Turner Brooks

Architect Turner Brooks has quietly built a practice in rural New England that is comprised primarily of residential projects. By combining vernacular elements and traditional materials with his unique view of the relationship of buildings to the landscape, he has created a body of work that contains some of the most interesting small-scale single-family houses being built today. "I see my buildings as compact bodies-taut, stretched, swelling-objects with a strong sense of directionality, isolated on the landscape which they inhabit easily, but from which they are read as distinctly separate. They are often built on the scruffy abandoned edges of this great agricultural landscape-they hover slightly and are 'placed' on the landscape without any presumptions or ambitions of transforming it. They are simply there, containers that outside their own tight wrappers, assume no accommodation to or from their surroundings." The houses themselves -- crouching animal-like in their surroundings -- form a sort of architectural bestiary. Among the projects featured in Turner Brooks: Work are built works: McLane House, Starksboro, Vermont; Peek House, Monkton, Vermont; Gates Center, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine; Lombard/Miller House, Westby, Wisconsin; and unbuilt projects: Lobsterman houses, and Provincetown Eugene O'Neill Theater, Massachusetts. Heavily illustrated in color and black-and-white, this monograph brings to light the work of one of the most interesting American architects working today.