Synopses & Reviews
Learning Through Practice presents the explorations of the architects and urban designers at Rogers Partners. In its 20 years of practice designing in cities around the country, the firm has maintained an attitude of curiosity about the elements that make design. From the smallest detail to the largest impositions, their work penetrates sites and their stories to feel their inherent conditions and find inspiration in the discovery of the unseen, the peculiar, the untouchable and the immovable. The book introduces six topics that pervade this journey. It is the story of how these designers acquire knowledge and expertise in what they haven't done but are doing, by making buildings, spaces and things. Navigating from how small things can have massive effect and finding adaptability in authenticity, to opening space, revealing the unexpected, designing the invisible to delight, and engaging responsibly with inherited patterns, Rogers and Moutaud use the lens of twelve of the firm's projects, analyzed in twenty-two case studies that support those six themes. Essays and catalogued inspirations preface each chapter while a display of large images for each project discussed concludes the book. These projects include a park and pavilion on the National Mall and one in Minneapolis, a corporate campus in downtown Oklahoma City, the Ellipse behind the White House, an open space in the Tetons, the narrow streets in New York's Financial District and the new ones along the Hudson River, a temporary art museum in Kowloon, a power plant in Syracuse, benches to aid New York's resilience, and many more to come.
Review
"This book offers a distillation of how designing great public spaces is as delicate an art as arranging a Japanese rock garden - and as robust an enterprise as protecting, gracefully, New York's Financial District. Few architectural firms are as attentive to economy of means - in every sense - in order to form public spaces fulfilling our humanity at its best." Norman Weinstein
Synopsis
Learning Through Practice demonstrates how architects learn by practicing and by designing ... not just by solving problems, but by changing the problems themselves. For 30 years, architect Rob Rogers has explored the edges of architecture and the places between various disciplines: the spaces where architecture, landscapes and the civic realm converge. Designing in cities around the country, his firm, Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers, creates work that is built on solid research, analysis, discovery, and shared experience. Through the various lenses of sixteen different projects, analyzed in twenty-two case studies, Learning Through Practice explores ideas fundamental to Rogers' practice of architecture. With contributing editor, Isabelle Moutaud, Rogers deftly navigates the reader through six principles that have guided his approach to designing engaging 21st-century environments: the impact of small things, delight, authenticity, what you don't see, open spaces, and the impact of big things. A premise on 21st-century architectural practice, Rogers unfolds, layer by layer, the architectural and civic projects based on these principles. Featured projects include a park and pavilion on the National Mall; a corporate campus in downtown Oklahoma City, OK; the Ellipse south of the White House; an open space in Cody, WY; redesigned streetscapes in New York City's Financial District and along the Hudson River; a temporary art museum in Kowloon, Hong Kong; a cogenerative power plant in Syracuse, NY; and many more.
About the Author
The founding partner of Rogers Partners, Architects+Urban Designers, Rob Rogers creates institutional and cultural buildings that are civic work. Believing that even a single building is a piece of urban design, his work assertively and elegantly combines urbanism, landscape and architecture. Rogers holds a BA and a Bachelor in Architecture from Rice University and a Master of Design Studies, with Distinction, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.A passion for architecture and its impact on city and culture has led Isabelle Moutaud to work with some of the country's most celebrated rising design firms. She has advised and written for architects, urban designers and landscape architects for twenty years and is a published author in the US and Europe. After working with Rogers, she directed the book's content to express the powerful simplicity of the firm's approach to design.