A specific region’s environmental needs often lead to a regional vernacular architecture that embraces a common style. Yet, Hutker Architects, Inc., has designed over 200 homes in coastal New England that avoid a single style. The twenty-five diverse residential projects in this book illustrate a process – not a preordained style. The common thread running through the Hutker projects is the use of the life equity principle: a home should generate social and emotional equity over time. The conversation between the architect and each client reveals the way to design and build this home once well to ensure positive and enduring social and emotional outcomes. A home with life equity provides for the owner’s long-term needs, both physical and psychological, uses materials best suited to the spaces needed, and accommodates ever-changing family arrangements. Hutker homes fit clients so well, that they are rarely sold outside the families that build them. Whether small or large, owners treat these homes as heirlooms to be preserved and handed down to the next generation.

• Foreword by Marlon Blackwell and David Buege
• Introduction by Mark A. Hutker, FAIA
• Preface by Mark A. Hutker, FAIA
• Principal Architectural Photography by Brian Vanden Brink
• Context Photography by Alison Shaw
• Edited by Leo A. W. Wiegman and Oscar Riera Ojeda

Contributors Biographies

Mark A. Hutker AIA, principal and founder. A registered architect in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Mark is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture and Art with a Bachelor of Archi- tecture degree (1982). After working with Jon McKee in Boston, Mark joined Dunn Brady Associates in 1985 on Martha’s Vineyard. He bought the firm in 1987, and renamed it Hutker Architects. In 2008, the New England Design Hall of Fame inducted Mark as an honoree [www.nedesignhalloffame.com]. Mark Hutker is particularly dedicated to design education and serves as a mentor within highly accredited associations, as well as serving on various civic associations such as the Dukes County Housing Authority, West Tisbury Historic District Commission, the Board of Island Elderly Housing, and the Board of Falmouth Academy. Mark is also a long-standing director of the Lyceum Fellowship Committee, an annual competition that awards traveling fellowships in architecture to young architects [www.lyceum-fellowship.org]. He and his family live in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is an architect and professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Working outside the architectural mains- tream, he generates design strategies that at once celebrate the vernacular and transgress the boundaries of the conventional. Work produced from his private practice, Marlon Blackwell Architect, has received national and inter- national recognition through numerous design awards and architectural publications. A monograph entitled An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2005.

David Buege is the Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkan- sas, where he had been director of the Architecture Program in the 1990s. He has taught at Auburn University, Mississippi State University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and served as interim director of Auburn’s Rural Studio in 2007-08.

Leo A. W. Wiegman, writer. Born in the Netherlands, and a graduate of Tufts University, Leo is married to the architect Julie D. Evans and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. A writer and editor, he worked in book publishing for many years, publishing non-fiction books in basic sciences, photography, the environment, and current affairs for general readers and for college courses, before launching E to the Fourth Strategic Communication, a firm dedicated to helping environrnmental organizations get their story out to the public. Leo serves as Mayor of the Village of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and is co-author with David Blockstein of The Climate Solutions Consensus (Island Press). http://etothefourth.com

Brian Vanden Brink is often chosen as an architectural photographer by those in the design world. He has been photographing award-winning architecture for three decades. Brian’s name is synonymous with a respect for design and a passion for light. His work has been featured widely in a variety of design and consumer publications such as Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, Boston Globe Magazine, Coastal Living, Design New England, Down East, La Vie Claire, Maine Home & Design, Metropolitan Home, New England Home, New York Times Magazine, Photo District News, Residential Architect, and View Camera Magazine. His photographs grace many books including his own At Home by the Sea: Houses Designed for Living at the Water’s Edge and At Home In Maine: Houses Designed to Fit the Land. Brian’s new book RUIN: Photographs of a Vanishing America, a photographic study of abandoned architecture throughout the United States, is out now.