In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.

Presenting their new and recent projects, Lake|Flato Architects demonstrate the inexhaustible potential of the modern house to enter into a dialogue with nature. Lake|Flato Architects, based in San Antonio and Austin, believe first and foremost that architecture should be rooted in its particular place, responding in a meaningful way to the natural or built environment. Using local materials and partnering with the best local craftsmen, Lake|Flato seek to create buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. Now more than thirty years since its founding, the firm has grown along with the range and complexity of its projects, yet it still considers the desire to build in partnership with the land to be an approach that remains valid and increasingly resonant. Lake|Flato’s first projects were houses, and these projects excite the firm still. By exploring the intimate relationship between family, place, and building, Lake|Flato create unique living environments that possess a compelling authenticity and beauty.

Few design firms are as celebrated as San Antonio–based Lake|Flato Architects, the winners of more than three hundred international, national, and regional awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ Firm of the Year Award. This book features the firm’s large-scale pursuits: arresting, airy, and sustainable public buildings. Featuring more than three hundred stunning color photographs, Lake|Flato explores sixteen recent projects from across the United States. The images—of Mississippi’s rustic-modern and ecologically resilient Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, the crystalline Witte Museum, the sinuous Confluence Park structures in San Antonio, and other spaces—are grouped by themes reflecting the designers’ ethos: nature, place, craft, and restraint. Architects Kengo Kuma, David Miller, Warren Byrd, Stefanos Polyzoides, Vivian Loftness, and Lance Hosey provide guest commentary, delving into the works and themes and connecting them to Lake|Flato’s larger mission of creating a meaningful architecture that brings people into contact with the natural environment while facilitating culture and community.

Anchored by Austin and San Antonio, Texas Hill Country is celebrated for its frontier history and natural beauty. Architects and interior designers build contemporary houses using local materials and drawing on the area’s diverse heritage—Spanish Colonial missions and Mexican-style haciendas, French pioneers’ log cabins, German stonework, and the legacy of the “new regionalism” espoused by O’Neil Ford in the 1930s—to create inspired residences that respect tradition and allow their owners to enjoy expansive rural surroundings. This volume presents nineteen of the area’s most remarkable private houses, with lush photography to provide a glimpse of how life in Central Texas is unique—from restored Victorian houses in bohemian Southtown, to a glass-walled ranch in Boerne canopied by oak trees; from floating stairs and sustainable systems to the casual elegance of country antiques, screen porches, and longleaf pine floors. The rolling hills, spring-fed creeks, rivers, timber forests, and fertile grass-covered prairies of Hill Country—along with their abundance of natural materials such as limestone, cedar, local pecan, mesquite, oak, and cypress—inspire architects and interior designers to create beautiful modern spaces. They draw from the strong vernacular tradition of classic farmhouses that once dotted the land, and the building techniques that have been handed down through generations. The architecture and interiors featured here in beautiful full-color photography celebrate the wonderful particularities of this singular place.

A book showcasing luxury houses around the world.

A compelling survey of Texas houses that draw both on the heritage of pioneer ranches and on the twentieth-century design principles of modernism. Helen Thompson and Casey Dunn, the writer/photographer team that produced the exceptionally successful Marfa Modern, join forces again to investigate Texas modernism. The juxtaposition of the sleek European forms with a gritty Texas spirit generated a unique brand of modernism that is very basic to the culture of the state today. Its roots are in the early Texas pioneer houses, whose long, low profiles express an efficiency that is basic to the modern idiom. This Texas-centric style is focused on the relationship of the house to the site, the materials it is made of--most often local stone and wood--and the way the building functions in the harsh Texas climate. Dallas architect David R. Williams was the first to combine modernism with Texas regionalism in the 1930s, and his legacy was sustained by his protégé O'Neil Ford, who practiced in San Antonio from the late 1930s until his death in the mid 1970s. Their approach is seen today in the work of Lake/Flato Architects and a new generation of designers who have emerged from that distinguished firm and continue to elegantly merge modernism with the vocabulary of the Texas ranching heritage. Twenty houses are included from across the state, with examples in major urban centers like Dallas and Austin and in suburban and rural areas, including a number in the evocative Hill Country.

Spectacular Modern Homes of Texas is the newest installment in Signature's spectacular book series. Brimming with beautiful photography and dreamy design, this book has something for everyone's taste and style. Showcasing a wide variety of approaches to modern design, readers will get a tour inside private homes designed by Texas' top interior designers and architects. Get a first class tour inside Texas most unique and stunning homes such as a posh Austin penthouse, a vertical glass house in Dallas, and a sprawling Hill Country estate with a historic farmhouse exterior and cutting edge modern interiors. Totally unique, just like the state of Texas, this book will stir the designer in you and be a beautiful decor piece on your coffee table. You've never seen Texas look so good.

Highlighting thirty-five spectacular recently completed houses overlooking sea, lake, river, and ocean, selected for beauty and variety across the globe, Houses by the Shore features homes that demonstrate the extraordinarily diverse ways that today's leading architects and interior designers build and design homes on the water and new approaches homeowners are taking to life on the shore. Frequently elegant and uncluttered, these houses serve as models of smart and often exquisite design with lots of ideas for homeowners who don't necessarily live in a waterfront home, but who wish to have something of that appeal and sensitivity in their own space. A range of projects encompassing myriad geographic and cultural inspirations show some of the world's most inviting residences, built in stone and glass, in wood and steel and concrete. The houses vary in size and style, though all within the realm of the modern, from open plan homes that include terraces and rooms that flow from indoors to out, to spaces flooded with light and views. Each house is photographed comprehensively with detailed interior and exterior pictures and plans, and placed into context through the lens of widely respected editor Oscar Riera Ojeda and descriptive texts written by design critic Byron Hawes, to give readers a privileged look at the best of shore-side residential architecture. With its beautiful modernist homes set beside the golden sands of the gulf coast of Mexico or upon the romantic islands of Greece, from Finland to South Africa to New Zealand, Houses by the Shore is a paean to rooms with a view.

This volume presents twenty-seven contemporary residences, spanning the entire stylistic spectrum and thoroughly documented with color photography. The United States has always had a great number of stone houses, subject to regional and stylistic variations, as author Lee Goff writes in her comprehensive introduction. That history and variety are alive today, as houses of stone continue to appear in myriad guises - classical, modern, vernacular, postmodern - throughout the country. In fact, Goff concludes that a new renaissance of stone houses is at hand. The exceptional residences in this book, by such renowned architects as Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Will Bruder, 1100 Architect, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Lake/Flato, and Kohn Pedersen Fox, provide ample evidence of this renaissance. Goff discusses with each architect the design of each house, focusing on the decision to use stone, the building process, and other related choices, while color photographs illustrate both exteriors and interiors.

This lavishly illustrated book presents an extensive selection of landmark homes built since 1999 by the San Antonio firm Lake|Flato Architects, an award-winning leader in sustainable architecture that merges with the landscape.