hen Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell won the Boston City Hall competition in 1962 it was one of the most remarkable debuts in American architectural history. Two émigrés—committed Brutalists without a building between them—beat out half a dozen larger and better-known firms with a design that was complex, confrontational, and that challenged conventional notions of the civic. The raw abstract monumentality of their elaborate composition immediately cemented Kallmann McKinnell & Wood’s place in the echelon of contemporary iconic architects. The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood explores the diverse work of these master architects with color and black and white photographs, technical drawings and sketches, and profoundly thoughtful text.

David Dillon wrote both the project text and an insightful introduction. He writes: “In the work of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, we find few exotic forms, and little that could be called narrowly mimetic. They neither build theory nor court fashion. Over the past 40 years they have instead achieved a sophisticated, and largely unclassifiable, synthesis of old and new, traditional and contemporary, familiar and surprising.”

Through four decades, through Modernism, Post-Modernism, Deconstruction, and various modernist revivals, Kallmann McKinnell & Wood has stuck to a few basic principles. The firm continues to view buildings as extensions of the environment rather than as solitary objects in space. This volume is divided into sections that explore how the firm’s structures relate to their surroundings, whether it be the urban fabric, the landscape, or the campus.

Book Details

• 160 pages, 8.5" x 11.5"
• $45.00, Hardcover
• ISBN 1-931536-31-7
• Purchase this title

About the Author

David Dillon has been the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News since 1982. He received an MA and a Ph.D from Harvard University in literature and art history and was a Loeb Fellow at its Graduate School of Design in 1986-87. He has written eight books, including The Architecture of O’Neil Ford, The FDR Memorial, Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century, and Dallas Architecture 1936-1986. He is a contributing editor to Architectural Record and Texas Architect and writes frequently for Landscape Architecture, Preservation, Planning, and other major journals. Dillon is currently writing the new plan for the White House and is an advisor to both the FDR Memorial and the World War II Memorial. He divides his time between Dallas and Amherst, Massachusetts.