Fromonot

Investigates the history of the Villa dall’Ava in the playful style of a detective novel.

Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. It returns the focus of architectural discourse back onto buildings in a style and form that is fresh 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 in fields 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 Françoise Fromonot, the first case--The House of Doctor Koolhaas--is about the Villa dall’Ava, a private residence in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. Fromonot brilliantly unpicks, explains, and interprets this very first building completed by Rem Koolhaas, who is universally regarded as the world’s most celebrated architect, and his Rotterdam-based firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The house is resolutely part of a modern architectural canon, but until now has not been the focus of a dedicated book or analysis.

Françoise Fromonot is professor of design, history, and theory at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville and William Wayne Caudill Professor of Architecture at Rice Architecture Paris. Thomas Weaver is an architectural writer, educator, editor, and lecturer at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland.