The Knowlton School announces the publication of the eleventh title in its Source Books in Architecture Series, Preston Scott Cohen / Taiyuan Museum of Art. Source Books in Architecture is a product of the Herbert Baumer seminars, a series of interactions between students and seminal practitioners at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Preston Scott Cohen was the 2014 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Preston Scott Cohen: Taiyuan Museum of Art is a book about how ideas come to be, evolve, are refined, changed, and are made concrete. Explored through a series of interviews, essays, and exhaustive documentation, the Taiyuan Museum of Art is intimately related to a design process and strategy that has unfolded over the course of Cohen’s career, while also indicating shifts in his interests. Critical essays and interviews map out a larger theoretical and intellectual argument for this body of work. Early projects and precedent studies are discussed, focusing on the role of different techniques of representation, development, historical evaluation, and technical execution in the development of both these earlier projects as well as the larger subject of the book. Even further, the book better describes the ideas that generated the project, as described through interviews with the graduate students of the Knowlton School of Architecture, interviews with contemporary critics, and critical commentaries by architects, designers, and colleagues of the Cohen. The design process is described in detail through drawings, diagrams and study models.

Preston Scott Cohen is the Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was Chair of the Department of Architecture from 2008 to 2013, and founder and principal of Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. He is the author of Lightfall (Rizzoli, 2017), The Return Of Nature, Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability, co-authored and edited with Erika Naginski (Routledge, 2014), Contested Symmetries (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) and numerous theoretical and historical essays.

Source Books in Architecture 11: Preston Scott Cohen / Taiyuan Museum of Art is available through Amazon.