According to the esteemed American architect, Peter Q. Bohlin, FAIA, 'Thomas Bosworth's architecture subscribes to an appreciation and philosophy of balance, light and site positioning. His houses are Modern in detail, yet classical in spirit. They are calm and assured. They are comfortable and have great dignity.'
A teacher and scholar, as well as practicing architect, the Seattle architect Thomas Bosworth is a classicist, strongly influenced by Greek and Roman architecture and especially powerfully by the work and writings of Palladio. His work is equally motivated by land and landscape: architecture follows site, literally and aesthetically, and every house sits on and in its particular location with a perfect sense of rightness and inevitability. This big, bold, beautifully designed monograph, 'Building With Light in the Pacific Northwest,' is a review of some of Bosworth's most exceptional houses. Organized by plan type, they reveal, on the one hand, the consistency of his principles--landscape, natural light, handcraft, symmetry, axiality and memory--and, on the other, his near-infinite capacity to conceive something entirely new and fresh with each house. Together, photographs, plans and texts open the reader's eyes to what Bosworth sees from the time he first walks the land until his vision is fully realized.
Bosworth has completed nearly 70 houses in the Pacific Northwest. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he is a partner in the firm Bosworth Hoedemaker in Seattle and the recipient of the 2003 AIA/Seattle Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement, among many other honors. Light may be both wave and particle, but rarely is it considered a building material, for it is the essence of insubstantiality, too inconstant to be relied upon, a desirable after-thought in much 20th and 21st century architecture. For architect Thomas L. Bosworth, however, it is the primum mobile, and his extraordinary understanding of light as a living thing informs his vision and his work. In a career that began in 1960 in the office of Eero Saarinen and continues with new projects on the boards today, he consistently uses natural light to inform his architecture, to bring to it both shape and meaning. This book is a review of some of some of Bosworth's most exceptional houses.