Overview
For 25 years the architects who make up Jersey Devil have been constructing their own designs while living on site in tents or Airstream trailers, making adjustments to their structures in response to problems encountered during the building process. Jersey Devil is a name that has been attached to work by Steve Badanes, John Ringel, Jim Adamson, or any combination of the above, plus many other people who have participated in their diverse projects. This loose-knit group of designer-builders has created projects that critique conventional practice, both the process of making architecture and the accepted definitions of architecture itself. Jersey Devil's architecture shows a concern for craft and detail, an attention to the expressiveness of the construction materials, and a strong environmental consciousness.Devil's Workshop contains complete project descriptions, photographs, drawings, and plans on more than a dozen projects, including the Snail House, the Silo House, the Hoagie House, and the Seaside Pavillion. Essays analyze Jersey Devil's work, providing an insight into the design-build process and its historical context, and discussing the formal qualities inherent in these projects.
Synopsis
For 25 years the architects who make up Jersey Devil have been constructing their own designs while living on site in tents or Airstream trailers, making adjustments to their structures in response to problems encountered during the building process. Jersey Devil is a name that has been attached to work by Steve Badanes, John Ringel, Jim Adamson, or any combination of the above, plus many other people who have participated in their diverse projects. This loose-knit group of designer-builders has created projects that critique conventional practice, both the process of making architecture and the accepted definitions of architecture itself. Jersey Devil's architecture shows a concern for craft and detail, an attention to the expressiveness of the construction materials, and a strong environmental consciousness.
Devil's Workshop contains complete project descriptions, photographs, drawings, and plans on more than a dozen projects, including the Snail House, the Silo House, the Hoagie House, and the Seaside Pavillion. Essays analyze Jersey Devil's work, providing an insight into the design-build process and its historical context, and discussing the formal qualities inherent in these projects.
Fine Homebuilding
A New Hampshire house that's shaped like the helmet of a medieval suit of armor. A self-contained room suspended between two trusses with the silhouette of a football in the California redwoods. A house on the high plains of Colorado with a roof that appears about to take off in flight. These projects are representative of the iconoclastic work of Jersey Devil, a loosely knit group of nomadic designer/builders. If you're unfamiliar with the names of Jersey Devil partners Steve Badanes, John Ringel and Jim Adamson, Devil's Workshop is a good introduction.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
They are not a firm or legal partnership. They are a loosely organized group of nomad architects who have dubbed their consortium Jersey Devil. They crisscross North America not only designing structures but also building them. Susan Piedmont-Palladino and Mark Alden Branch's Devil's Workshop: 25 Years of Jersey Devil Architecture celebrates, with project descriptions, photographs, and drawings of more than a dozen of their most adventurous creations, the group's brand of rebel architecture. The book details the unique style that reflects the Jersey Devil's concern for craft, detail, and environmental consciousness.From the Publisher
Jersey Devil is by turns artful, relaxed, whimsical and serious, classical and out to lunch. They put the funk back in functionalism. Michael Sorkin, from his foreword to Devil's WorkshopThere is nobody truer to the cause of architecture than Jersey Devil. Michael Sorkin, Connoisseur