Peter Pennoyer Architects: Apartments, Townhouses, Country Houses
By Peter Pennoyer & Anne Walker
Forward by Robert A.M. Stern
TWENTY OF PPA’S RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS are featured in this sumptuously illustrated volume, ranging from a triplex on Fifth Avenue to a Spanish Colonial Revival house in San Francisco, from a farmhouse in the Virginia countryside to a ranch in New Mexico. Culminating two decades of practice, Drumlin Hall in Dutchess Country, New York, showcased on the front cover, is a modern-day version of a Palladian villa—a house that revels in perfect proportion, rigorous geometry, and the great flexibility of the classical idiom.
No matter how they differ in style, each project in PPA’s monograph, published in 2010, embodies the basic principles of the profession—beauty, utility and fitness—that Vitruvius postulated in the first century B.C. The uniqueness of each project lies in PPA’s solid grounding in—and fluency with—the classical idiom, which is not an end in itself but a point of departure. “It’s classicism with a twist,” says Pennoyer. “We never repeat any design or even any aspect of a design. Our client can count on his house being singular in its outward guise.” Anne Walker’s text, illustrated with more than three hundred specially commissioned photographs, architectural drawings, and watercolors, offers a thoughtful approach to understanding PPA’s impeccable implementation of classical traditions and skillful adaptation of timeless design to the exigencies of modern life.