Dialogues in Space: Process and Ideas in the Work of Wendell Burnette Architects is the first multi-project monograph on this American architect’s selective body of work. The title alludes to the architect’s view that architecture is a constructed conversation between people, things, and time. Six singular projects from the architect’s oeuvre are presented in-depth through the architect’s own words, drawings, and photography. Also included is a comprehensive essay by the celebrated architectural writer/critic Robert McCarter entitled “Crafting Space: Composition and Construction in the Architecture of Wendell Burnette” that examines the “thinking and making” process behind the built and un-built work across fifteen years of practice. The different typologies of the work explores authentic human experience through provocative spatial constructions – public and private in diverse locales – that attempt to promote an expansive dialogue with our places, our environment, our communities, ourselves, and our time. Through extensive research into the “art of building” – the specificity of place and locally appropriate construction systems, materials, craft, and their infinite capacity to transcend mere construction – the work strives toward an architecture that is at once functional and poetic.

• Foreword by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
• Introduction by Juhani Pallasmaa
• Essay by Robert McCarter
• Epilogue by Brian Mackay-Lyons
• Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda

Contributors Biographies

Wendell Burnette is a self-taught architect and principal of Wendell Burnette Architects, established in 1996 after a three-year period at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and an eleven-year association with William Bruder. He has been an assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University since 2000. Wendell Burnette’s design philosophy is grounded in distilling the essence of a project to create highly specific architecture that is at once functional and poetic. Burnette has traveled widely in Asia, Europe, Africa, Central and North America where he has assimilated a personal perspective on the “art of place making.” The work of Wendell Burnette Architects has been presented in over 100 publications worldwide including The Burnette Studio/Residence, a single building monograph published by Rockport Press and the Phaidon Atlas of World Architecture in 2004 and 2008.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have worked together for over thirty years. In 1986, they founded Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects on Central Park South in New York City. The firm is known for institutional work that pays careful attention to context, detail, and the subtleties of materials. Award winning projects include the Neurosciences Institute, the American Folk Art Museum, Cranbrook Natatorium, the Phoenix Art Museum, Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, and the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. Current work in construction includes a new museum for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, a performing and visual arts center at the University of Chicago, the Asia Society headquarters in Hong Kong, and two new skating rinks in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. 

Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, author, and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. He has previously taught at the University of Florida from 1991-2007, where he was founding Director of the School of Architecture; at Columbia University from 1986-1991; and at three other institutions. He has had his own architectural practice since 1982, in New York, Florida and St. Louis. He is the author of Aldo van Eyck (2015); Herman Hertzberger (2015); Local Architecture (with Brian MacKay-Lyons, 2015); Alvar Aalto (2014); Carlo Scarpa (2013); Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as Experience (with Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012); Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References (2012); Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Lives (2006); Louis I. Kahn (2005); On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles (2005); William Morgan (2002); Frank Lloyd Wright (1997); Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright (1997); Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright (1994); and several other books. At press are his books Steven Holl (2015) and Marcel Breuer (2015). He is currently under contract to write a monograph on MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple (2016), as well as The Space Within (2016). He was named one of the “Ten Best Architecture Teachers in the US” by Architect magazine in December 2009.

Brian MacKay-Lyons is a Canadian architect best known for his designs for houses on the coast of his native Nova Scotia and his use of Atlantic Canadian vernacular materials and construction techniques. Mackay-Lyons was born of part-Acadian heritage in Acadia, on the French Shore of southwest Nova Scotia, and was strongly influenced by the region’s maritime landscape, architecture, and functionalist design. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Nova Scotia (graduated in 1978) and received his Master’s in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California, Los Angeles. He also studied and worked in China, Japan, and Siena, Italy. In 1983, MacKay-Lyons returned to Nova Scotia to work on vernacular designs and teach at Dalhousie University, where he holds a full professorship in architecture.

Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa (born September 14, 1936, Hämeenlinna, Finland) is a Finnish architect and former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology. Among the many academic and civic positions he has held are those of director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture 1978-1983, and head of the Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki. He established his own architect’s office – Arkkitehtitoimisto Juhani Pallasmaa KY – in 1983 in Helsinki. From 2001 to 2003, he was Raymond E. Maritz Visiting Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2013 he received an honorary doctorate from that university. In 2010-2011, Pallasmaa served as Plym Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 2012-2013 he was scholar in residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. Pallasmaa has also lectured widely in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia.