The work of Spanish architect Julio Salcedo is shown in this book as a series of built and speculative projects. Salcedo's houses, early achievements that stunned both academic and professional circles with their freshness and precocious sophistication are presented with unpublished competition proposals for large-scale buildings. The projects in their varying locales, scales and ambitions all demonstrate a commitment to architecture as a conceptual medium with a capacity to tackle complex ideas as well as a material practice with a transformative worldliness. Each is a built essay that works through architectural problems of form, construction and material to achieve a thought-provoking resolution in a difficult yet satisfying beauty. The book complements a thorough graphic documentation of selected projects with Salcedo's own writings and critical essays by Luis Rojo and Ivan Rupnik.
As Michael Sorkin said at the Book Launch Party: "The book feels like a series of snapshots taken with a fast shutter of an oscillating object, of a blur of continuous invention. That is, it catches a series of positions taken by a single phenomenon that cannot but be observed differently every time and by every one."
No Comments