Site: Marmol Radziner in the Landscape

Marmol Radziner really do a great job of refining the architecture and landscapes, so that you just aren't looking at a beautiful home with a totally incomplete landscape. So, it's really important to do these high performance, sustainable homes that rest gently in the landscape, but it is also very important that the landscape reflect the importance of using native and adapted plants arranged in a manner to contribute to the overall sense of home as a retreat - Marmol Radziner are on the right path!

Unfortunately this doesn’t have projects from the last three to five +- years but it’s wonderful and I hope they make an addition to it. I would buy it.

This is a large format book that describes homes in four categories: Canyon, Desert, Urban and Woodland settings. The homes are located primarily in California but also Arizona and Nevada. The full page photo's are beautiful but there are no floor plans, no site plans, no drawn building elevations. The written descriptions of the homes are very limited with no details on the materials used. I guess the theory here is that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Tons of beautiful pictures. That's it.

The implied premise of this book is that the site on which the building sits is examined and that the featured homes are designed to take advantage of the particular building site. As far as one-off custom homes are concerned, this is nothing new or special. It's to be expected from any competent architect.There are 18 homes featured. The homes are divided into 4 categories: canyon, desert, urban and woodland. It's easy to tell by looking at photos of the desert homes that they're in the desert category but many of the other homes could fit into other categories. Any of the 3 canyon homes could have been placed in either the urban or woodland categories and nobody would have really noticed since they all have plenty of trees near the house. Really, any of the homes could work in any setting anyway The suggestion that each home was designed for it's particular environment doesn't really hold up to scrutiny in my opinion.There are a few pages of Leo and Ron answering some general questions in the beginning of the book, and I mean a few. What they have to say isn't really substantive. I didn't learn anything from this book. It's like these guys don't want to give up the secrets or take the time to write a book. Each of the homes gets a scant 1/3 of a page of descriptive text (see pic) and 17 pages of photos. It's like the book was written using Twitter. It would have been nice if there were at least several pages of text for each house, describing the design and build process, what materials were used for the siding, and so on. The book falls WAY short here.There are only a few photos showing the homes being built. The rest of the pics are of the completed homes. There are interior shots of some homes but not others, like they didn't have access. The photos are all beautiful, but the book could have been a lot more interesting if there were photos of the homes being constructed.The way the book cover is made is really unique and interesting. It's essentially a large 10" x 13" paperback book with a green cloth strip adhered to the binding and 1/8" thick rigid cardboard plates glued to the front and back covers, turning it into a hardcover book. There's no separate dust cover. The cardboard seems especially rigid, sort of like a clip board, but I still think the corners may be susceptible to fraying if one is not super careful.The book is exceptional visually. The photography and layout are excellent and the unique cardboard cover concept is WAY cool, worthy of 5 stars. The lack of construction photos, elevation and floor plan drawings and almost complete lack of descriptive text amounts to a 1-star effort. An average of 5 and 1 is three, so 3 stars it is.

bien

Uh, what more can I say. Beautiful images and that's it. Several trees died for it, sorry for the planet. Bof, quoi dire de plus. Belles photographies et c'est tout. Dire que des arbres ont été sacrifié pour cela, désolé pour la planète.