Preston Scott Cohen

‘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 Cohen. The design process is described in detail through drawings, diagrams, and study models. The ambition of the Source Books series is to offer an alternative to the conventional architectural monograph by documenting the design process in depth, and by providing extensive critical commentary that allows for careful study of the project from conception through execution.