MYTHIC MODERN. ARCHITECTURAL EXPEDITIONS INTO THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

The Mythic Modern: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place depicts an amazing fifteen years of adventurous design/build projects in extraordinary landscapes from Machu Picchu, Nepal, and the Amazon to Italy, Ireland, and Finland. The projects are built in a modern idiom yet with designs inspired by local cultures and ecologies, a series of legacy installations à la Christo, but with a conscience. These award-winning and highly published projects have been called out as a convergence of Andy Goldsworthy, Frank Gehry, and Joseph Campbell ' with a dash of Indiana Jones thrown in.A decade and a half ago, Travis Price, FAIA, created the Spirit of Place/Spirit of Design (SPSD) design/build, educational exploration program for architecture students at the Catholic University of America to provide students the opportunity to research, design, and construct a project in nine days in a remote landscape once a year, and the program continues to this day. The design philosophy of SPSD enunciates a crucial turning point in modernism, which, while replete with Green underpinnings, takes a critical look at the preservation of authenticity and character in a contemporary design language. The book tells tales of the adventures of building installations, which in turn tell their own tales about revived cultural legacies.