Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture and the Selected Works of Beverly Willis

Invisible Images: The Silent Language of Architecture by Beverly Willis, published by the National Building Museum, is a book for readers of the late 1990s, who have learned-and demand-to interact with media that includes both ideas and imagery.

Encompassing the full range of visual and verbal arts, Willis discusses and illustrates the creative process that is universal to all designers:

"All art forms, from architecture to music, dance to painting, drama to sculpture, cinematography to illustration, seek to reveal or express the invisible, unarticulated and often unperceived forces that affect the human experience at a given time. Objects that command attention and communicate at some profound level become timeless, weaving a tapestry of universal expression. The invisible images surrounding such forms or designs not only distinguish the present from the past, but generate new possibilities."

This original book, profusely illustrated in color with 170 stunning cross-cultural photographs and drawings of Willis' own architectural projects, multi-media art, and symbols will engage creative people in any field, and all of those who are interested in the creative process.

Willis' textual thesis is enhanced by a compelling visual device: a ribbon of words running along every page of the book, traversing time and place, with quotations from artists, writers, and philosophers, and highlights from her own text. More provocative than the moving headlines on Times Square, they carry the reader along. . . engaged by thoughts and interrupted by images, when not engaged by images and interrupted by thoughts.

Beverly Willis, an artist, architect, photographer, teacher, and writer, drew on a remarkable range of experience and study as she created Invisible Images. Her career began as a multi-media artist, and she was licensed as an architect in 1966 and honored with a Fellowship by the American Institute of Architects in 1980. Best known among the buildings she designed is the San Francisco Ballet Association Building and School, which is part of the San Francisco Civic and Performing Arts Center. Her award-winning architectural designs have been widely published. Dartmouth College selected Willis to serve as Montgomery Fellow in 1992, giving her the opportunity to study and write while working with students and faculty. Invisible Images developed from preparations for the Montgomery Fellowship Lecture she delivered that winter. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts by Mount Holyoke College in 1984, and has been invited to lecture at many other universities throughout the country. Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York is among the venues that have exhibited her art and design work.

Among the many publications for which she has written are Blueprints, the quarterly Journal of the National Building Museum and Visions and Reflections on Utopia and Reality, edited by Iris Miller and Robert A. Bosser, American Institute of Architects. She studied engineering at Oregon State University and received a BFA degree from the University of Hawaii in 1954.

Beverly Willis is currently founder and director of the Architecture Research Institute, Inc., in New York, and resides in New York City.