Buildings should have a 'spirit of place' says Travis Price, who had a eureka moment before he discovered his answer to the future of modern architecture, writes Emma Cullinan

AN AMERICAN architect who believes that building design should be rooted in a sense of place came to Mayo for inspiration. Travis Price includes Croagh Patrick - along with Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia and Machu Picchu in Peru - as one of the sacred places that has the kind of spiritual presence he wants to inject into his buildings.

In Mayo, he and his architecture students from the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, created structures on the Mayo Sculpture Trail in Belmullet, Annagh Head, Doonamore, French Port and Carroteigue. The projects were facilitated by Peter Hynes, an architect in Mayo council, who also brought DIT students on board.

The projects were part of Price's mission to build "Spirit of Place" structures in remote spots worldwide.

Price, a Washington DC-based architect, came to Dublin last week to launch his new book about architecture and the spirit of place with a talk at the RIAI (Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland) in Merrion Square. And he has what might be seen as a warning for a rapidly developing Ireland.

People nowadays spend their lives behind glass and are divorced from their local community: driving from placeless housing estates to culture-free shopping malls, working in glazed towers and watching the world on television, says Price, who studied philosophy as well as architecture.

He calls it all our "Sprawl, Mall and Tall" society which has brought with it building designs that lack humanity, soul and which are formulaic. "A void permeates today's architectural landscape. Economies of scale ignore the scale of the spirit. The result is an architecture that promulgates isolation and homogeneity."

A watershed happened in his own work when he decided that he couldn't go on as an architect unless he could inject spiritual metaphors into his buildings. That is part of the journey towards finding what he calls "Mythic Modern" involved building those "Spirit of Place" structures, which aimed to find "the mythic and interpret it into modern architecture".

In Mayo, Price asked people about local lore to gain a knowledge of the land: "Of course every rock there has about 10 tales attached to it so I got a bellyful and then some." It is such stories that inform his work: "Without choosing a specific culture and metaphor to tie a building to, it will be foundationless."

Certain buildings have "it" - that certain something he's talking about - he said in his address to the RIAI. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao is one. Others he used to illustrate his point are Calatrava's pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum; Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona; Saarinen's airport in Virginia and Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in Pennsylvania.

"He got it - he nailed it," says Price pointing to a picture of Wright's house at Bear Run.

Nature, stillness and movement are the three ingredients he's identified in the creation of buildings that have honesty and meaning.

All of this philosophy sounds good - but does Price deliver the goods in his own work? When he began to show pictures of his buildings, they looked competently designed but didn't have that sense of spirit until he showed slides of the houses he has built since his watershed moment.

They are absolutely beautiful, including his own home in Washington DC built on a steep slope, steering clear of trees and their tap roots by standing on only two columns.

The building is held at the moment it leaps from the hilltop into the air by restraining tension wires plunged deep into the ground.

Was there a moment when he knew he had got "it", I ask him. "Absolutely," he says, "there was a watershed when the three principles (nature, stillness and movement) I had been focusing on for so long crystallised in one single gesture.

"I don't know how I got it but when it happens I feel the thunder roar through me. I also know through clients and review commission reactions that I'm onto something."

One way of achieving this is through a balance. He uses another triplet to look at where design has been recently and how architects can move forward: Po-mo, E-co and De-co (or De-con in the book).

These stand for Postmodernism, Ecologist and Deconstructivism, all architectural movements that have followed Modernism and Price - along with architects the world over - is looking for an after-Modernism (as opposed to Post-modernism which was essentially reverse-modernism) way forward.

And many are still designing Modernist white boxes, perhaps waiting to see where they can go next.

"Modernism is just one clinical metaphor. Minimalism can be profound if it is done right but if you are off by a hair you lose the power."

Each of the three movements have a place but they aren't enough on their own, says Price.

The Po-mo movement looked for meaning in the past but often ended up just pasting bits of history - in the form of classical elements - onto new buildings, says the architect who refers to his hometown of Washington DC as the "world's largest neo-classical theme park. All pastiche."

Price is for sustainability which helped us towards tactile textures and human scale but says that eco-architecture has become "too granola" in places.

Meanwhile, deconstructivism has "captured the (architectural) flag with brazen showmanship" and, in his own career it "shocked me back into a passion for an architecture that can truly take wing".

So, while his work is about form and function, it is also about force. When he works with a client "I ask them to tell me how a house should feel, what it should evoke from the site and from their individual psyches, not 'what do you want it to look like?'. "

The Archaeology of Tomorrow - Architecture and the Spirit of Place by Travis Price is for sale at the RIAI bookshop, Merrion Square, Dublin 2, for €45