CATEGORY

Whether it's a house in the Hamptons, an addition to a famous museum, or a new building for an Ivy League campus, contemporary architecture doesn't get any more coolly, cleanly serviceable than Gwathmey Siegel, the large firm that since 1965 has executed some of the most high-profile private and institutional commissions in the United States (with a few abroad). Gwathmey Siegel's history of concise, user-friendly innovation is well reflected here, in this comely monograph of 26 residential, corporate, academic and museum/arts-related projects spanning 35 years; per custom, it should be a hernia-inducing 10-pound hardcover, but instead is a near-palmsized paperback that still manages to convey the sweep and scale of GS's work in its excellent full-color photography with succinct annotations by firm founder Charles Gwathmey. Appropriately, the fun kicks off with the now-famous house and nearby studio Gwathmey designed for his parents in the Hamptons' Amagansett in 1965. Its basic principles of several levels, volumes, and niches intricately carved into a basic cube would play out again and again in the firm's work, which always manages to cunningly incorporate all sorts of technical solutions and aesthetic charms into volumes whose outer limits possess the simple, geometric logic of buildings that children have long fashioned from a few wooden squares, rectangles, and cylinders. The Gwathmey Residence and the other Hamptons residences featured here (like the 1972 Cogan and the 1983 de Menil), as well as houses in southern California, Vermont, and Switzerland, collectively illustrate 35 years of palatial postmodern minimalism, a stripped-down, late 20th-century bookend to the rococo wedding cakes commissioned by the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and other assorted robber barons of the century just preceding.

But because GS's residential projects, as diversely striking as they are, continuously manage to look (especially from the outside) like anything but places where people actually live, the book's subsequent sections offer almost a sense of relief--these are the kinds of projects at which the firm excels, and those upon which it has built its considerable reputation: the gleaming, Meier-esque white tiles and columns of its 1987 office building for IBM in Greensboro, North Carolina; an ingenious new set of unapologetically modern innards (1973) jutting out of the august, old stone exterior of Princeton University's Whig Hall, whose original wood interior was destroyed in a fire; an elegantly high-tech Science, Industry and Business Library for New York City (1996); blond wood, luminous marble, and stainless steel fitted inside the 1911 Beaux Arts envelope of the former B. Altman department store; and--perhaps the firm's most high-profile (and controversial) commission to date--the 1992 renovation and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Guggenheim Museum, also in New York City--an undertaking that managed to vastly increase the museum's gallery and administrative space and address omissions or weaknesses in the original structure, all while linking it to a discreetly handsome limestone rectilinear addition that deferred not to a gamut of political interests but to Wright's original plans for a proposed annex.

Many other notable projects are included in the book as well, including an array of new buildings for Cornell University and an addition to Harvard's venerable Fogg Museum, not to mention the warm-toned Museum of Contemporary Art (1996) that has redefined downtown Miami, and a renovation/addition for the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (1997). A complex multivolume, multilevel, multiline configuration that somehow manages remarkably to leave the gallery's charming, original red-brick structure from 1927 as its centerpiece, it is this last entry which serves as a fitting final reminder that no one takes simple shapes and fashions them into something chic, clean, and clever quite as deftly or respectfully as Gwathmey Siegel. --Timothy Murphy