Product Description

Of the new generation of architects practicing today in Britain under the rubric "neo-minimalists," none has a higher critical reputation than David Chipperfield. As his fame and commissions have grown worldwide, Chipperfield now find himself in the circle of elite architects, including Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor, whose reputations have been built on an architecture of spare sensuousness. Chipperfield’s London-based practice has recently garnered a large number of prestigious projects, among them the reconstruction of the Neues Museum and master plan of the Museum Island in Berlin. His River and Rowing museum on the Thames has been hailed as "a minor masterpiece, a match of modern manners and time-honored materials" and won the Building of the Year Award from the Royal Fine Art Commission. The projects covered in this large-format, beautifully produced book include: airframe furniture; BFI Film Centre, London; the Figge Arts Center in Davenport, Illinois; the Royal Collections Museum in Madrid; the Toyota Auto building in Kyoto; and the San Michele Cemetery in Venice, among many others. Stunning photographs, and Chipperfield’s preparatory sketches and countless drawings illustrate this exquisite work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1539726 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 344 pages

About the Author
David Chipperfield maintains offices in London, New York, and Tokyo.

Customer Reviews

David Chipperfield: Architectural Works 1990�2002
Odd that the Brits-generally messy, philistine, and mired in nostalgia-should have generated, over the past two decades, such an impressive body of high tech architecture and purist design. Chipperfield-like John Pawson, for whom he once worked-is a maestro of luxurious minimalism, a perfectionist who demands polish and precision in every detail and on every surface. When he doesn't get it, he walks away: hence the omission of the Bryant Park Hotel in New York-a refined remodel of Raymond Hood's classic American Radiator Building-in which the client didn't stay the course. The thirty buildings and projects, plus furniture and ceramics, that he has anointed are arranged alphabetically to counter any suspicion of linear development. One finds a surprising diversity of invention. Curves sneak in, as they never do in Pawson's relentlessly rectilinear world, and Chipperfield's vacation house in Spain has a checkerboard façade. There are nods to Mies and Le Corbusier, to the English vernacular and to classicism-notably in his work on Museum Island in Berlin. The book is-of course-coolly beautiful, and concludes with a set of literate essays by Jonathan Keates. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

More books should be done like this
Of course, not everyone has a portfolio like Chipperfield either. Still, with so many books that are stuffed to make them thick (thick books are trendy, even if there's little actually read or see in them), and others being either summary catalogs or picture books with no drawings, it's nice to see a real, honest-to-goodness monograph like this. Sure, it does some odd stuff like present the projects alphabetically, but that's a minor point.

It's refreshing that the book lets the photos and drawings pretty much speak for themselves too. The images aren't just PR shots either, but they actually coordinate and are often analytical in nature. Of course, there's the old napkin-sketch-as-final-design trick, and a lot of these projects have no choice but appear this way because they're not built yet. Also, I think it's a crime that his early career work in Japan is mostly glossed over. The gorgeous sectional renderings of those early house designs are just postage stamps in the essays, but they should dedicate at least half a page for each of them.

The only thing that might make me hesitate about buying this book would be that much of the work is unbuilt, for now anyway. At the same time, would we get so much insight into the firm's process -- drawings, models, renderings, sketches -- if they had more as-built photographs at their disposal?