Framing the Valley - by Maria Ogrydziak (Hardcover)

About the Book

Emerging from the vivid landscape of California's Central Valley, architect Maria Ogrydziak's iconic, light-filled houses reflect a region where growth abounds, rich soil runs deep, and blue sky goes on and on. She designs for a new California dream, outside the hustle of the big cities, far from the deep turquoise of the Pacific. 'Framing the Valley' follows eight case study houses where everyday people find extraordinary lives through architecture. Written in an approachable style by Maria, it is full of design wisdom from over 40 years of 400 built projects. Projects include Art Barn, a steel horse barn transformed into an art gallery, overlooking picturesque fields dotted with California poppies; Flight house, a budget-friendly remote-work homestead just outside town; two remodels of California's classic ranch-style and mid-century modern tract homes; and a 15,000-square-foot luxury homestead clad completely in iridescent glass.

Book Synopsis

Emerging from the vivid landscape of California's Central Valley, architect Maria Ogrydziak's iconic, light-filled houses reflect a region where growth abounds, rich soil runs deep, and blue sky goes on and on. She designs for a new California dream, outside the hustle of the big cities, far from the deep turquoise of the Pacific.

Framing the Valley follows eight case study houses where everyday people find extraordinary lives through architecture. Written in an approachable style by Maria, it is full of design wisdom from over 40 years of 400 built projects.

Projects include Art Barn, a steel horse barn transformed into an art gallery, overlooking picturesque fields dotted with California poppies; Flight house, a budget-friendly remote-work homestead just outside town; two remodels of California's classic ranch-style and mid-century modern tract homes; and a 15,000-square-foot luxury homestead clad completely in iridescent glass.

Review Quotes

"Maria Ogrydziak casts an artist's eye on the landscapes of California's Central Valley, on the compact towns and endless fields, the winding streams and encircling hills, spread out under a brilliant sky, which she so deeply loves. Woven into these settings,
her homes resonate with the diverse and creative lives lived within them."

Tim Culvahouse, FAIA, editor of arcCA (Architecture California)

"Maria's projects yield continual inventions, each a way of capturing aspects of the Great Valley and the many places and landscapes that it harbors. The forms and spaces are richly configured, allowing life to resonate within them and echo out into the surroundings. Her works, so well presented here, join mind, material, and action to create the wonder of fully inhabitable places."

Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA, renowned architect, educator, and author of The Sea Ranch: Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, Place,
and Community on the Northern California Coast

"This elegant book conveys how Maria Ogrydziak's architecture has offered discerning homeowners the option of a crisp modernism keyed to the big skies, shade trees, agricultural engineering and long horizons of the Californian interior's hot, enigmatic expanse. In this it offers one answer to the puzzle of how to build in a region largely overlooked by Californian architecture culture."

Simon Sadler, author of Archigram: Architecture without Architecture and The Situationist City