Saratoga

George Ranalli, Oscar Riera Ojeda, George Ranalli, Paul Warchol, Michael Sorkin, Michael Sorkin,

ISBN 10: 098146288X / ISBN 13: 9780981462882

Published by Oro Editions March 2009, 2009

About this Item

In 2008, renowned New York City-based architect George Ranalli completed a renovation (commissioned by the New York City Housing Authority in Brooklyn) to Brownsville's Saratoga Community Center--adding 3,500 square feet to the existing 1,500 square-foot facility to create a highly functional and re imagined super-block. Ranalli's facades--adorned with geometric wall planes and featuring multiple masonry units and glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete cast details, mahogany doors and windows as well as an exposed steel structure on the roof--provides a series of exquisitely designed public spaces for its diverse local users. In addition to commentary by Michael Sorkin and Ranalli's sketches, drawings and computer images, this volume contains stunning images by New York-based architecture and design photographer Paul Warchol. In projects ranging from doorknobs to residences to office buildings, George Ranalli experiments with a distinctive brand of ornamentation, a machine-cut, linear vocabulary that suggests computer age manufacturing processes and geometries. For New York City's public housing agency, he uses glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete (GFRC) lintels and copestones, and buff-grey cement panels with routed joints indoors, to imbue a new community center with layers of meaning and visual interest.

Seller Inventory # 293424

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Saratoga
• Publisher: Oro Editions March 2009
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 098146288X
• ISBN 13: 9780981462882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Used - Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Architecture - Architects, A-Z

About this title

Synopsis

In Saratoga (2009), author/ architect George Ranalli documents the Saratoga Avenue Community Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn -- a city-agency sponsored project to reorganize, renovate, and expand an isolated inner-city housing block. Saratoga looks an in-depth look at Ranalli's innovative approaches to producing abeautiful, durable, adaptable, and sustainable work of architecture, on a rock-bottom budget, that connects an urban community to new green spaces,and light-filled interiors, both functional and lovely. Ranalli provides plenty of contextual and programmatic information alongside vivid color images from photographer Paul Warchol, and reproductions of architectural sketches, renderings, plans, and other details documenting every phase of the life cycle of the project. Acclaimed architecture critic Ms. Huxtable credits Saratoga for breaking every rule of conventional civic architecture. On the architecture itself, Ms. Huxtable writes, "Mr. Ranalli adheres to the logic of modernist practice, integrating itsmechanical, material and structural realities with details drawn fromearlier sources to create an integral ornament of abstract lineargeometry. His purpose is to move modernism into an enriched and moredeeply referenced style."  -- Breaking All The Rules With New York's Public-Building Design by Ada Louise Huxtable, WSJ, May 13, 2009

About the Author

George Ranalli is a practicing architect and scholar based in New York City.  He founded the award-winning firm George Ranalli, Architect in 1977. Educated at Pratt Institute (B.Arch '72) and Harvard University GSD (M.Arch '74), he has been a leader in architectural education for over 40-years. He has authored five monographs, published in English,German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, including In Situ: George Ranalli Works & Projects (2014), and his work has been featured in numerous publications internationally.  Throughout, Ranalli has developed an ethos for expanding the modernist vocabulary into a new contemporary idiom. He is recognized for the advancements of both the traditions and innovations of the practice of architecture.