Customer Reviews

William Turnbull, Jr.: Buildings in the Landscape

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This is a big, beautiful book portraying the works of an architect who strived not to design monuments with a signature style, but instead create wonderful places that fit their landscape. The book chronicles twenty of Turnbull's projects beginning with the Sea Ranch Condominium (with MLTW) and ending with Turnbull and his wife's own weekend retreat, Teviot Springs Vineyard. All but one of the projects (Sea Ranch Athletic Club)are residential, which reflects the nature of Turnbull's career. The book contains essays by Mary Griffen (Turnbull's wife and business partner), William Stout, Mitchell Schwarzer, and Donlyn Lyndon. Turnbull's buildings contain innate beauty, sensitivity to site, and the ability to bring common, conventional construction to a high art. Morley Baer's black and white photography is powerful and captures the wonderful subtleties in Turnbull's sometines simple and conventional structures that are truly "GOOD" architecture.

Taking the road up the coast to California's North Coast, home to most of William Turnbull's homes, one's watch seems to begin to tick more slowly, the mind-static of current affairs and fashion-chasing begins to fade while natural phenomena fill the senses to their brinks and make us feel somehow more whole. Turnbull's houses belong here. They remind us of something once sought but almost forgotten in our gilded and distracted age: what might it be like to live at once more modestly and more elegantly, with less pretention and less things and more time and space for self, family friends, nature? Turnbull was an uncramped master, whose considerable invention was grounded in a broad and deep knowledge of his metier and a huge feel for the land. Forging new ground is not always a noisy thing: Turnbull reminds us of this. Contemporary architects and students would be well-advised to study his elegant, livable and economical plans, to learn from his relaxed-but-disciplined construction techniques, perhaps even to model their rhetoric on his unpretentious, down-to-earth tone.

William Stout Publishers has taken the strikingly beautiful black-and-white photos of Morley Baer, combined them with readable plans and a helpful text to make an inspiring book. My only wish is that it were hardbound: my own copy is heavily dogeared from multiple lendings to appreciative colleages.