Design Reads: Innovative American Architecture In Remote Locales

Out There: New Architecture Across America

text by Robert Ivy, Cathleen McGuigan, and Peter MacKeith 

Merrell Publishers: $85; 500 pages, 780 color images

Shining a spotlight on American architecture outside major metropolises is the remit of this compendium featuring, fittingly, 50 firms and more than 100 projects, many in “out there” locations like Duluth, Minnesota, and Livonia, Michigan. A map of architectural practices up front reveals the studios’ locations, they too occasionally remote—from Greenwater, Washington, to Maryville, Tennessee—while essays throughout on forebears and global context provide grounding. Among the standout projects, which are pictured here, from top left: Arcade’s mobile Melville Studio for the Mastheads, a writing-residency program in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Digsau’s Basecamp Delta pavilion for Scouting America in Glen Jean, West Virginia; OS Projects Gallery and studio for painter Vera Scekic, who commissioned Johnsen Schmaling Architects to revive an urban street in rust-belt Racine, Wisconsin; and Interior Design Hall of Famer Rand Elliott’s Glass Ranch residence in Logan County, Oklahoma. Marlon Blackwell, architecture chair at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, where book cowriter Peter MacKeith steps down as dean this June, waxes poetic in his foreword: “I am taken by how these masterful practices—some emerging, some well established—are all making architecture of the highest aspirations and being progressive in places that often are not… Unafraid of beauty, they believe everyone deserves design, even in places where it is seen as a luxury.”

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