Turner Brooks
Autor de Turner Brooks: Work
Obras de Turner Brooks
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Educación
- Yale College
Yale School of Architecture - Ocupaciones
- architect
- Organizaciones
- Turner Brooks Architecture
- Premios y honores
- Rome Prize Fellowship (1984)
- Biografía breve
- Mr. Brooks is a principal of Turner Brooks Architects, based in New Haven. The firm, established in Starksboro, Vermont, in 1972, initially designed (and often built) small houses and community facilities local to the area. The firm’s current work includes a new building for the performing arts at the campus of the Cold Spring School in New Haven and the conversion of an existing Masonic Lodge into space for art studios and the performing arts in West Haven, Connecticut. Recently finished are the Cushing Collection at the Yale School of Medicine, a small museum and archive space exhibiting the work and collections of the pioneering brain surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing, and a new campus with housing and community facilities at a center for the treatment of children with autism spectrum disorder. Student housing at Marlboro College in Vermont, the Gilder Boathouse for Yale University, the Richard W. Woolworth Library of the Stonington Historical Society, and the Gates Center for the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, are among the firm’s published institutional projects. The monograph Turner Brooks: Work was published in 1995. His work also has been featured in books and magazines domestically and abroad and in an exhibition at Middlebury College in December of 2010. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation, and he was awarded a Mid-Career Rome Prize Fellowship in 1984. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Miami, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont. Mr. Brooks received B.A. and M.Arch. degrees from Yale University.
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Miembros
- 17
- Popularidad
- #654,391
- Valoración
- 3.5
- Reseñas
- 1
- ISBNs
- 2
Yes, his fetish about mobile houses and deep, circuitous and mysterious pathways might seem like typical one-liners to justify his quirky formal approaches but, at least the former really goes a long way in justifying the idiosyncratic nature of the work. The mysterious aspect doesn’t necessarily come through in pics, plans, and, I’m sure, the low budget realizations. Per his ghostly renderings, the mobility thing is not so much in regards to ubiquitous “manufactured homes” but literally pitched-roof, archetypal houses driving down dark roads with their own headlights!
There is a seeming conflict in a design ideal rooted in a particular place, yet one that is also inspired by and formally redolent of mobile things (roving machines, insects, Airstream trailers, or whatever). This dilemma seems best evidenced by his physical models. Bloomer writes about how, as a student, Brooks made a gargantuan plaster site model to relate his studio project to a much larger contextual sphere than the mere property boundaries – and this approach is obviously standard fare for any architect(s) who claims a rooted interconnectedness to a particular context. Yet the models Brooks created for these projects are placeless. Much like John Hejduk’s miniature study models that he supposedly carried around in his pocket, Brooks’ constructs have no site whatsoever and are occasionally photographed in piles. This seems to relate to the nomadic theme, infusing the projects with the placeless universality of an automobile. But the other, and I think more important, aspect is how a home occupies a particular landscape. He speaks about axial connections to wood bridges two miles away for Chrissakes! What happened to the model bases?
As this is another fine Princeton Architectural Press offering, I find it unbelievable that there don’t seem to be any major spelling or grammatical errors! The monograph has some typical problems though. Rather incomplete documentation disables any kind of holistic reading of many projects; for instance, the “Alley Stair” proposal includes one sentence and two model pics not showing the alley nor the building that the stair is supposed to occupy and serve! Many works are missing key floor plans (and a few are no better than smudges on the page) and there are plenty of pointless, postage stamp-sized photos of the houses positioned way off yonder in a field. Despite a purportedly comprehensive oeuvre up to 1995, when you see the list of houses previously published elsewhere – such as in Architectural Record “Houses” issues - and even some of the references in Kent Bloomer’s essay, there are some inexplicable project omissions.
This is strong work generally. Brooks approaches these projects in a peculiar but compelling way in relation to specific sites – if less so on the basis of rusting classic automobile metaphors. Importantly, the written narratives enable one to smile genuinely at (or “with”) the work – the odd formal/spatial contortions and “diabolical inflection of elevations” as Bloomer has it – as opposed to the troubled, head-scratching process I went through upon a quick visual survey a few years ago.… (más)