Rick Joy: Desert Works
This beautiful visual tour of nine of Joy's projects in the Sonoran Desert shows how natural they are to their setting. A transplanted New Englander, Joy uses color, texture, and materials to turn the six houses shown here into spare and subtle evidence of humanity in a vast natural world. He uses a similar approach, with expanded functionality, in the three studio/office designs that complete this book. The quiet of the settings and the simplicity of Joy's approach are perfect partners in producing architecture appropriate to a vast, unpeopled place. This book succeeds because it gives just enough room to the necessary text (Joy's preface, a foreword by architect Steven Holl, and an introduction by critic Juhani Pallasmaa), thus creating a book as lean as Joy's designs. The rest of the book gives us long views, interiors, and detail shots of these superb buildings. One of the publisher's "New Voices in Architecture" monographs on designers around the world, this carefully formatted volume makes an important contribution to an appreciation for contemporary architecture.David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., CTCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.