Alan Buchsbaum, architect & designer

Architect Alan Buchsbaum was a figure of central importance on the American design scene during his two decades of independent practice. His career, and his unique ability both to draw from and to draw out the world around him, reflected the revitalized spirit of his times, the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties. This lavishly illustrated monograph collects, for the first time, over fifty projects; its unique intertwining of work and text, image and type, presents an integrated portrait of Alan Buchsbaum and his design oeuvre prior to his 1987 death from AIDS. Buchsbaum's design outlook was at once irreverent and respectful, ironic and classical, versatile and idiosyncratic, elegant and entertaining. His Pop Art-influenced projects of the late sixties initiated the Super-Graphics look; elements of his High-Tech style of the mid-seventies became ubiquitous in interiors designed during that time; and his romantic modernism of the eighties, rich in materials and textures, foretold more extraordinary work to come. These three broad periods are presented in this volume in more than twenty-five residential designs (for such clients as Ellen Barkin, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Anna Wintour and David Shaffer), as well as commercial spaces, installations, furniture, and rugs. In addition to the wealth of designs, this book features a variety of Buchsbaum's own writings - a fellowship essay, project descriptions, and zingy one-liners - as well as those of architect/editor Frederic Schwartz, architect/critic Michael Sorkin, writer Patricia Leigh Brown, critic Rosalind Krauss, and architects Stephen Tilly and Steven Holl. The complex picture that emerges is a testament to the individual whose untimely death robbed the design industry of a major talent.