It's been our distinct pleasure over the past few years to publish monographs on a select group of young architects and firms whose work represents the best of contemporary design thinking while retaining a distinctive regional sensibility. The Nova-Scotian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons fits neatly into this distinguished list, which includes Marlon Blackwell in the Ozarks, Rick Joy in the Southwest, and Miller/Hull in the Northwest.

Those familiar with Nova Scotia understand the austere beauty of this Canadian landscape, with its wide open skies and rugged terrain pushing up against the Atlantic. MacKay-Lyons's work responds to this unique topography and to the vernacular building traditions that define its communities. His houses, commercial buildings, and public projects combine regional forms with local materials, technologies, and building practices to create works that are linked to their environments right down to their DNA. Peaked gables, shed roofs, and sliding doors are inspired by local barn types; corrugated metal cladding comes from the buildings used by the area s fishing industry; structural wooden frames are based on local ship-building traditions. These elements communicate a sense of place that is sophisticated, accessible, and free of sentimentality.

Novelist and historian Malcolm Quantrill weaves together an intimate portrait of MacKay-Lyons and his work, elucidating the "peculiar regionality" of his subject's architecture.

A New Voices monograph published with The Graham Foundation.

When Isaiah Rogers died in 1869, the Cincinnati Daily Times noted that ""in his profession he was, perhaps, better known than any other person in the country."" Yet until now there has been no study that fully examines his remarkable, influential, and instructive career. Based largely on Rogers's own diary, this book tells his story and adds much to our understanding of architectural practice in the United States before the Civil War. In 1944 the distinguished historian Talbot Hamlin wrote of New York's Merchant Exchange (1836--42) that the building had ""been so grandly conceived, so simply and directly planned, and so beautifully detailed... [that] the whole was welded inextricably into one powerful organic conception that shows Rogers as a great architect in the fullest sense of the word."" Rogers's Tremont House in Boston has been called the world's first modern hotel; it spawned many progeny, from his first Astor House in New York to his Burnet House in Cincinnati and beyond. Rogers designed buildings from Maine to Georgia and from Boston to Chicago to New Orleans, supervising their construction while traveling widely to procure materials and workmen for the job. He finished his career as Architect of the Treasury Department during the Civil War. In this richly illustrated volume, James F. O'Gorman offers a deft portrait of an energetic practitioner at a key time in architectural history, the period before the founding of the American Institute of Architects in 1857.

The pilgrimage church Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (1950-54), an icon of modern architecture, represents one of the central buildings of Le Corbusier's late period. Like all the guides in this series, this book is indispensable both for a specialist audience and for tourists interested in architecture and modern art.