Bedrock Detroit’s Post

Read Giles Heather's brilliant review of the latest volume of Caruso St John's Collected Works. "I can offer one opinion very quickly. I would counsel you to consider buying these beautifully produced and useful Mack editions, and saving up for subsequent volumes. "The cumulative effect of the numerous more obliquely weighted interviews with Adam Caruso and Peter St John presented here, alongside a wide range of thematically relevant texts by, for example, T.S. Eliot, Lisle March Phillipps and Louis Sullivan, give the Collected Works a heft simply lacking in a more processional set of drawings and images. It gives a genuine insight into their motivations and interests. "The architectural scene in Britain covered by this volume saw the ascendency of a form of enervating not-modernism characterised by Caruso as nonetheless 'informed… by the avant-garde formalisms of the early twentieth century.' What we might call the practice’s middle period was thus taken up with counter-proposals to this stifling and incurious uniformity. "The Caruso St John of these years had an oscillating attitude to modernism, characterised initially by a qualified embrace, but then moving towards an increasing reliance on recovered historical critiques (from within the modernist paradigm, just about)." MACK PUBLICATIONS Caruso St John Architects Llp Goldstein Heather Giles Heather #architecture #reviews #bookreviews