The practice of James Timberlake and Stephen Kieran is marked by their engagement with the fundamental issues of building durability, construction sequencing, and building infrastructure. This critical yet poetic engagement with everyday conditions of practice and construction resonates strongly especially when compared against other practices primarily concerned with the status-quo of budgets and specifications. With KieranTimberlake, we are presented with a firm engaged with core issues in a formative and intellectually compelling way. The book's structure is meant to reinforce the firm's belief that architecture extends across sites, histories, and cultures not as singularities, but as vast interrelated systems that have individual characteristics articulated within the whole. KieranTimberlake traces the passage of the firm toward a philosophy in which the ethical obligation to perform becomes a central generator of architectural form, a philosophy extensively illustrated through nineteen new and recent projects including the firm's own studio; academic buildings for such prestigious institutions as Yale University, Cornell University, and the University of Pennsylvania; the new U.S. embassy in London; and cutting-edge residential projects.
