A. Lawrence Kocher

380 pages

Lawrence Kocher’s work as an independent designer has gotten very little critical attention. The book devotes several chapters to this little-known part of Kocher’s practice and resituates him as one of the main protagonists in the history of American Modern architecture, revealing the profound relationship between Kocher’s designs and existing American domestic traditions. Kocher’s concept of the vernacular included not only the different residential types of Colonial and Early Republican America, but most importantly, other kinds of transitional dwelling artifacts. This book tries to provide evidence about Kocher’s intention of using these vernacular artifacts, alongside the concepts of prefabrication and industrialization inherent to them, as a base to construct a new national architecture to graft the European modernist tradition.