The rogue element (2016) “The willingness to take a chance and depart from the script is the quality we most admire in vernacular architecture."—Richard Fernau
As I read a New York City architect's review of Improvisations on the Land, the famous New Yorker cover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," came to mind. I pictured the map's solipsistic, Manhattan-centered geography as the architect breezily dismissed Richard Fernau's book and the built work it discusses. There's a long history of East Coast critics getting the West Coast wrong, trusting an internal map that's lamentably at odds with reality. The Los Angeles-based writer Alissa Walker uses the hashtag #lahaters to call out such distortions. Except for its cuisine, which East Coast critics generally praise, the Bay Area has it even worse than LA. The term "regional," first invoked by Lewis Mumford and then reinforced (as "critical regionalism") by Kenneth Frampton and by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, attaches to Bay Regional architecture. Richard Fernau rejects the label, pointing to Eudora Welty's contention that "regional" is an outsider's terms. Fernau and Laura Hartman's eponymous firm is part of a lineage that gathers up its senses of the place, values openness and flow, and is wary of the overly predetermined. Living here on the Pacific Rim, you're immersed in it yet ever aware of what's beyond you and behind you. The heart of this monograph on the firm's houses is Fernau's lead essay, which could serve as a tutorial on how to practice architecture as he and Hartman see it—with place and improvisation providing valid, potent bases for design. The pioneering Berkeley-based wine dealer Kermit Lynch shares their view of the role of place in creative practice. According to Lynch, author of Adventures on the Wine Route, viniculture and winemaking combine art, craft, and science with nature: the grapes, soil, and climate matter, but the rest is human and improvisational—skill, experience, nose, and luck. Fernau compares their design process to modern dance, another improvisational and collaborative art. He compares their houses to collage in their use of materials, their fabrication, and the way they incorporate the "rogue elements" that place itself provides. And he points to the vernacular as evidence of how people adapt to a place as it changes and they change with it (and vice versa). This reminds
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