Miró Rivera Architects and University of Texas Press proudly present Miró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia. For 20 years, Austin-based Miró Rivera Architects has produced an innovative, refined, and imaginative body of work that blurs the lines between art, architecture, and landscape. Featuring essays by prominent thinkers in urban design and architecture, Building a New Arcadia situates the firm’s diverse portfolio in a global context related to concepts of nature, sustainability, history, and urban design. Now available wherever books are sold.
“Miró Rivera Architects are design leaders in Austin’s creative ecosystem. Packed full of stunning photographs, splendid drawings, and thoughtful essays, this book illustrates how brilliant architecture contributes to the landscape mosaic of the built environment.”
The book opens and closes with two series of luminous pinhole photographs. Miró Rivera Architects commissioned Belgian photographer Sebastian Schutyser to capture their work with a pinhole camera (a wooden box with a small hole and no lens or filter). While Schutyser has employed this method of “slow photography” to document African mosques, Spanish hermitages, and Korean dolmens, these images are his first foray into contemporary architecture.
“It is through the lens of nature and the verdant landscape of Austin that the work of Miró Rivera Architects comes alive. This is a beautifully designed book...that will help readers to understand the work within the broadest frames of architecture and its history.”
Written by partner Juan Miró, the second chapter presents Austin as a model for the “Landscape City.” Ten houses are compared through a site plan, a floor plan, and a photo. These case studies catalog the character of the urban fabric at different moments in the development of the city. The detailed floor plans also offer a window into how different people live. Despite a wide variety of backgrounds, their common thread is a shared quest for a better life.
“The remarkable variety of Miró Rivera’s work always arises from the particulars of program and population, and the architecture that embraces and satisfies them is never formulaic, always bespoke. Architecture that knows where it is. And whose lives it enlarges.”
The core of the book features twenty of the firm’s most significant designs with texts, sketches, photographs, and drawings that highlight the ideas behind each project related to nature, urban design, and history. Incorporated into this chapter is a series of technical sidebars featuring “teachable moments” that are explained using new drawings and diagrams created specifically for this book. Over half of the photographs have never been published before.
“The work of Miró Rivera expresses the tautness of modernism, but does so gently. It is an architecture of stability and shimmer.”
Miró Rivera Architects does not “specialize” in any particular building typology. Their work ranges in scope and size: from a Hindu temple to a sculptural public restroom; from a mixed-use high-rise tower to single-family homes. The firm’s most renowned projects solve conventional problems using unconventional means and materials; they have established a reputation for seamlessly combining technical innovation with bold artistic expression.
“Miró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia engages nature and the city in a remarkable conversation. This book’s attention to detail echoes the care the architects demonstrate in their projects.”
“This monograph is as exquisitely composed and presented as the work it documents: it is an oeuvre that never fails to surprise and satisfy in its intelligence, inventiveness, and regional sensitivity.”
