Book Review | Sightlines

Arts and culture magazine Sightlines has shared a thoughtful overview of our “luxurious” first monograph published by University of Texas Press. From the article:

Surprisingly “Building a New Arcadia” is the first book from the award-winning Miró Rivera Architects, led by Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera. For a couple decades now the firm has been producing imaginative and sophisticated built work that both astutely addresses a sense of place and landscape, while embracing architecture’s ability to function as art.

Beginning and ending the book is a photo essay by Belgian photographer Sebastien Schutyser who used a pinhole camera to capture some of Miró Rivera’s projects in riveting images with equal parts fine detail with slightly distorted effects.

Essays by design scholars Michael Sorkin, Carlos Jiménez and Nina Rappaport, compliment entries for 20 projects, each represented by multiple photographs, along with site plans and floor plans. And Miró’s cogent essay “The Landscape City” introduces case studies of ten of the firm’s single family residential projects in Austin, demonstrating the urban context of Miró Rivera’s design for “a city in an urban forest.”

A thoughtfully conceived volume, “Building a New Arcadia” offers a terrific overview of Miró Rivera’s oeuvre that also, by highlighting examples, widens an understanding of urbanism in Texas, and elsewhere.