Book Review | Yale Constructs

Constructs, the official publication of the Yale School of Architecture (alma mater of partner Juan Miró) has published a glowing review of our “sumptuous” first monograph, Building a New Arcadia. Read the full text below:

“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.”

For the past two decades, the architecture of Miró Rivera has been distinguished by the unfaltering incremental refinement of its practice, founded by Spaniard Juan Miró ('84) and Miguel Rivera, born in Puerto Rico. After studying architecture in Madrid and San Juan, respectively, the partners completed graduate studies at Yale and Columbia. They met while practicing with Charles Gwathmey (’62), and in 2000 they established the practice in Austin, Texas. 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.

In his insightful introduction, architecture critic Michael Sorkin writes that Miró Rivera's wide range of projects exhibit genuine “Austin-nesses”—essences of the Lone Star State's capital region that include, as he describes it, “barbecue and Shiner beer, bats and Austin City Limits”—the vibe of a city that is at once relaxed, compound, and exceptional. Although Sorkin doesn't use the term, he alludes to the fact that Miró Rivera's architecture appears to exude an affinity with critical regionalism, as articulated by Kenneth Frampton. Another inspiration is Austin's texture as a “landscape city,” a flora-inspired urbanism elaborated in an essay by Miró.

Sorkin characterizes Miró and Rivera as “monks and cowboys” because of their ability to draw together a variety of influences into a specific design that hammers down a sense of place like a tent stake on the range. Such attributes abound throughout Miró Rivera's work, for example, in the firm's design for the Chinmaya Mission (which won an award for New Religious Architecture from Faith&Form magazine in 2016). This refuge for Austin's Hindu community vibrates with Eastern and Western resonances. The architecture is a distillation of Hindu architectural traditions along with Texan hip-roofed agriculture buildings and rustic stone construction.

The mission's architectural heart—a central courtyard around which buildings are carefully placed and aligned—is defined by sculptural limestone sentinels (slightly taller than a monk and tinted in a light rust that echoes the traditional saffron-colored robes), which appear to watch over the community and its place. It is a wonderful example of how Miró Rivera brings together a host of influences and references: traditional construction, regional architecture, enduring materials, devotional attire, and the expansive blue of the Texas sky.

Some of the most engaging examples of the firm's work presented in this sumptuous monograph are the small projects with big ideas: for example, a San Antonio bus stop that appears on the brink of taking flight. Its protective inverted-gable roof spreads wide with wings, sheltering bus patrons like a hovering guardian angel. A restroom on an Austin hiking trail is contained within a gradually constricting coil of 49 Cor-Ten steel panels that appear as a modern-day unraveling Stonehenge, the apex of which is a cylindrical volume with a mysteriously levitating steel disk overhead. A footbridge connects the main house of a large residential project in Austin with a guesthouse over a shallow inlet. Leaping and arcing over the water, the bridge's slender steel structure is camouflaged in an array of vertical rebar, resembling a reed-covered duck blind or serpent.

In the book's cleverly titled Afterword, “Future Foreword,” architectural critic and author Nina Rappaport describes these diminutive opuses as forays of experimentation that continuously expand the designers' “orientation and Weltanschauung.” These elements are fascinating not only for their modest size but also for their inherently dual nature: bus stop or angel? comfort station or tiny temple? footbridge or swamp creature? Miró Rivera demonstrates that even a modest building can dream big and spin fantastic tales.

Along with these modest projects, the book includes commercial, institutional, and residential designs executed for the particular exigencies and characters of their sites, many of them in and around Austin. The houses in particular seem to stress life on the horizontal plane, reminding inhabitants of the vast spaces that distinguish this part of the country. One exception graces the book's cover: the Vertical House, in Dallas, a “machine for living in a garden.” A series of floating floors interspersed by glass planes highlight the verdant surroundings beyond. The house speaks with the lilt of Gwathmey Siegel.

Along with the contributions by Sorkin and Rappaport, the book includes an essay on Miró Rivera's work and its contributions to the architecture scene by Juan Luis de las Rivas Sanz, architecture professor at the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, and an interview with Miró and Rivera by architecture scholar and critic Carlos Jimenez. The book is bracketed by dreamlike pinhole-camera portrayals of Miró Rivera's architecture by Sebastian Schutyser. Paraphrasing Sorkin, this book presents us with an architecture that knows where it is and whose lives it enlarges.

– Michael J. Crosbie
Professor of Architecture, University of Hartford