Commonplaces: Thinking About an American Architecture

Brian Healy is an architect and an educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. He established his architectural practice there in 1986 and he has taught graduate design studios at the Yale School of Architecture, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, as well as numerous other major universities in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Arkansas, Missouri, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Florida. In the Spring of 2007, Healy was selected as the Visiting Artist in Residence at Amherst College in Central Massachusetts. As part of this residency, he was asked to prepare an exhibition and lecture on his work to place it within the context of contemporary architecture in America. This book documents that effort in a collection of essays, observations, drawings, paintings, and photographs related to his twenty years of architectural practice in a dozen states ranging from the Appalachian Hills to the vineyards of Northern California; the Catskills in New York to the Westside of Chicago; from downtown Boston to the beach communities along the central coast of New Jersey. ILLUSTRATIONS: 280 colour a140 b/w photographs n50 illustrations