THE ARK OF ARCHITECTURE. SELECTED WRITINGS OF MLCOLM QUANTRILL

Architect and Professor Malcolm Quantrill has held an unusual place in architectural scholarship over the last 50 years. He has taught architecture and travelled extensively, from London to Finland, from Oman to Montana, finally becoming the first Distinguished Professor in Architecture at Texas A&M University. Throughout his career he has retained a close interest in Finnish architecture, writing about the works of Alvar Aalto, Reima Pietilä and Juha Leiviskä. Author and critic Roger Connah has compiled and edited this extensive collection of his writings - The Ark of Architecture. The Ark of Architecture is both a reader and a re-reader of an acute architectural eye and mind. Quantrill's texts move effortlessly from the literary to the architectural and his analysis of the work of memory, landscape, and some of the more unusual drivers behind Modern Architecture remain memorable. Quantrill's methodology allows him to coax and at times subtly needle his 'subject' to produce unusual results. His interviewing of architects as different as Reima Pietilä, Norman Foster and Brian MacKay-Lyons show a lively movement of thought as he cleverly uses history and the past to ward off the frailty and often faddishness of the present. This unusual selection of writings, with interventions from the likes of Norman Foster, Kenneth Frampton, Bruce Webb, Marco Frascari and Stanford Anderson, deserves to be read by anyone interested in the vicissitudes of architectural writing.