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For more than sixty years, casual observers and architectural aficionados alike have craned their necks to catch glimpses of Harry Gesner houses of Southern California. There´s one hovering on a mountaintop above Malibu, as it poised to take flight over the Pacific. Another is bolded to a cliff so that the site can support a home before the next 60 -foot cliff drops off. And yet another is tucked away on the grounds of the Getty Museum centre in Los Angeles. Maverick architect and inventor Harry Gesner was always drawn to unusual, challenging sites, which called for dramatic architecture and living environments. Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner will open doors to these and twelve other intriguing homes, all located in and round the Los Angeles area, accompanied by magnificent photographs by Jurgen Nogai. The book´s scope will be broad, using archival photographs, documents and a rich collection of Gesner´s own spectacular design drawings, blue prints and floor plans to trace his career from 1 945 to the present/ Even in Southern California, a region that has been a catalyst for great Modern architecture for more than a century, Gesner´s utterly unique designs are outside the canons of doctrinaire modernism. Rather, his sensibility springs from his interpretation of the landscape and the messages it communicates to him after days of sketching on a new pristine site. Inevitably, for a man born an raised in Southern California, his sculptural designs are imbues with the vision of an almost primeval California, derived from his parents memories of the relatively undeveloped paradise of his youth. He is a Modernist, but one whose romantic, idealistic nature has caused his truly extraordinary body of work to be overlooked. Until now.

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George R. R. Martin, geb. 1948 in Bayonne/New Jersey, veröffentlichte seine ersten Kurzgeschichten im Jahr 1971 und gelangte damit in der Science-Fiction-Szene zu frühem Ruhm. Gleich mehrfach wurde ihm der renommierte Hugo Award verliehen. Danach arbeitete er in der Produktion von Fernsehserien, etwa als Dramaturg der TV-Serie ´Twilight Zone´, ehe er 1996 mit einem Sensationserfolg auf die Bühne der Fantasy-Literatur zurückkehrte: Sein mehrteiliges Epos ´Das Lied von Eis und Feuer´ wird einhellig als Meisterwerk gepriesen. George R. R. Martin lebt in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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George R. R. Martin is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire- A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons -as well as Tuf Voyaging, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag, Dying of the Light, Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle), and Dreamsongs Volumes I and II . He is also the creator of The Lands of Ice and Fire, a collection of maps from A Song of Ice and Fire featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, and The World of Ice & Fire (with Elio M. García, Jr., and Linda Antonsson). He lives with the lovely Parris in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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