CIVIC BUILDERS

Civic life is not only about the authority of government and the duties of citizens, but should also encompass passion and imagination. Civic Builders presents recent municipal buildings around the world that subscribe to this attitude: they all demonstrate a quality of playfulness and liveliness, whilst maintaining their dignity and power.

The book focuses on the city hall, where people have the most direct experience of government, both on the purely symbolic level and in the nitty-gritty of governmental functions. Organised chronologically, it begins with S?yn?tsalo Town Hall in Finland and three North American city halls: Toronto, Boston and Dallas. The Post-Modernist Portland Building, the James R. Thompson Center and Mississauga City Hall take us into the 1980s, followed by a profusion of intriguing civic buildings that began to emerge in Europe, North America and Asia in the 1990s - including Ottawa City Hall, the Vidhan Bhavan, La Fl?che Town Hall, Murcia Town Hall and the Clark County Government Center, which is shown on the cover. It concludes with several projects in the United States that are still on the drawing board.

Beyond city halls, the book includes legislative buildings such as the Reichstag (1999) and the European Parliament Building (1999); some buildings that are only symbolically public, such as the Berlin Chancellery (2001) and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia (1999); and designs that show civic imagination can flourish even in the service of administration.

It is possible to see in these buildings a warmth and welcome, and a sense of connection to community. They bring to mind the base meaning of 'metropolis', whose roots are literally 'mother-city'. In short, they show the human touch.

CURTIS W FENTRESS, FAIA, RIBA, established his architectural practice in Denver, Colorado, in 1980. Since that time, Fentress Bradburn Architects has won 16 national and international design competitions and over 150 design awards. A graduate of North Carolina State University's School of Design, Fentress began his career in New York working first for I M Pei and later at Kohn Pedersen Fox. He has led design teams on over 45 major civic and public works of architecture.

Contributors:

JOHN MORRIS DIXON, FAIA, is an architecture graduate of MIT and left the drafting room in 1960 for a career in architectural journalism. He was chief editor of Progressive Architecture magazine from 1972 to 1995, during a period when the magazine was influential internationally.

ROBERT CAMPBELL, FAIA, received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work as architecture critic of the Boston Globe. He is a contributing editor of the magazines Architectural Record and Preservation, and the author of a book, Cityscapes of Boston. He has been in private practice since 1975 as an architectural consultant to cultural institutions and cities. His photographs and poems have appeared in numerous publications. In 1997 he was architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. He is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

DONLYN LYNDON, FAIA, is the Eva Li Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and editor of Places, a journal of environmental design. He is author of The City Observed: Boston, and co-author of Chambers for a Memory Palace and The Place of Houses. His architectural and urban design practice has included the design with Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker of Condominium One at the Sea Ranch, California (1965), which received the distinguished 25-year Award from the AIA. He has headed the Departments of Architecture at the University of Oregon, MIT and Berkeley. In 1997, he was honoured with the AIA-ACSA's Topaz Award, the highest award in architectural education.

CHARLES JENCKS is the author of the best-selling The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (Yale University Press, a seventh edition to be published this year), Architecture Today (Academy Editions, third edition, 1994), The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (Wiley-Academy, second edition, 1997) and other books on contemporary building and Post-Modern thought. His architecture, landscape design and furniture explore in different media the ideas developed in his writing.

COLEMAN COKER is the principal of buildingstudio, which aims to explore built presence grounded in the experience of the real world. With his former office Mockbee/Coker Architects, he received numerous architectural awards. He has been director of the Memphis Center of Architecture, is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has received the Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.