Swimming to Suburbia and other essays

Összefoglaló

Once dubbed "an inveterate tinkerer able to improvise a solution to any mechanical problem," the Los Angeles-based architect Craig Hodgetts is equally at home on the construction site, immersed in interactive media, or under the hood of an Alfa Romeo. His restlessly innovative nature—kindled by training in automotive design, fine arts, theater, and architecture, stoked by important collaborations with James Stirling and Robert Mangurian, and currently fueled by his partnership with Hsinming Fung—has kept him at the forefront of architectural culture since the late 1960s, while his influential teaching at UCLA and institutions across the country has left its mark on several generations of young architects. Hodgetts matured as an architect with a thoroughgoing faith in technology and a calculated skepticism of the field's most deeply held habits and conventions. From the start, the written word has been a key element in his intellectual arsenal. This collection, featuring texts from the 1960s to the present, gathers an array of theoretical polemics, urban speculations, critical commentary, and other writings—a sci-fi intelligence report on a futuristic society, a city plan-cum-comic book, an amorously charged stage play starring Eileen Gray and Josephine Baker—that mischievously evade conventional categories. Together, they demonstrate Hodgetts's keen eye, quick wit, and highly original mind as they cut a revealing cross-section through a turbulent period during which architecture's confidence in the modernist project was exhausted, its intellectual energies redirected, and its cultural agenda reimagined in the face of environmental challenges, technological opportunities, lingering disciplinary traditions, and revolutionary new ideas.