BOOKS

BOOKs edited by Stanley Abercrombie

Contemporary House India by Rob Gregory; photography by Edmund Sumner New York: Thames & Hudson, $75 272 pages, 360 photographs, 205 color

This is a welcome survey of two dozen recent residential designs from various parts of India. It is well illustrated with drawings and photography, but the photo captions are terse and the drawings without written explanations, so they are a bit less informative than they might have been. Still, it gives us a rare look at residential modernism in India. It begins with a bang of a preface based on an interview with Balkrishna Doshi, India’s Pritzker Architecture Prize winner and, at 93, the éminence grise of Indian architecture. He discusses the profound influences of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, who both built in the country, and he questions the need for India—or any nation now—to have a common narrative. Indeed, the work that follows presents a pleasing variety of styles. The house most clearly influenced by Le Corbusier (and chosen for the cover) is the Stripped Mobius House by Matharoo Architects in Ahmedabad where Corbu’s 1955 Villa Sarabhai and 1956 Villa Shodan are its neighbors. Going in a quite different direction is the Lattice House in Jammu by Sameep Padora & Associates, responding to a hot, dry climate with tiered screens of myriad wooden slats. Different again is a geometrically acrobatic house in Alibag by Malik Architecture where “decisions about where to touch the ground and where to sail over it” create a composition like a “creature feeding off the terrain.”

“This is a book,” author Rob Gregory admits, “about luxury houses,” and indeed it is a bright light above a dark background of caste and poverty, but it is nevertheless exciting to see this vigorous and diverse display of architectural virtuosity. A Room of Her Own: Inside the Homes and Lives of Creative Women by Robyn Lea New York: Thames & Hudson, $45 240 pages, 278 color illustrations

Creative women (like all gender profiles) need some financial security and a private work space, Virginia Woolf told us inA Room of One’s Own,her 1929 book based on lectures she had given at Newnham and Girton colleges. This new, lavishly illustrated book introduces us to 19 such women from Europe, America, Mexico, and Australia, some of them with two homes (New York and Virginia, Florence and Sicily, London and Tuscany).

These homes are quite grand, for the most part, beginning with a 12th-century, 52-room Austrian castle and followed by a palazzo here, a chateau there. Woolf’s requisites of money and space seem amply fulfilled. And the occupants are unquestionably creative in varied ways as designers and artists and some with vaguer job descriptions: “cultural ambassador,” “art and antiquarian curator,” and “creative entrepreneur.” They, in author Robyn Lea’s opinion, “share a drive to infuse all aspects of their lives with their creativity,” a drive that for many women until recently “lay dormant and lifeless.” She concludes that “the walls of their homes, the hues on their palettes or plates, the prints and patterns on their gowns. . .are the markings of artists and thinkers that the world needs like never before.”

What They’ re Reading...

Sophie Goineau

Founder of Sophie Goineau Design The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard New York: Beacon Press, $15 268 pages

“I first encountered La poétique de l’espace in the 1990s. The 1958 book belonged to my first husband and design mentor, Jean Guy Chabauty, and I was immediately drawn in by its title. I came to learn that Gaston Bachelard was one of the most influential and revolutionary thinkers of poetics and architecture of his time so, naturally, I wanted to know more. I discovered that for Bachelard the house is the most intimate of spaces, a place that ‘protects the dreamer,’ and that understanding the house for him is another way of understanding the soul. It is such a nuanced and layered read. Even after 30 years—having raised my children, lived in three different homes, and become a designer of spaces and homes myself—I can say it is still constantly teaching me things and changing the way I conceptualize and interact with my environment and my upcoming projects, including a villa in Malibu.”