The Fig District
Jeff Shelton
North Street Book Prize 2024 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Art Book
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Architect Jeff Shelton's art book The Fig District: Some Buildings in Downtown Santa Barbara is a joyful compendium of colorful patterns, photographs, and blueprints from eight whimsical multi-use buildings he designed in a historic California neighborhood. In a time when even expensive homes often look cheap and bland, plopped down in treeless voids like personal mini-malls, it's inspiring to read about a team of artisans crafting unique buildings that are well-integrated into the pedestrian street life and that honor the city's cultural heritage.
"The Fig District" is a place that exists primarily in Shelton's imagination, a moniker he gives to the neighborhood around his office on Fig Avenue. And what an imagination it is! Strict design standards in this section of Santa Barbara require new homes to reference the aesthetics of Andalucia and Southern Spain, incorporating such materials as plaster, terra-cotta and ceramic tiles, and decorative ironwork. Shelton's team rose to the challenge.
Everything about this book's design reflects the same detail-oriented craftsmanship as the homes it depicts. Vibrant tile patterns decorate the endpapers and page borders. The binding is a sturdy hardcover—a welcome change from many entries in this contest that used hard-to-hold soft covers for oversized art books. The pages are thick and glossy with good color reproductions of photos and drawings. Sketches are paired with a photo of the finished architectural element and, where relevant, a concise and often amusing explanation of how it was altered in response to physical difficulties. A reader with no background in architecture or metalwork can easily understand the problem-solving that went into the final product.
The buildings profiled in this book make the most of limited square footage in a dense neighborhood. Some are clusters of live/work studios, others multi-unit residences with some commercial space or home offices. The graceful flow of design elements between indoor and outdoor areas makes the buildings look more spacious than their specifications would suggest.
I found myself wishing that such workmanship was available to more people than Shelton's presumably wealthy clients. Perhaps it's not the purpose of this book to contextualize our society's unequal access to beauty. Still, I wondered how the wider community could derive more benefit from the skills on display here. I would have liked some background on the politics of the historic district designation and how moderate-income neighborhoods could impose design standards without making new construction prohibitively expensive. This beautiful book makes me yearn for a time when we took more pride in the architecture of our common space.
Read an excerpt from The Fig District (PDF)
Buy this book from Jeff Shelton Architect.
