recrafted landscape thumb

by Jaime Gross I finally got my hands on a copy of contributing editor Marc Kristal's lush new book, Re:Crafted: Interpretations of Craft in Contemporary Architecture and Interiors, which was published by the Monacelli Press this past spring. The twenty-five projects he profiles are eclectic—an over-the-top villa for a Chinese industrialist; a graphic 'outdoor room' in a San Francisco backyard; a glacier-inspired arts complex in Oslo—but they all share a modern, expanded (and sometimes exploded) sense of 'craft,' and they've all been built in the past decade. Kristal acknowledges that the notion of 'craft' is rather hard to pin down: "It may seem easily discernible. But the more you see—the more you realize how many forms it takes, and how imaginatively it can be interpreted—the more resistant craft becomes to easy explanation," he says. This book is his attempt to "encourage a more flexible understanding of the craft influence and how it can be used to enrich the whole of the built environment."