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Since 1984 Lake|Flato Architects has been winning awards for its unique buildings committed to sustainability, beauty, and community; this generously illustrated book presents the firm’s most striking creations.
Few design firms are as celebrated as San Antonio–based Lake|Flato Architects, the winners of more than three hundred international, national, and regional awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ Firm of the Year Award. This book features the firm’s large-scale pursuits: arresting, airy, and sustainable public buildings.
Featuring more than three hundred stunning color photographs, Lake|Flato explores sixteen recent projects from across the United States. The images—of Mississippi’s rustic-modern and ecologically resilient Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, the crystalline Witte Museum, the sinuous Confluence Park structures in San Antonio, and other spaces—are grouped by themes reflecting the designers’ ethos: nature, place, craft, and restraint. Architects Kengo Kuma, David Miller, Warren T. Byrd Jr., Stefanos Polyzoides, Vivian Loftness, and Lance Hosey provide guest commentary, delving into the works and themes and connecting them to Lake|Flato’s larger mission of creating a meaningful architecture that brings people into contact with the natural environment while facilitating culture and community.
“A stunningly photographed book.”
San Antonio Report
“[Lake|Flato] is primarily a picture book. Almost always, one immediately notes the design elements that celebrate indirect natural light while avoiding our state’s extreme heat.”
Austin American Statesman
“The photos of Lake|Flato's humanist architecture make me appreciate their work all the more, but coming now, in the midst of a pandemic, they also make me pine for the social interactions that the best architecture enriches.”
A Daily Dose of Architecture
“The graphic layouts [in Lake|Flato] are thoroughly detailed and include a diverse mix of finished, construction, and archival photography (by a variety of photographers), sketches, watercolors, diagrams, site and floor plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, heatmaps, models, and more. Looking through them, it’s possible to get a sense of how Lake|Flato designs buildings. The cliché about architecture being a mix of art and science seems to hold true here...The fact that all of the projects are photographed with people is consistent with the firm’s avowed humanist ethos and allows the reader to better imagine what it might be like to experience these buildings.”
Texas Architect
