IT BY BIT: Evoking Simplicity from Complexity

It by Bit has universal implications in that it explores the particularity of a renown yet regional practice dedicated over thirty five years to the testing and refinement of a working method first suggested by Adolf Loos, interpreted by Hannes Meyer in the Bauhaus and further demonstrated by the mid century architecture of Shadrach Woods. Yet this is a design method missing in present discourse more preoccupied with the authorship, escapism and the saturated image. Muir’s is an architecture seemingly subsumed in the vicissitudes of use, inhabitation, body centric experience and the materials and practice of the local. The work provides resistance to the disruptive influence of the uncanny.

The contributors, Kroloff and Pallasmaa, bracket the conversation with their understanding of first the place in the Western US and second the possibilities of Muir’s approach. In It by Bit Muir illuminates the historical precedent for this practice, calibrated against the theoretical propositions of Carlos Ginzburg and Jurg Habermas. The book represents in varying level of detail, the initial idea, drawings holistically considered and photographs of the architecture with special attention to ones physical engagement with the work.

Prescott Muir, Master of Science of Architecture and Building Design, Columbia University; Bachelor of Architecture, Professional Degree, University of Southern California; Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Utah; Professional Development Museum Design Program, Harvard University GSD; and currently the Director of the School of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Utah beginning in 2009.

Since 2003, Dan Hoffman has been a partner in the Phoenix based firm of Studio Ma with award winning art museums, campus buildings and urban interventions including the Memorial Union at Arizona State University, the Heard Museum of Art, Princeton University Student Dorms and Cranbrook Institute of Science to their credit. He has taught architecture for over thirty five years most notably as head of the Department of Architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and held positions at the University of Utah, Arizona Stat and University of Michigan with visiting positions at Yale , Cornell and the University of Illinois. He has exhibited, lectured and published widely including, ?The World of My Imagination- Work of Marlon Blackwell” in An Architecture of the Ozarks and ?More or Less Mies” in Detlef Mertin’s The Presence of Mies.

Juhani Pallasmaa is one of Finland’s most distinguished Architects and Architectural Theorist. He is a practicing Architect in Helsinki, former Professor of Architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology, Visiting Professorships at the Fox School of Architecture at the University of Washington St. Louis, University of Illinois, and Minnesota University School of Architecture. He is Author of over twenty books including The Eyes of the Skin which has become a classic in architectural education.