyping until the work is done—at which point it finally goes into the computer.

While I don’t work precisely this way all the time, unless I follow some variant of my routine, however cumbersome it may sometimes be, the outcome doesn’t feel authentically “mine”—because it hasn’t emerged from the process by which I practice the craft of writing. As a result of this approach—and my sensitivity to when my own work becomes authentic to me—I have always been interested in why certain things feel “crafted” and others do not. In 1964, Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously observed that while he couldn’t precisely define hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That is how I feel about craft. It may seem easily discernible. But the more of it you see—the more you realize how many forms it takes, and how imaginatively it can be interpreted—the more resistant craft becomes to easy explanation.

On the one hand, everyone knows what it is: craft involves, in the architect Adam Yarinsky’s formulation, “the hand and how it registers on the making of something”; an informed understanding of a (typically organic) material and how to tease out its potential; and a method of making that combines a vast store of skill-based knowledge with experience and artful intuition. Viewed from this perspective, a craft object is easy to identify: George Nakashima’s tables, a glass dragonfly by René Lalique, George Ohr’s pottery, a Fabergé egg.

On the other hand, this definition isn’t large enough to include what we instinctively perceive to be craft when we encounter it in other, unexpected places—for example, in product and industrial design, as in the work of Tapio Wirkkala, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and versatile creators. A gifted draftsman who could express himself equally well with hand tools, Wirkkala would produce countless sketches of an object, refining his ideas with multiple models and molds. Then he would migrate this craft-based sensibility to the mass-production phase: immersing himself in the requisite processes, making design adjustments as necessary, and working side by side with the fabricators, whether the object was a Venini polychrome vase or the Finlandia vodka bottle—perhaps his best-known design, the manufacturing of which required thousands of hours of experimentation. By keeping hold of the reins throughout production, Wirkkala was able to preserve the quality of craft that had emerged during development—a quality that remained evident in the mass-produced object.

This same double vision can be applied to the presence of craft in architecture and interiors. If there is such a thing as a common understanding of “the craft of architecture,” it can perhaps be found in the appropriately named Craftsman style of the architects Charles and Henry Greene—notably their 1908 Gamble House in Pasadena, California, with its superlative woodwork—or the English Arts and Crafts movement and its presiding figure, William Morris,

Excerpted from Re:Crafted: The Craft Influence in Contemporary Architecture and Design by Marc Kristal
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