Book Review | Archidose
Influential architecture book critic John Hill has penned an insightful and thorough review of our monograph on his website, A Daily Dose of Architecture Books. The review heaps particular praise upon the multitude of page- and spread-size drawings that are featured throughout the book—many of which were created specifically for the monograph. Check out the full review below.
“These twenty buildings spanning twenty years make me eager to see what the next twenty years hold for Miró Rivers Architects.”
For me, two projects define the Austin architecture firm of Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera: the pedestrian bridge connecting a house and guest house they also designed; and Circuit of The Americas (COTA), a massive sports venue made up of multiple parts (grandstand, amphitheater, observation tower). Outside of the fact the firm designed a couple pedestrian bridges to allow visitors to traverse the Formula One racetrack to access the different parts of COTA, the two projects are miles apart typologically. They are also quite different in terms of scale, with the pedestrian bridge serving a family and its guests and COTA able to host 120,000 people for races, soccer matches, concerts, and other events. There are formal similarities, in the bridge's bar guardrails and the observation tower's bright-red tubular "veil"—gestures that repeat in other projects, as revealed in the spreads below — but it's diversity that seems to tie the firm's buildings together.
Michael Sorkin echoes the variety of the firm's output in his posthumous preface: "What might otherwise be called a 'style' seems so indigenous and assumes so many guises that it evades any analysis that tries to isolate or refract its particular vocabularies and moves." The "guises" focus on two types of projects: single-family houses and public buildings. Following Sorkin's text and one by Juan Luis de las Rivas Sanz, Juan Miró's "The Landscape City" briefly describes Austin's urban fabric in words and then follows them with a visual presentation of ten houses ordered by neighborhood density, from 4 houses/acre in the city's Clarksville neighborhood to <0.1 houses/acre outside the city. The houses are presented in more depth in the next part of the book, where they—intentionally, I'm guessing—alternate with public buildings.
Flipping through the monograph's presentation of twenty completed buildings, the ones that stand out the most, aside from the pedestrian bridge and COTA, are the public buildings. These range from a unisex restroom on Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail to Citica, a mixed-use tower in Monterrey, Mexico, with a striking trellised façade (third and fourth spreads, below) that shades a public plaza as well as its commercial tenants. Nina Rappaport, in her essay at the back of the book, calls this quality evident in Citica and other projects "duality." Most overtly visible in COTA, the non-residential projects illustrate the firm's ability to create memorable forms all the while providing pleasing public spaces. This is Architecture 101 stuff—don't repeat yourself; think of how people use your buildings—but the resulting buildings are far from textbook.
What sets this monograph apart from others is the documentation, especially the drawings. The photographs are beautiful, but the same can be said about dozens of other monographs. (That said, Sebastian Schutyser's pinhole photos at the front and back of the book are a slight remove from the norm.) As first evidenced in "The Landscape City" chapter, with twenty pages of site plans and floor plans, the drawings are commendable for their consistent appearance; I particularly like the light-beige backgrounds that makes them easy to read. About half of the buildings go beyond the typical plans to provide details: large axons that are informative and beautiful. These drawings, which must have been specially made for the book, highlight particular assemblies worthy of the reader's attention and, in the case of exploded axons, peel away the facades and other layers to reveal the spaces within. These twenty buildings spanning twenty years make me eager to see what the next twenty years hold for Miró Rivera Architects.