Hodgetts + Fung

With backgrounds in theater, film, and industrial design, Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung, the principals of this award-winning Los Angeles-based firm, celebrate architecture's theatricality and the visual, media-oriented culture of Southern California. Hodgetts + Fung's brightly colored, rigorously structured buildings and installations cleverly integrate computer and multimedia systems, natural lighting, and eclectic materials such as tinted plaster, aluminum siding, and sheet metal. The firm has designed a wide range of projects, including a widely praised temporary library at UCLA; a historic theater renovation in Hollywood; offices for film and talent companies in Los Angeles; Los Angeles Arts Park, a competition entry for an arts and cultural center; and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Library of Congress. Thirty-two projects are presented in this first monograph on the firm, which received the 1994 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1996 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design.

Kurt W. Forster, a distinguished architectural historian and critic, is Chair in the History of Art and Architecture at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he is also a professor. From 1984 to 1992 he was the founding director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California. Dr. Forster's publications include monographs on Benedetto Antelami, Pontormo, and mannerist painting, and his critical writings encompass the subjects of Renaissance, mannerist, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, architecture, and urbanism.