Rick Joy: Desert Works

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Rick Joy: Desert Works Features

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About Rick Joy: Desert Works

From Library Journal This beautiful visual tour of nine of Joy's projects in the Sonoran Desert shows how natural they are to their setting. A transplanted New Englander, Joy uses color, texture, and materials to turn the six houses shown here into spare and subtle evidence of humanity in a vast natural world. He uses a similar approach, with expanded functionality, in the three studio/office designs that complete this book. The quiet of the settings and the simplicity of Joy's approach are perfect partners in producing architecture appropriate to a vast, unpeopled place. This book succeeds because it gives just enough room to the necessary text (Joy's preface, a foreword by architect Steven Holl, and an introduction by critic Juhani Pallasmaa), thus creating a book as lean as Joy's designs. The rest of the book gives us long views, interiors, and detail shots of these superb buildings. One of the publisher's "New Voices in Architecture" monographs on designers around the world, this carefully formatted volume makes an important contribution to an appreciation for contemporary architecture. David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., CT Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description Rick Joy builds with remarkable sensitivity, precision, and grace. The allure of his architecture is often quietly and seductively hidden in the sensual qualities of one's experiences: the sounds, smells, tactile qualities, and moods of his work. Granite crunching underfoot, the gentle trickle of water, and the lacy shadow of a mesquite tree all stir the viewers' sensations. "The simplest things can evoke the deepest feelings," Joy says. "The silence in great music is often more profound than the sounds." The nine buildings shown in thins, the first monograph on Joy's work, express his interest in making places that are transcendent moments of space, light, and matter. In each of the projects the physical landscape, its specific environment, and its rich history are revealed and celebrated. While many of the projects here use sustainable materials like rammed earth, Joy's primary interest is in the quality of the spaces he makes. He shows us how efficient and environmentally sensitive architecture can emerge as a by-product from a quest for the timeless qualities that are always associated with great architecture. Presented in the form of lush photography, insightful narratives, and revealing descriptions of his highly collaborative process, this book will bring one to a closer understanding of one of the most interesting architects practicing today. Review "...as simple yet emotionally intense as the desert itself...Joy's writing is eloquent in the absence of pretense." -- Architectural Record, April 2003 "...one of those American make good stories." -- Label, February 2003 About the Author Rick Joy is an architect in Tucson, Arizona.