The Mythic Modern: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Depicts a number of design/build projects carried out by Travis Price in landscapes as diverse as Machu Picchu and Italy, Nepal and Ireland, and the Amazon, and Finland.

The Mythic Modern: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place depicts an amazing fifteen years of adventurous design/build projects in extraordinary landscapes from Machu Picchu, Nepal, and the Amazon to Italy, Ireland, and Finland. The projects are built in a modern idiom yet with designs inspired by local cultures and ecologies, a series of legacy installations a la Christo, but with a conscience. These award-winning and highly published projects have been called out as a convergence of Andy Goldsworthy, Frank Gehry, and Joseph Campbell with a dash of Indiana Jones thrown in. A decade and a half ago, Travis Price, FAIA, created the Spirit of Place/Spirit of Design (SPSD) design/build, educational exploration program for architecture students at the Catholic University of America to provide students the opportunity to research, design, and construct a project in nine days in a remote landscape once a year, and the program continues to this day. The design philosophy of SPSD enunciates a crucial turning point in modernism, which, while replete with Green underpinnings, takes a critical look at the preservation of authenticity and character in a contemporary design language.

The book tells tales of the adventures of building installations, which in turn tell their own tales about revived cultural legacies. A plethora of amazing National Geographic quality photographic images are displayed: action stories by photographers such as Ken Wyner, Chris Rainier, and Eamon O'Boyle. The visual record includes a superb library of project images showing the design process, key indigenous peoples, construction action, human-interest stories, finished projects, and exotic landscapes.

Author Bio

Travis Price, FAIA, is a multiple award-winning architect, philosopher, and innovator in environmentally sound architecture. A former consultant to the Carter administration on alternative energy policy, Price has designed architecture for over 30 years completing such projects as the world's largest solar building (the TVA's one-million-square-foot complex); planned new urbanist town developments from Virginia to Uganda; designed an array of stunning individual residences, commercial properties, and institutional monuments (e.g., the new Explorers Hall for the National Geographic Society, Oseh Shalom Synagogue, and St. John's College Library); as well as creating a line of furniture. A popular lecturer at Yale, Harvard, and the National Geographic Society, as well as adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon and the Catholic University of America, Price has received numerous AIA awards, has been featured in several films and television programs, and is widely published in journals and books internationally. He has run the Spirit of Place design/build expeditions for Catholic University for over fifteen years while serving as the graduate director for the Cultures/Sacred/Modernism Concentration. He lives, teaches, and practices in Washington, D.C. when not somewhere exploring the world. Wade Davis provides the Foreword.