George Suyama began his architectural practice in Seattle in 1971. His
early career is marked by a number of notable designs in the
contemporaneous wood idiom of the region. Over time, however, Suyama
developed an architecture characterized by a search for minimalist
simplicity, a paradoxical architecture of intense, even exciting,
tranquility.
In 2002, he and partners Ric Peterson and Jay Deguchi established
Suyama Peterson Deguchi. Their firm has built a distinguished
reputation by means of designs influenced by the immediate region and by
Suyama's ancestral Japan, which are intimately related to site and
executed with an astonishing finesse of detail. Above all, their
architecture reflects Suyama's quest to eliminate what he calls
"visual noise," a quest that has yielded not visual silence but a kind
of visual music. Architectural elements are distilled to a purity
analogous to that of a musical tone, and relationships between those
elements are as pure and artistically rich as the mathematics of music.
In Suyama: A Complex Serenity, Grant Hildebrand introduces the man and
his work, discussing relevant aspects of Suyama's life, the influences
that have shaped his beliefs, and twenty of his built and unbuilt
projects that illuminate the development of his remarkable art and
craft. Included also are appendices that illustrate Suyama's deep and
long-standing involvement with the arts and product design.
