Explore the vast range of titles available.

Ein umfassender Überblick zu dem Werk des renommierten Londoner Architekten Tony Fretton (1945 geboren). Nach seinem Abschluss 1982 an der angesehenen Architectural Association hat Fretton sein eigenes Büro eröffnet. Erste Beachtung fand er mit der Lisson Gallery und dem Red House in London. Seine räumliche Gestaltung und die Einbindung in den städtischen Kontext sind von subtiler Meisterschaft. Mit seinem Entwurf für das Camden Arts Centre, dem Fugelsang Museum Dänemark, dem Londoner Stadthaus für den Künstler Ansih Kapoor und der britischen Botschaft in Warschau zählt Fretton zu den bekanntesten zeitgenössischen Architekten. Die vorliegende Monographie ist die erste umfassende Publikation zu seinem Oeuvre. Seit 1999 hat Fretton Gastprofessuren an verschiedenen Universitäten: Technical University Delft, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne, Berlage Institute Amsterdam, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich.

We have become so used to the gallery embedded in the fabric of the city that to approach a museum deep in the Danish countryside becomes a disconcerting experience. Contemporary art itself, with its installations, its geometric forms and mini-cities, veering between the minimal and the splashes of urban street art, is profoundly a part of the city. But the [Fuglsang] concentrates on the sweep of Danish art, particularly the romantic Nordic landscape and the sublime; it is a building rooted in the rural and the landscape, both inside and out. Situated on the island of Lolland, a couple of hours south of Copenhagen, the Fuglsang is a rare and unexpected delight. It was designed by Tony Fretton, who, for more than two decades has been Britain's finest and most subtly inventive architect. His Lisson Gallery in London was perhaps the city's most sophisticated urban intervention of the late 20th century, a robust, irregular and almost musically eloquent structure that managed to make sense of a context that embraced concrete towers and Georgian terraces. The context of the Fuglsang could not be more different. The corridor terminates in a room-from-which-to-contemplate-the-landscape. A domestically scaled room with large windows (as opposed to a glass box), this is the most remarkable space. So much of the art in the museum focuses on the landscape that it allows your eyes to readjust to the real thing. It put me in mind of the sky-room at New York's New Museum (by Japanese architects SANAA), an uber-urban room in which the city and the sky are brought into the foreground, into the museum. At Fuglsang, too, it is the vast northern sky with its fast-changing canvas of clouds and beams of hopeful sunshine that engrosses you, that imposes the same awed quiet as does New York's almost geological skyline.

Binet profiles British architect Tony Fretton, including his designs for the Red House in London and the Faith House in Dorset. Fretton may be classified as a site-specific architect because of the way some of his designs refuse to dress itself up, choosing instead to adapt to the vernacular of its immediate surroundings. Moreover, the floor plans and pictures of the Red House and Faith House are also presented.

[...]their reputation distorts our culture. Paul Rudolph [the US modernist and head of Yale’s Department of Architecture] said that Mies van der Rohe could be such a brilliant architect because he didn’t do half the things that architecture needs to do. [...]in 2009, came the brilliant, stripped-down British Embassy in Warsaw (with a blast screen façade made, incongruously, of glass) and a stream of northern European housing projects including the Solid 11 mixed-use block in Amsterdam (designed to last 200 years) and the striking Westkaai Towers in Antwerp.