orthogonal form, love of transparency, willful defiance of gravity and servility to the most retrograde programs. George Ranalli stands outside this stream of fashion, just as he stands outside the backward-looking branch of the profession that claims thumping its virtuous chest, to be building within some sense of “tradition”, in general one that has long been pronounced dead.

Ranalli on the other hand, works in a tradition that retains a principle of de- velopment, a living tradition, not one recaptured from the moribund reaches of the architectural past. He continues to research, refine and extend one of the key taxonomic streams of modernity. The architect whose books appear most prominently on Ranalli’s shelves is Frank Lloyd Wright and the master is pivotal in the development of his work. The sense of the collusion of space and detail, the richness of elaboration, the intense but disciplined materiality, the feeling for landscape, and the visionary openness to the suggestiveness of context are qualities abundantly shared between them. This is by no means to say that Ranalli is a Wrightian, rather Wright was the giant in a flow of sensibility that both preceded and followed him. His fellow travelers certainly include the Amsterdam School, the Arts and Crafts movement, Otto Wagner, Louis Sullivan, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Le Corbusier and Raimund Abraham amongst many more.

What unites these figures for Ranalli is a set of characteristics that join the spatial, the tectonic and the social. Ranalli’s work enjoys one of its many singularities in the way it combines a feeling for flowing space with a more orthodox, even quirky, reverence for the chamber, for spaces isolated in their particularity. The union unique becomes unique because Ranalli does not simply produce a breezy continuity throughout the project but a palpable flow that eddies and laminates and through which the movement of bodies is both straightforward