House Shumiatcher

(Hardback)

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Description

This is the story of a house designed by hatmaker-turned architect Judah Shumiatcher, built for his family in 1975, and demolished in 2013. Like so many other distinguished houses to Vancouver, the only crime House Schumiatcher ever committed was to be sited on a plot of gold. This image rich book, sponsored by the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia, is the first in a proposed series of noteworthy, endangered houses in Metro Vancouver. Due to rapidly escalating land values, many unique postwar houses built between 1945 and 1980 are being demolished. The series seeks to document this local building tradition before it is lost. As Victor Hugo tells us, books are made more durable then buildings. AUTHOR: Leslie Van Duzer is a Professor of Architecture and the Director of the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. Illustrated throughout

Reviews

"...perhaps West Coast Modern should more accurately be known as "West Coast Organic." This term certainly captures the essence of the Shumiatcher and Friedman houses, and the others covered by this fascinating series of little architecture books." --Martin Segger, The Ormsby Review

Author Bio

Leslie Van Duzer is a Professor of Architecture and the Director of the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. Originally from California, she came to the University of British Columbia in 2010 after teaching in architecture schools across Europe (Technical Universities in Helsinki, Vienna, Prague and the Architecture School in Aarhus, Denmark) and the United States (UC Berkeley, Universities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota, Arizona State University and Washington University). She has lectured and written for numerous international venues and has published three books in collaboration with Kent Kleinman: Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas, Villa Muller: A Work of Adolf Loos, and Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision. A fourth book, co-authored with Maria Szadkowska, Adolf Loos: Works in the Czech Lands, accompanies a traveling exhibition. Her fifth book, House Shumiatcher, the first in a series of building monographs on endangered West Coast houses, will be published in 2014. Her next book will be titled: Double Climax: Architecture and the Art of Deception.