Situated Objects
Buildings and Projects by Stan Allen, Photographs by Scott Benedict
Building in and with nature: buildings by American architect Stan Allen in the Hudson Valley, north of New York
Stan Allen is an architect and Professor at Princeton University, and has won global acclaim, primarily for his work in town planning, and his influential essay Field Conditions, which was published in 1996. Situated Objects now shows a very different facet of his creative process: a selection of small buildings and projects within the landscape of the Hudson Valley, New York. They demonstrate an approach to architecture that engages in a dialogue with this partly wild, and wholly non-urban environment that lies just outside the gates of New York City.
The projects are presented in drawings and a rich array of photographs, and are arranged in three thematic categories: Compounds, Material Histories, and New Natures, supplemented by the architectâs writings and essays by Helen Thomas and JesĂșs Vassallo. The numerous photos taken by celebrated architectural photographer Scott Benedict convey the special atmosphere of the Hudson Valley and the buildings that are embedded in it.
âAllenâs essay on the meaning and force of the axonometric is dressed like an afterthought within his monograph, but it succeeds as a quiet manifesto for the work of an architect who, more even than his recent buildings, is himself convincingly situatedâand not only in the Hudson River Valley, but at John Hejdukâs Cooper Union, or at Princeton where he was Dean until 2012, or in the work of the other cerebral masters he admires.â Niall Hobhouse, drawingmatter.org