Elegant Explorations: The Designs of Phillip Jacobson

Throughout his career as an architect and educator, Phillip Jacobson has also continually engaged in another realm of design: furniture, lighting fixtures, jewelry, and home accessories. He has designed in this applied arena for commercial production and for friends and family. This "other" realm of design, evidenced by Jacobson's use of timeless structural and formal concepts, has been an exciting exploration for the artist and is the subject of this book.

Phillip Jacobson has practiced architecture in Seattle for forty years. He was a partner in and for twenty years design director of TRA, a large multidisciplinary firm renowned for deft and effective design of large architectural and urban projects, both domestic and international. He is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, where he taught for nearly four decades in the Departments of Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He has held visiting appointments at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the University of Sydney in Australia. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a recipient of the AIA Seattle Chapter medal for distinguished lifetime achievement.

Grant Hildebrand is professor emeritus of architecture and art history at the University of Washington. He is the author of several books on architecture, including Origins of Architectural Pleasure, for which in 2000 he received the Washington Governor's Writers Award for work of literary merit and lasting value. In 2005, with co-author T. William Booth, he was short-listed for the award for A Thriving Modernism: The Houses of Wendell Lovett and Arne Bystrom. His most recent publication is Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House.