Scogin, Elam, and Bray

Book excerpt: "The architecture of Scogin, Elam, and Bray offers an uncontestably intriguing object for critics and theorists. Their practice is markedly unconventional, but still participates in and reinterprets numerous architectural conventions, from 'modernism' and 'economy' to 'regionalism' and the proprieties of the profession. This ambitious work and the skillful subtlety of its forms provokes a reconsideration of what makes architecture critical, as well as a reformulation of prevalent approaches to architectural criticism. Thus Mark Linder, in his preface, introduces a book in which 'the architecture and the writing are equal partners.' Based on the symposium 'Critical Architecture/Architectural Criticism: the Work of Scogin Elam and Bray,' held in May 1990 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, this book is neither simply a presentation of a firm's oeuvre nor merely a collection of illustrated essays. It presents the visual and verbal material in a way that emphasizes the interchanges and debate of the symposium. The authors, all of whom participated in the symposium, explore nine built projects and other unrealized designs by this adventurous young firm, including the downtown branch of the High Museum, Turner Village at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, and the Buckhead Library in Atlanta"-- Page 4 of cover.