Book of the Week: UNFINISHED AND FAR FAR AWAY — The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects
Unfinished and Far Far Away: The Architecture of Irving Smith Architects, recently published by Altrim Publishers, has taken out runner-up at the international Architecture Book of the Year Awards (World Architecture Festival). The judges praised the publication for its freshness and avoidance of solipsism.
“What an engaging monograph. Two Kiwi architects persuaded US academic Aaron Betsky to visit them in their small town in New Zealand’s South Island. Jeremy Smith and Andrew Irving, live ‘far, far away’ where an unusual landscape dominates. But they point out, in our collective global warming crisis, all our ‘far, far aways are not so far apart’. And, they ask, ‘Will you continue to mow a lawn around architecture and hope you don’t need to change your buildings or, will you look to participate with the landscapes and environments that we share?’”
The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites.
Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings.
A thoughtfully produced book, with excellent essays, this is a must for anyone interested in architecture in Aotearoa, its connection to international practice, and the role that architecture plays in addressing the way we live and interact with our environment, now and into the future.
