The American architectural firm of Sparano + Mooney in Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, CA, stands for sustainable and innovative buildings that are harmoniously embedded in spectacular mountain landscapes. In this volume, architectural critic Michael Webb presents ten projects with the aid of photographs, drawings, sketches and texts, visualizing the process by which architectural ideas are conceived and realized. The architects respond in their plans to the overwhelming natural surroundings with restrained forms and the innovative detailing of materials. The firm's models, sketches, conceptual drafts and fully executed buildings offer thoughtful perspective on developing architecture that thrives on the relationship between concept and place. Accompanying essays relate the buildings to their regional contexts and also highlight analogies to Land Art.

Hope, Heart, and the Humanities How a Free College Course is Changing Lives Edited by Jean Cheney and L. Jackson Newell with Hikmet Sidney Loe, Jeff Metcalf, and Bridget M. Newell Hope, Heart, and the Humanities tells how Venture, a free, interdisciplinary college humanities course inspired by the national Clemente Course, has helped open doors for hundreds of students who, for various reasons, faced barriers to attending college. This course has given them the knowledge, confidence, and power to re-chart their lives. Readers will go inside Venture classrooms to see what occurs when adults enter serious discussions of literature, critical writing, art history, American history, and philosophy. Also apparent are the difficulties nontraditional students often encounter and the hard choices they and their teachers make. But what readers may remember most are the stories and voices of people whose views of the world have broadened and whose directions in life have change.

Robert Smithson's earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah's Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with fluctuations in the lake's locally red, saline water. The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson's writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson's many points of reference in creating it. Visitors and armchair travelers, too, will discover how much significance Smithson placed on regional considerations, his immersion in natural history, his passion for travel, and his ability to use diverse mediums to create a cohesive and lasting work of art. Containing some 220 images, most of themin color, with some historical black and whites, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo lets readers explore the construction, connections, and significance of Smithson's 1,500-footlong curl into Great Salt Lake, created, in Smithson's words, of "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water."