What turns a random space into a place? What inscribes history into it, or lends it significance? These questions occupy the installation artist Sondra Perry in her current piece, A Terrible Thing, for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. On Euclid Street in the heart of Cleveland, Perry carries out a kind of archaeological study of the street’s history using video, pictures found online, and digital methods of representation. In doing so, she relates the changing infrastructure of race representation on the street and its gender-political effect in everyday use to each other in order to negotiate issues of identity―of a city, a society, and of individuals. This work became a prism of times and perspectives that can now be imagined with the help of this publication.

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.