Salmela, Architect

Thomas Fisher

U of Minnesota Press

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Salmela Architect provides an in-depth look at one of America's leading "critical regionalist" architects. Salmela's buildings resolve a central question of our time: how to balance the various extreme positions that characterize contemporary architecture and culture. Salmela accomplishes this by juxtaposing opposites: modernist and traditional forms, open and cellular plans, large and small scales, familiar elements used in unfamiliar ways. His projects range from a small stand-alone sauna to commercial spaces visited by thousands of people, and his buildings, mostly situated in the upper Midwest, have become nationally and internationally known. Salmela Architect showcases twenty-six completed buildings and sixteen current projects in lavish color photographs and architectural drawings, enabling readers to get a full sense of the practicality, ethnicity, and playfulness apparent in David Salmela's work. Architecture critic Thomas Fisher explores Salmela's propensity to draw from regional roots as he creates designs particular to individual places and cultures yet with universal appeal. Fisher illuminates this synchronicity with projects as prominent as the Gooseberry Falls Visitors Center and Wild Rice Restaurant as well as residential projects including the acclaimed Jackson Meadow community and photographer Jim Brandenburg's Ravenwood Studio.

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Thomas Fisher is dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota.  He is the former editor of Progressive Architecture magazine and is the author of In the Scheme of Things (Minnesota, 2000).

David Salmela is a self-trained architect practicing in Duluth, Minnesota.  Since 1985 his projects have won fourteen Minnesota AIA Honor Awards and sixteen national level awards including a National AIA Honor Award for Architecture.