About this talk

Running time: 41 minutes

Considering himself a Californian architect, the Austrian-born Mark Mack has lived and practised in Los Angeles since 1975, having worked previously with Hans Hollein (see Ritual & Transformation), Haus-Rucker-Co and Emilio Ambasz (see The Poetics Of Architecture), and having come under the spell of Luis Barragán's work. Other influences have been Adolf Loos while he was a student in Vienna, and Irving Gill and Rudolf Schindler when he came to California.

His first houses, built in the Napa Valley, allowed him to explore the characteristics of the Californian house, out of which certain principles have come to bear in most of his subsequent architecture - the relationship between architecture; landscape and climate; the integration of the outdoor and indoor; the separation of public and private space; the recognition of the needs of different life-styles and the contrast between man-made structures and Nature -- leading to more open and free environment, albeit low-rise, high density.

For him architecture is not an art but "a way of artfully building, putting things together, composing them". He sees art "in the Loosian sense, as a contraction to architecture".

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