The architecture of WG Clark is inextricably grounded in its place, the Atlantic coastal states of the American South. Over the course of his 40-year career as a modern architect practicing in historic contexts, Clark has constructed a small but significant body of work of unparalleled high quality and experiential richness. Clarks remarkably resolved spatial compositions are formally restrained and contextually appropriate, and while relatively few in number, have nevertheless exerted an outsize influence on architects around the world. Clarks regional grounding, slow and measured pace of design, and modest publicity has provided him with the time-in-place necessary for thinking and making at the very highest level. Like the relatively few works of Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, the works of WG Clark have attained canonical status, and his redefinition of architectural design as being grounded in the history of the discipline, as well as in the particularities of its place, has proved to be of ever-increasing relevance to contemporary practice.
The architecture of WG Clark is inextricably grounded in its place, the Atlantic coastal states of the American South.
Robert McCarter is a practising architect, author and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught at five universities over thirty-two years, and in his forty years of architectural practice he has realised twenty-five buildings. Among the twenty books he has authored are: The Work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple: Economy as Ethic (2017), Marcel Breuer (2016), Steven Holl (2015), Aldo van Eyck (2015), Herman Hertzberger (2015), Alvar Aalto (2014), Carlo Scarpa (2013), Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References (2012), Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as Experience (with Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012), Louis I. Kahn (2005) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1997).
