When it comes to introducing a new, lavishly illustrated architecture book, it’s pretty hard to top Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger. So, when Modern to Classic Volume II, the new, lavishly illustrated book that chronicles the prolific career of Richard Landry and the Landry Design Group arrived on my desk, I was hardly surprised to see Goldberger do such a good job of putting Landry’s prolific and eclectic career in perspective.
“That title was chosen to indicate the range of Richard Landry’s work, which has always had much in common with that of the most talented and committed eclectic architects of the American tradition,” Goldberger writes. “They were designers who moved easily from style to style, with little concern about whether they were designing a house in the style of the Italian Renaissance or that of Tudor England.
Classic
“These architects all knew, as Richard Landry knows, that a Spanish Mediterranean villa or a Georgian house or a French château can be well-proportioned or badly proportioned, that it can be well detailed or badly detailed. The difference comes not from the choice of style, but from what the architect does with it.”
And everything
“While the array of styles is still present-there are some excellent traditional houses to be found in these pages-it has been clear for some time that Landry is moving, slowly but steadily, toward a more modern form of expression…
In
there is more glass, and more openness, in his newer work, and in almost all of his newer houses, whatever the style, we see and feel his buildings as shapes, not just as exercises in one architectural language or another.”
between
But then again, as you can see in these photos and in the detailed feature we published on Landry last year, his work, and high-profile client list speaks for itself.
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Image Credits: Photo courtesy of Landry Design Group.