Lake Flato Houses

Presenting their new and recent projects, Lake|Flato Architects demonstrate the inexhaustible potential of the modern house to enter into a dialogue with nature. Lake|Flato Architects, based in San Antonio and Austin, believe first and foremost that architecture should be rooted in its particular place, responding in a meaningful way to the natural or built environment. Using local materials and partnering with the best local craftsmen, Lake|Flato seek to create buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. Now more than thirty years since its founding, the firm has grown along with the range and complexity of its projects, yet it still considers the desire to build in partnership with the land to be an approach that remains valid and increasingly resonant. Lake|Flato’s first projects were houses, and these projects excite the firm still. By exploring the intimate relationship between family, place, and building, Lake|Flato create unique living environments that possess a compelling authenticity and beauty.

In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.

"Architect Tom Kundig is known worldwide for the originality of his work. This paperback edition of Tom Kundig: Houses, first published in 2006, collects five of his most prominent early residential projects, which remain touchstones for him today. In a new preface written for this edition, Kundig reflects on the influence that these designs continue to have on his current thinking. Each house, presented from conceptual sketches through meticulously realized details, is the product of a sustained and active collaborative process among designer, builder, and client. The work of the Seattle-based architect has been called both raw and refined--disparate characteristics that produce extraordinarily inventive designs inspired by both the industrial structures ubiquitous to his upbringing in the Pacific Northwest and the vibrant craft cultures that are fostered there." --

Anchored by Austin and San Antonio, Texas Hill Country is celebrated for its frontier history and natural beauty. Architects and interior designers build contemporary houses using local materials and drawing on the area’s diverse heritage—Spanish Colonial missions and Mexican-style haciendas, French pioneers’ log cabins, German stonework, and the legacy of the “new regionalism” espoused by O’Neil Ford in the 1930s—to create inspired residences that respect tradition and allow their owners to enjoy expansive rural surroundings. This volume presents nineteen of the area’s most remarkable private houses, with lush photography to provide a glimpse of how life in Central Texas is unique—from restored Victorian houses in bohemian Southtown, to a glass-walled ranch in Boerne canopied by oak trees; from floating stairs and sustainable systems to the casual elegance of country antiques, screen porches, and longleaf pine floors. The rolling hills, spring-fed creeks, rivers, timber forests, and fertile grass-covered prairies of Hill Country—along with their abundance of natural materials such as limestone, cedar, local pecan, mesquite, oak, and cypress—inspire architects and interior designers to create beautiful modern spaces. They draw from the strong vernacular tradition of classic farmhouses that once dotted the land, and the building techniques that have been handed down through generations. The architecture and interiors featured here in beautiful full-color photography celebrate the wonderful particularities of this singular place.

Written in an accessible style, Henry's work places Texas architecture in the wider context of American architectural history by tracing the development of building in the state from late Victorian styles, and the rise of neoclassicism, to the advent of the International Style.... His work provides a welter of new facts, both about the era's buildings and the architects who designed them, and he has catalogued and described most of the important landmarks of the period. -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly ., .a significant contribution to the study of Texas architecture.... -- Drury Blakeley Alexander, author of Texas Homes of the Nineteenth Century Texas architecture of the twentieth century encompasses a wide range of building styles, from an internationally inspired modernism to the Spanish Colonial Revival that recalls Texas' earliest European heritage. This book is the first comprehensive survey of Texas architecture of the first half of the twentieth century. More than just a catalog of buildings and styles, the book is a social history of Texas architecture. Jay C. Henry discusses and illustrates buildings from around the state, drawing a majority of his examples from the ten to twelve largest cities and from the work of major architects and firms, including C. H. Page and Brother, Trost and Trost, Lang and Witchell, Sanguinet and Staats, Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres, David Williams, and O'Neil Ford. The majority of buildings he considers are public ones, but a separate chapter traces the evolution of private housing from late-Victorian styles through the regional and international modernism of the 1930s. Nearly 400 black-and-white photographs complement thetext. Written to be accessible to general readers interested in architecture, as well as to architectural professionals, this work shows how Texas both participated in and differed from prevailing American architectural traditions.

This lavishly illustrated book presents an extensive selection of landmark homes built since 1999 by the San Antonio firm Lake|Flato Architects, an award-winning leader in sustainable architecture that merges with the landscape.

The work of Samuel Mockbee and Coleman Coker "offers many lessons for projects of all scales and locations. It is an architecture that both celebrates and transcends its regional influences". -- Progressive Architecture

This richly illustrated book takes the reader deep into lake country to reveal the essence of lake house and summer cottage style. Spectacular photographs and insightful essays capture the best of 100 revered homes.

A compelling survey of Texas houses that draw both on the heritage of pioneer ranches and on the twentieth-century design principles of modernism. Helen Thompson and Casey Dunn, the writer/photographer team that produced the exceptionally successful Marfa Modern, join forces again to investigate Texas modernism. The juxtaposition of the sleek European forms with a gritty Texas spirit generated a unique brand of modernism that is very basic to the culture of the state today. Its roots are in the early Texas pioneer houses, whose long, low profiles express an efficiency that is basic to the modern idiom. This Texas-centric style is focused on the relationship of the house to the site, the materials it is made of--most often local stone and wood--and the way the building functions in the harsh Texas climate. Dallas architect David R. Williams was the first to combine modernism with Texas regionalism in the 1930s, and his legacy was sustained by his protégé O'Neil Ford, who practiced in San Antonio from the late 1930s until his death in the mid 1970s. Their approach is seen today in the work of Lake/Flato Architects and a new generation of designers who have emerged from that distinguished firm and continue to elegantly merge modernism with the vocabulary of the Texas ranching heritage. Twenty houses are included from across the state, with examples in major urban centers like Dallas and Austin and in suburban and rural areas, including a number in the evocative Hill Country.

Highlighting thirty-five spectacular recently completed houses overlooking sea, lake, river, and ocean, selected for beauty and variety across the globe, Houses by the Shore features homes that demonstrate the extraordinarily diverse ways that today's leading architects and interior designers build and design homes on the water and new approaches homeowners are taking to life on the shore. Frequently elegant and uncluttered, these houses serve as models of smart and often exquisite design with lots of ideas for homeowners who don't necessarily live in a waterfront home, but who wish to have something of that appeal and sensitivity in their own space. A range of projects encompassing myriad geographic and cultural inspirations show some of the world's most inviting residences, built in stone and glass, in wood and steel and concrete. The houses vary in size and style, though all within the realm of the modern, from open plan homes that include terraces and rooms that flow from indoors to out, to spaces flooded with light and views. Each house is photographed comprehensively with detailed interior and exterior pictures and plans, and placed into context through the lens of widely respected editor Oscar Riera Ojeda and descriptive texts written by design critic Byron Hawes, to give readers a privileged look at the best of shore-side residential architecture. With its beautiful modernist homes set beside the golden sands of the gulf coast of Mexico or upon the romantic islands of Greece, from Finland to South Africa to New Zealand, Houses by the Shore is a paean to rooms with a view.