Gumshoe is new series of architectural books, introducing a new approach to the writing of architectural history. It returns the focus of architectural discourse back onto buildings, in a style and form that is original and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. It emulates the detective novel a form of writing beloved by many, but also one that has enjoyed a parallel academic life in disciplines and by writers as diverse as psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), film (Sigfried Kracauer), and art history (Carlo Ginzburg) but, significantly, not yet by architecture. Each volume will investigate a singular building as if it were a mystery waiting to be solved.
Written by distinguished French architectural critic and historian Franēoise Fromonot, the first case The House of Doctor Koolhaas is about the Villa dallAva, a private residence in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. Fromonot brilliantly unpicks, explains and interprets the very first building completed by Rem Koolhaas, who is universally regarded as the worlds most celebrated architect, and his Rotterdam-based firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
