West Coast Modern

by Sardar, Zahid; Millman, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9781423624394
• ISBN10: 1423624394
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-30
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Summary

Architects and designers are breaking new ground on the West Coast, incorporating tested ideas with modern technologies, materials, and concepts in thrilling and sustainable designs. This collection of more than 25 inspiring residences by such renowned western architects and interior designers as Ricardo and Victor Legorreta, Tom Kundig, Jim Jennings, Steven Ehrlich, Marmol Radziner, Aidlin Darling, Paul Wiseman, Terry Hunziker, and Gary Hutton showcases large and small homes that respond to the deserts, mountains, plains, and coastlines of the West. The sculptural forms and elegant interiors are at once both urban and rural, open to the outdoors, and always contemporary, comfortable, and stylish.

Excerpts

As the West commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge-its symbolic gateway to modernity-it also recognizes the catalytic effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor just five years after the bridge was built. Thatact transformed the relatively isolated West Coast into an armed frontier with bunkers ready for war. New suburbs for soldiers on the coast rapidly replaced farmland and orchards, and by the end of World War II, California, Oregon and Washington, as well as their neighboring states, emerged as a thriving, modern international frontier between east and west with clusters of ranch-style homes.

Among them, Cliff May's typical ranch-style designs evolved from his San Diego family's Hispano-Moresque courtyard home and his own European, Spanish Colonial and Mexican roots. Built with only some discernible Mediterranean and North African Moorish features to interrupt wood-framed stucco walls, large expanses of glass, lowslung roofs and broad verandahs, May's light-filled courtyard ranch houses shaped for modern open-plan indoor/outdoor living still resonate as new.