Acclaimed for his designs of the Trinity School campus, the Little Chapel within the Woods, the Texas Tools Semiconductor Elements Department Construction, and a lot of personal properties, O’Neil Ford (1905–1982) was once the most important 20th-century architect and a pioneer of modernism in Texas. Participating with artists, panorama architects, and engineers, Ford created various and enduringly wealthy works that embodied and knowledgeable world traits in brand new structure. His homes, lectures, and instructing prompted a technology of Texas architects.
O’Neil Ford on Architecture brings in combination Ford’s leading skilled writings and speeches for the primary time. Revealing the highbrow and theoretical underpinnings of his unique modernism, they remove darkness from his fascination with architectural historical past, his pioneering makes use of of recent applied sciences and building programs, his deep issues for the panorama and atmosphere, and his passionate commitments to training and civil rights. An interlocutor with titans of the 20 th century, together with Louis Kahn and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ford understood structure as inseparable from the social, political, and clinical traits of his day. An introductory essay by way of Kathryn E. O’Rourke supplies a essential evaluate of Ford’s essays and lectures and repositions him within the historical past of US architectural modernism. As a few of his so much vital homes flip sixty, O’Neil Ford on Architecture demonstrates that this Texas modernist merits to be ranked a few of the major midcentury American architects.
