Margaret Helfand Architects

Since 1981, the office of Margaret Helfand Architects has employed this guiding philosophy to produce commercial, residential, and institutional designs of arresting sensuality, logic, and simplicity. In a great variety of projects - apartments and houses, institutional buildings and commercial designs, offices and showrooms, furniture and objects - such basic materials as steel, wood, glass, and stone are subjected to a minimum of transformation, allowing their inherent colors, textures, and structural properties to shape the architecture. Helfand has extended her scrupulous process of analysis and design to this volume. Twenty buildings and projects - all illustrated with exceptional color photographs - have been rigorously analyzed according to Helfand's three essential axes of geometry, structure, and materials. Each of the works - including Kohlberg Hall for Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, the Child Development Center for Bronx Community College in New York, and industrial building in upstate New York, offices for her firm and for Time Out New York magazine, and two spectacular apartments in New York - builds on themes from previous designs and simultaneously expresses her passion for materials and techniques. Paola Antonelli's introduction places Helfand within the tradition of American modernism, tracing both European domination over the East Coast and contextual and pragmatic trends on the West Coast. Helfand's own experiences, from architecture school at the University of California at Berkeley in the midst of the countercultural era to rebuilding and then sailing a ninety-foot schooner - which introduced her to traditional and vernacular architecture around the world - were also extremely influential. The practice of Margaret Helfand Architects - individual and personal yet strongly affected by both national and international themes - thus exemplifies what Antonelli calls "the new age of modernism worldwide." -- from front flap.