Known internationally for designing buildings that take their inspiration from the land, Antoine Predock explores many of his ideas about architecture through the fluent medium of drawing. This collection of 172 sketches, many published here for the first time, surveys nearly fifty years of his work. Presented in a format that evokes Predock's sketchbooks, the drawings are arranged according to the logic of their internal topologies. Like a Moebius strip, they fold back on themselves, equating objects in space to drawn connections on a surface through a continuous process of transformation. Whether sketching sites around the world or designing buildings, Predock has learned through years of experience to condense multiple sensations and ideas into line and color. Christopher Curtis Mead traces Predock's aesthetic impulse back to the primal sense that through drawing we reach out to touch the world.

The name of the architect Victor Baltard is inseparable from the Halles Centrales of Paris, the complex of iron-and-glass pavilions built between 1854 and 1874 in the historic heart of the city. Making Modern Paris is the only comprehensive study to address systematically not only the role Baltard played in the markets' design and construction but also how the markets relate to the rest of Baltard's work and professional practice. Christopher Curtis Mead interprets the Central Markets as a cogent expression of Baltard's professional experience as he adjusted his academic training to new criteria of municipal administration, urban planning, and building technology. Considering his entire career over the three decades he worked for the Prefecture of the Seine, this investigation of how architectural and urban practice came together in Baltard's work offers a case study of the historical process that produced modern Paris between 1840 and 1870.

The roadcut is a diagram of the investigative process for the making of architecture.--Antoine Predock The work of New Mexico architect Antoine Predock is known around the world. In 2006, the American Institute of Architects awarded Predock its Gold Medal, the highest honor it can bestow on an individual, aligning him with such celebrated modern architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn. In Roadcut, architectural historian Christopher Curtis Mead traces Predock's development over forty years from early work in Albuquerque--the housing complex La Luz and the Rio Grande Nature Center--to twenty-first-century projects like Winnipeg's Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Mead also gives special attention to the Nelson Fine Arts Center in Tempe, Arizona, the American Heritage Center and University Art Museum at the University of Wyoming, the Turtle Creek House in Dallas, the Austin City Hall and Public Plaza in Texas, and George Pearl Hall at the University of New Mexico.