Merrill, Pastor & Michael - by Scott Merrill (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book is the first collection of the firm's work, covering almost forty years with over sixty projects, and more than twelve hundred drawings and photographs, most of them in color. Hundreds of new drawings, renderings, and photographs were prepared for the book. There are written contributions by Andrés Duany, Léon Krier, and Vincent Scully. Scott Merrill wrote three essays and the descriptions and goals of each project.

Almost every type of building in a town or small city is represented. About a third of the projects are houses--in Georgian Bay, Jackson Hole, Shelburne Farms, Highland Park, the Bahamas, New Zealand, and throughout Florida. There are multifamily projects in Florida's Alys Beach, Vero Beach, and West Palm Beach, and on the Bahamian island of New Providence. There are models for condominiums, mixed-use buildings, row houses, courtyard buildings, small cottage groups, and micro housing.

There are public buildings--chapels, a memorial garden, town halls, a commuter train station, a federal courthouse, a library, and small university buildings. There are master plans and precinct plans. There are two collaborations with Léon Krier, and half the projects in the book are in DPZ or DPZ CoDesign master plans. This long-standing collaboration is the backbone of the book.

There is an entire section of work in the Middle East. There are built and unbuilt projects, and sometimes multiple designs for the same project. There are projects that have been embraced by communities and good projects that have received fierce public opposition.

There are projects from before the Great Recession that will never be realized. There are historic buildings that require new uses if they are to be saved, and master plans that try to provide historic buildings with the settings they deserve. There are master plans that express a university's commitment to its host city, and master plans that try to reverse disinvestment. There are counterproposals.

Because the firm is located in Vero Beach, and because there is such a large net migration of people into the state, there is a focus on Florida, with several projects in the Panhandle, in Indian River County on the Atlantic coast, infill housing in West Palm Beach, university buildings in Miami, a master plan among the lakes of central Florida, and a small campus plan among the wetlands, wildlife preserves, and tomato farms in the vast, empty interior of the peninsula.

There is an emphasis on the wealth of our national architectural inheritance--garden apartments in Jackson Heights in Queens, and courtyard apartments in Chicago and Los Angeles; the motor courts on old US highways, barns, grain elevators, grapefruit sorters, tobacco warehouses, and National Park lodges; the industrial, the agricultural, the commercial, and the vernacular; and the stream of talented northerners who have given Florida some of its most beloved buildings.

A wide range of settings are described--mountainsides, hillsides, coastal plains, and primary dunes; freshwater lakes, archipelagos, brackish estuaries, and lagoons; oases, deserts, wetlands, and subtropical forests; wharfs, ports, canals, marinas, and the Intracoastal Waterway; commuter rail tracks, dog tracks, and remediated mines; small towns, suburbs, and small cities; decommissioned army forts and naval bases; large dairy farms, citrus groves, Audubon easements, and National Wildlife Refuges; small greens, narrow streets, alleys, pinwheels, plazas, amphitheaters, military parade grounds, and verdant campuses.