Monographs

Unprecedented Realism:
The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti
K. Michael Hays
Princeton Architectural Press, 1995

For almost two decades the work of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti has remained at the forefront of theoretical production. Their rigorously detailed and exquisitely drawn projects characterize an attitude of aesthetic realism towards materials, construction, function, and the cultural role of architecture. Yet the conditions they address, and the effects they produce, are unprecedented. Their projects synthesize seemingly incompatible images, uses, and typologies.

Unprecedented Realismis not an illustration of theory. Rather what emerges is a constructive theory of architecture that understands the process of design itself as a distinct mode of knowledge -- as theoretical research that is still irreducibly architectural.

The book presents a range of work from buildings to urban infrastructures. Some of the projects presented include Steps of Providence, Rhode Island; Entrance for Cranbrook, Bloomfied Hills, Michigan; Carnegie-Mellon University Center, Pittsburgh; Pershing Square, Los Angeles; and Times Square, New York. Along with the analytic text of K. Michael Hays, the volume includes critical essays by Alan Colquhoun, George Baird, Fares el-Dahdah, and Rodolphe el-Khoury.

Machado and Silvetti, both professors of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, have won numerous awards, including eight from Progressive Architecture and four from the AIA.

Recipient of the AIA International Book Award, 1995

This amazing monograph breaks new ground, marrying text and graphic documentation the way architects marry theory and architecture. The essays are probably inscrutable, but the renderings are of astounding quality.

— Jury Comments

Hays has managed to elevate the genre of the monograph and to compose a text that offers not only insightful analyses of provocative work, but also a significant critical and theoretical structure that can mediate today's bifurcated currents in architectural theory.

— Val K. Warke

K. Michael Hays, Editor
Hays is a professor of architectural theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the founding editor of the journal Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture.

CASAS Internacional 40
Rodolfo Machado & Jorge Silvetti
Oscar Riera Ojeda, editor
Kliczkowski, Madrid : Asppan, 1995

Construction as an art, and not as a mere technical instrument, is verifiable in each of their built projects, and specially visible in their exquisite details, full of meanings. Even the unbuilt projects, this meticulous detailing has shown us a realism without precedent and a kind of enraged shout for their materialization.

"Mastering and Breaking the Rules"
Oscar Riera Ojeda

The Placilla de Peñuelas Project
Ira Tattelman, editor
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1993

One of the salient characteristics of the modern world is the apparent universality of many urban design and planning concepts. First developed in one place, usually out of a sense of practical necessity, they are often quickly transferred to other locales, often thought to be experiencing roughly the same conditions. After a while this process of invention and transference becomes, as it were, "a self-fulfilling prophecy," particularly in these times of such fluid communications. For what one community has for a variety of sometimes almost forgotten reasons, another wants almost as a matter of course. Without us ever being fully aware of these events, the contemporary urban and suburban milieu becomes strangely familiar in various parts of the world.

On the one hand, there is absolutely nothing particularly misguided or inappropriate about this phenomenon of conceptual diffusion. In a time, for instance, of rising social expectations about dwelling environments, and of standards of living, it is both understandable and even desirable that differences between various groups' circumstances should diminish or even disappear completely. There is a certain unalienable democracy, after all, in the sharing of such concepts.

On the other hand, when the apparent universality of urban design and planning begins to overwhelm, or worse, totally ignore otherwise vast cultural differences between one locale and another -- essential differences which compose the very patchwork of human existence -- then there really is a problem at hand. Unfortunately, one of the potential tragedies of modern condition is just that: the elimination of urban-architectural distinctions between places to the point where all may be comfortable but, regrettably, much the same. Nowadays, cultural awareness is a crucial ingredient in the prevalent international practice of architecture and urban design. Furthermore, the ability to step, as it were, outside of one's own cultural sphere, even for a moment, can be a most salutary and invigorating experience. Not only is it a matter of coming to grips with the obvious foreign norms and values of the other place, but it is also an invaluable time to reflect profoundly on one's own beliefs and common-place acceptances.

In an academic setting, design studios, such as the one illustrated here for "The Placid de Peñuelas Project" in Chile, are thus doubly valuable to an institution like the Graduate School of Design. First, they enable students to deal, first-hand, with familiar problems in otherwise unfamiliar places. Second, and as a consequence, they allow students those rare and priceless moments for self reflection which allow them to re-confirm or, indeed, disregard aspects of their own cultural condition.

To the sponsors of this design studio, Forestall Valparaiso SSA., and to all those who assisted along the way, we offer our sincere gratitude. Without their interest, generosity and hospitality, we would be greatly more impoverished.

Peter G. Rowe
Dean of the Faculty of Design
from the Foreword

Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti: Buildings for Cities
Peter G. Rowe, ed.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, NY, 1989

"On Teaching and Practice"
Jaquelin T. Robertson,
FAIA AICP

Appreciation and respect for the objective qualities of cities also lead Machado and Silvetti to make contextual responses in their designs, but without historical rhetoric or eclecticism. Wherever possible, they fundamentally lead by a conservationist attitude that preserves and enhances the city as a perceptible physical entity. Buildings interventions placed in an existing context like Leonforte or Este, are relatively modest in material terms, yet highly strategic in how they invite a greater sense of public awareness and responsibility for the physical realm of the city.

"Making Civic Circumstances from Objective Speculations"
Peter G. Rowe

Articles