Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See
Frank Harmon
(Author)
Description
Native Places is a collection of 64 watercolor sketches paired with mini-essays about architecture, landscape, everyday objects, and nature. The sketches relate the delight found in ordinary places. The short essays, rather than repeat what is visible in the sketch, illustrate ideas and thoughts sparked by that image and offer a fresh interpretation of ordinary things. The goal of Native Places is, in part, to transform the way we see. Through its pages, barns become guidebooks to crops and weather; a country church is redolent of the struggle for civil rights and human dignity; and a highway rest stop offers a glimpse of egalitarian society. Native Places also expresses the belief that writing and hand drawing are not obsolete skills. Both disciplines offer us the opportunity to develop a natural grace in the way we view the world and take part in it.
Product Details
Price
$24.95
$23.20
Publisher
Oro Editions
Publish Date
September 16, 2018
Pages
168
Dimensions
7.2 X 9.2 X 0.7 inches | 1.6 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781940743455
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Frank Harmon, FAIA, has designed sustainable modern buildings across the Southeast for 30 years. He discovered architecture as a child playing in the streams and woods of his native Greensboro, North Carolina. His work engages pressing contemporary issues such as placelessness, sustainability, and restoration of cities and nature. The buildings he designs are specific to their sites and use materials such as hurricane-felled cypress and rock from local quarries to connect them to their landscapes. Airy breezeways, outdoor living spaces, deep overhangs, and wide lawns embody the vernacular legacy of the South while maintaining a distinguished modernism. Frank is a graduate of the Architectural Association in London and a professor at the North Carolina State University College of Design. He has taught at the Architectural Association and has served as a visiting critic at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Auburn University's Rural Studio.
Reviews
"Native Places is a sketchbook, memoir, travel journal, aesthetic experiment, a collection of small familiar essays, and maybe in some respects even a manifesto. I venture this last possibility because of the consistent appreciation and celebration of the vernacular. It leads us to discover the 'ordinary, ' which is not the same as the obvious, and then to agree that place does not contain architecture but, in the wisest instances, allies with it, or perhaps brothers with it. It brings me to observe things I had not seen because I only took them for granted. Native Places reminds me of a saying by the composer Max Bruch: 'One folk song is worth a hundred art songs.' " -- Fred Chappell, author, poet, professor, and North Carolina poet Laureate 1997-2002
"It's simultaneously academic and intimate -- and it speaks to humanity." -- Tom Kundig, FAIA, Olson Kundig Architects, Seattle, Washington
"Frank Harmon has designed many important and beautiful buildings. Here is a work of his art you can hold in your hands. Enlightening and joyous, Native Places takes us into and beyond what Harmon calls the 'broken places' of the world and gives the reader a new way to see them." -- Best-selling novelist Angela Davis-Gardner
"There are as few gestures as possible to capture a multi-layered spirit. There's almost always an element of landscape and something out of the ordinary and something extraordinary. A world emerges... His idea is not to get in the way of pure observation, that you're looking at the world with clear eyes. It reassures us, basically, that our instincts are right." -- Tod Williams, FAIA, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Partners, New York, New York
"Frank Harmon's sketches and essays are a quick window into a truth. He's asking us to go deeper and grander with a historical perspective, and to understand why things are the way they are. It's more the 'why' than the 'what.' " -- Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, Marlon Blackwell Architects, Fayetteville, Arkansas
"It's accessible and beautiful writing that's thought-provoking, spiritual and uplifting. It's like he knew what we needed." - Julieta Sherk, landscape architect, professor, J. William Fulbright Global Scholar
Native Places: Drawing as Way to See...offers us from [Frank Harmon's] daily sketchbook a gallery of unexpected beauties. Luminous ink and watercolor drawings and meditations, crafted with a poet's gift for language, take us to places as varied as a rural barn in east Tennessee, the Lawn at the University of Virginia, a pub in London, a back porch in Eastern North Carolina, the view from Van Gogh's window at St. Remy, a trailer park brightened by a clump of iris.
"Frank Harmon is an "architect's architect," Tod Williams writes in his foreword, as shown by Harmon's book of sketches and essays in what could be considered his travel journal. From the barns of his native North Carolina to the streets of London, these dozens of observations and reflections are an ode to the architecture he espouses: the everyday." --Architecural Record
"It's simultaneously academic and intimate -- and it speaks to humanity." -- Tom Kundig, FAIA, Olson Kundig Architects, Seattle, Washington
"Frank Harmon has designed many important and beautiful buildings. Here is a work of his art you can hold in your hands. Enlightening and joyous, Native Places takes us into and beyond what Harmon calls the 'broken places' of the world and gives the reader a new way to see them." -- Best-selling novelist Angela Davis-Gardner
"There are as few gestures as possible to capture a multi-layered spirit. There's almost always an element of landscape and something out of the ordinary and something extraordinary. A world emerges... His idea is not to get in the way of pure observation, that you're looking at the world with clear eyes. It reassures us, basically, that our instincts are right." -- Tod Williams, FAIA, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Partners, New York, New York
"Frank Harmon's sketches and essays are a quick window into a truth. He's asking us to go deeper and grander with a historical perspective, and to understand why things are the way they are. It's more the 'why' than the 'what.' " -- Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, Marlon Blackwell Architects, Fayetteville, Arkansas
"It's accessible and beautiful writing that's thought-provoking, spiritual and uplifting. It's like he knew what we needed." - Julieta Sherk, landscape architect, professor, J. William Fulbright Global Scholar
Native Places: Drawing as Way to See...offers us from [Frank Harmon's] daily sketchbook a gallery of unexpected beauties. Luminous ink and watercolor drawings and meditations, crafted with a poet's gift for language, take us to places as varied as a rural barn in east Tennessee, the Lawn at the University of Virginia, a pub in London, a back porch in Eastern North Carolina, the view from Van Gogh's window at St. Remy, a trailer park brightened by a clump of iris.
"Frank Harmon is an "architect's architect," Tod Williams writes in his foreword, as shown by Harmon's book of sketches and essays in what could be considered his travel journal. From the barns of his native North Carolina to the streets of London, these dozens of observations and reflections are an ode to the architecture he espouses: the everyday." --Architecural Record
