Lorcan O'Herlihy (Contemporary World Architects)

In the work of Lorcan O'Herlihy, a significant emerging voice in this new generation, the faith in modernist reticence, in abstraction, in "white" architecture, is mediated through a contemporary sense of inventiveness in the use of materials, traditional and new, and a profound understanding of context, its landforms, vegetation, and above all, light. Taking his cue from the spatial organizations of Loos, Schindler, and Neutra, O'Herlihy deploys his intersecting volumes to take advantage of the often panoramic views, floods of light, and dramatic sites he occupies. If the West Coast equivalent of modernism's "Mediterranean" is the simple stucco cube, then O'Herlihy echoes its traditional play of wood and plaster in a combination that exploits "the new woods" and their golden, light distributing surfaces.