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This article appeared in Architectural Record magazine in April 2005
The Nature of Dwellings
Reviewed by Andrea Oppenheimer Dean
Studded with desert sage, impressive cacti, and reach-for-the-sky saguaros, the Sonora Desert has exerted a magnetic pull on many architects. It lured Rick Joy away from Maine, Will Bruder from Wisconsin, Wendell Burnette from Tennessee, and, let's not forget, Frank Lloyd Wright from Wisconsin and Illinois. The desert enticed them and then inspired their best work, most of it residential. In fact, what we think of as contemporary Southwest vernacular design is largely the work of outsiders.
In the late 1990s, the desert captivated David Hovey, who sought and found there a landscape as different as the moon from his native Illinois. He settled in Desert Mountain, a planned community in North Scottsdale, and, acting as client,
contractor, and architect, began creating a series of stunning houses that enrich the desert's design vocabularies.
Hovey began his career as a Modernist and remains one today, but with a difference. As a student at IIT during the 1960s, he was imprinted with Miesian design principles, but Hovey's interests were broader than those of Mies. Though Hovey's
1980s Sandy Knoll in Homewood, Illinois, is a series of Miesian boxes stepping down a hillside, the house was largely prefabricated, and it is doubtful the Teutonic master would have approved. In his early Midwest dwellings, Hovey already used steel, glass,
concrete block, and cantilevers. More like Wright than Mies, he sought a balanced respect for landscape, man-made structures, and technology. By 1990, Hovey was as ready for Arizona as Wright had been in the 1930s.
Hovey's strong yet graceful Arizona dwellings have expanded Modernism's reach through the use and expression of new building methods and unconventional materials. At the same time, he has adopted age-old Native American planning strategies,
such as entering a dwelling at the site's highest point, configuring a house around a courtyard, and using water to mediate between building and landscape. Hovey also employs passive solar techniques-thermal mass, insulation, and exothermic exchange-as
well as emergent technologies. His houses are meant to sustain themselves like desert plants.
The Nature of Dwellings consists of a foreword and eight chapters, the work of seven different writers, a departure from the template for architectural monographs. Each chapter discusses only one building and one or more themes or ideas, such as "embedding, framing, and extending" and "machine meets nature." The result too often is overkill and repetition. Readers would have been better served by a single-or perhaps a few-thoughtfully developed, carefully edited essays.
There is another writing problem: The prose often lacks clarity, and ideas are frequently ill-formed. The Nature of Buildings shares these problems with many new books whose cost-conscious publishers have allowed their editing standards to
be compromised or tossed out altogether. In the first chapter, for instance, we read, "The house does not sublimate [sic] itself to the landscape." But Hovey's own prose, clear and simple like his houses, is sprinkled throughout the book. That's the good
part. The Nature of Dwellings:
The Architecture of David Hovey, edited by Cheryl Kent. New York: Rizzoli, 2004, 208 pages, $50.
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Architectural Record
The Nature of Dwellings
IIT Magazine
The Nature of Dwellings
Desert Living
The World Around Us
Chicago Public Radio
Hello Beautiful!
Pioneer Press
Hovey to give lecture at IIT
Chicago Sun-Times
Book frames modern homes since 1978
Focus
Book on David Hovey's work
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