Book Review | Il Giornale dell'Arte

Il Giornale dell’Arte, an influential international magazine dedicated exclusively to news from the artistic world, has published a review of our monograph written by Anthony Alofsin, a University of Texas School of Architecture professor and Frank Lloyd Wright Scholar. The original review may be viewed here; below is the English translation:

The architectural firm of Miró Rivera, based in Austin, Texas, has published its first comprehensive monograph, pulling together work spanning the last twenty years. The English-language publication, nearly A4 format in size, consists of 432 pages, 95 drawings, and 230 photographs. It differs from the standard office monograph in several ways. The authors, Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera, his partner (and brother in law) invested significant effort in providing written justifications and explanations of their work as well exacting visual documentation. Rosa Rivera, Juan’s wife, collaborated in the effort to form a family trio. With support from essays by architectural critics, the authors intend to present their architecture as objects in the landscape of a New Arcadia, embodied by their hometown, Austin, Texas. Austin is on the edge of the Hill Country of central Texas, at a seam where the topography shifts from low rolling hills on the east to upturned terrain on the west. The area is filled with beautiful Live Oak trees, Juniper cedars, and a river. In the mid-1960s the town supported a robust counter-culture and thriving music scene. The authors propose that building at a low density in such a landscape is sanctioned by historical precedent as seen, for example, in the ancient Meso-American city of Tikal. 

While Austin is the idealized model for building in the landscape, the firm’s work extends beyond Austin to other Texas cities as well as to Mexico. Color photographs benefit from sketches and architectural drawings (with furniture layouts and landscape treatments) that are large enough to read and provide an optimal means of understanding spaces, construction, details, and basic design concepts. Such treatments at a readable scale are often absent from the typical commercial architectural office monograph, and they are in themselves a recommendation for this book.

As reproduced in the book, the work of Miró Rivera also differs from many practitioners operating at their scale of practice—the office has only 10 to 15 staff members. Throughout the United States there are small to mid-size firms producing creditable work derived from a twentieth century modernist idiom, often International Style spin-offs with a few wood slats added here and there. Indeed, Miró and Rivera have produced several beautiful and lavish art houses, but the range of the work exceeds their peers. Built work extends from a temple and school for the local Hindu community to grandstands, concert stage, and a 250-foot-tall viewing platform for a Formula One racetrack; from a mixed-use tower for regenerating the center of Monterrey, Mexico to a bus stop in San Antonio, Texas; from a boat dock to public restrooms of Corten steel along a running trail. They have designed Lifeworks, a center for people in financial and social need that dignifies asking for assistance and support as well as a public-school performing arts center in East Austin, the less well-heeled part of the city.

With so many different kinds of programs and clients, no single style emerges. Their work, however, is consistently aesthetically crisp, beautifully proportioned, carefully worked out in detail, and finely constructed even when budgets are limited. The architects enjoy the materials of building itself, find inspiration in them, and champion, wood, steel, glass, and stone in the long lineage of modernist ideology. Seeing the soft and free sketches that first define basic design ideas makes all the more impressive the precision of the final results.

References to a bucolic arcadia are appealing in these tumultuous times and the architecture of Miró Rivera often sits comfortably in the landscape, yet let’s not forget Arcadia comes with a price. Tikal is impressive from a drone view with its temples poking above a lush tree canopy, but it is green now because it was abandoned and became a ruin. While still appealing to upper echelon high tech executives, Austin, Texas, though not a major urban center in size, has the problems of many big American cities: homeless people, traffic, ineffective public transportation, and a reduction of low-cost housing at the expense of upscaling. Artists and musicians can hardly afford to live there, and the public school system is shrinking as middle-class families have no recourse but to move to the suburbs. With projected global economic woes, the pandemic, and the persistence of Trumpism, the city is also probably overbuilt with new condominiums, hotels, and commercial office space. To their credit the architects don’t turn away from these challenges but attempt to address public and civic needs while designing simultaneously for a wealthy elite. Their work breathes optimism and energy, much welcomed vital signs at this point in the 2020s.

Anthony Alofsin is the author of Wright and New York: The Making of America’s Architecture (Yale University) and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.