Ben Jacks' Book Now Available

Culicidae Architectural Press is pleased to announce the release of Ben Jacks’ new book The Architect’s Tour:Notes for the Design Traveler. 

If you want to be an effective designer, set aside the glossy magazines, turn off your computer, and seek out first-hand encounters with good design. When it comes to cities, buildings, and art, actual experience is almost always better than the virtual kind. No image can replicate Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp when the light is just right, or capture the silent speech one hears on a stroll through Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta or explain hours dissolving in Peter Zumthor’s baths at Vals. That is the reason for this book: to encourage you to actively pursue direct aesthetic experience in the built environment, and to reflect upon the best reasons and ways to be a dedicated design traveler.
Traveling to learn is an integral part of the education of student architects and designers. In the age of overwhelming digital information a contemporary Grand Tour devoted primarily to exploring the built environment in all of its richness affirms that learning about design depends on experiencing places and buildings in their complete physical reality. Although this book consists of words and photographs once removed from their subject, it presupposes a philosophy of architecture in which senses such as sound, temperature, time, and touch are at least as important as the visual sense. Design travel is a particularly focused way to bring together experience, narrative, and image for greater understanding of the designed environment.

The photographs in this book focus mainly on Modern and contemporary architecture in Europe. Europe is compact, it boasts an extensive public transportation network, and its post-World- War- II built environment has been shaped by well-developed public policy that values design. For these reasons, it is a model destination for the design pilgrim. It is of course possible and desirable to pursue a rigorous program of design touring both close to home and further afield on any of the world’s continents. The photographs here are not meant to imply a canon or a prescriptive itinerary, rather they offer a personal collection—one example of a stepping off point for approaching, understanding, and benefiting from the experience of design travel. One of the central premises of this book is that beautiful design can be found just about anywhere if you work at it and look.

Ben Jacks, a designer, architect, writer, and teacher, holds degrees from the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. When not looking at buildings and making photographs, he teaches at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, including courses in beginning design, human behavior, design detailing, and understanding architecture through drawing.

In 1991 Ben walked the Appalachian Trail 2000 miles from Georgia to his home in Maine. This half-year experience of walking and living outdoors inspired and continues to inform his thinking and writing about architecture, aesthetics, landscape, and place, which has been published in Journal of Architectural Education, Places, and Landscape Journal.

As a designer Ben focuses on detail and craft, seeking to develop the potentially rich and intimate relationship between landscape, building, dwelling, and interior. He is currently at work designing and building a family home meant to last: a flexible- family-structure, aging-in-place, LEED Platinum, near net-zero Passive House in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Readers’ Responses
Pointed, focused, and meditative, this book exemplifies the traveling architect realizing built form.

John R. Stilgoe, Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, Harvard University 

The message of The Architect’s Tour is an important one: whether conceived in the abstract realm of paper or a computer screen, architecture’s ultimate sphere of power is and always has been in the
real world. The laboratory and classroom of the student architect is ‘out there’: and it is stocked
with wonderful places to visit and awe-inspiring buildings to study. Ben Jacks insists you go out into the world and look...because he knows you will become a better and better architect by filling your imagination with memories of great architecture! He also helps...by providing handy pointers to planning your own architectural tours.
Interior: Full Color Bleed on White paper, 172 pages

Simon Unwin, author of Analysing Architecture 

Book Details

Paperback List Price: $32.50 in the US, £20.89 in the UK, €26.65 in countries of the European Union. Dimensions: 5.5” x 8.5” (13.97 x 21.59 cm)
Publisher: Culicidae Architectural Press, an Imprint of Culicidae Press, LLC ISBN-13: 978-1941892022

The Architect’s Tour is available now worldwide at culicidaepress.com, amazon.com and other retailers. 

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For further press information about the book, or to schedule an interview or reading featuring Ben Jacks, please contact:

Culicidae Architectural Press
Mikesch Muecke, Publisher + Editor | editor@culicidaepress.com | +1 (352) 388 3848 Ben Jacks, Architect + Author | jacksbm@miamioh.edu | +1 (513) 658-0925