Situated Objects is a book of drawings, buildings, and projects realized by Stan Allen since 2012. Well known for his essay “Field Conditions,” and for work at the scale of the city, these projects represent a complementary approach that address questions of nature, the ex-urban landscape, design process, and building through a series of small-scale works on rural sites.  The book argues that buildings can be best understood as “situated” objects: object-like in that they have fixed limits and stand free; situated, in that buildings always exist in an intricate relationship to a larger context. A building does not end at its walls; it is a nexus in a complex field of social relations, ecological systems, cultural norms and local histories. Together, these buildings and projects reflect on the relationship between architecture and landscape at a time when the human impact on climate may have reached a tipping point.

Stan Allen is an architect and George Dutton ‘27 Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. From 2002 to 2012 he was dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton. His architectural firm SAA/Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America, and Asia. He was one of twelve architects chosen to represent the US in the American Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and his work was featured in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. In addition to numerous articles and project reviews, his architectural work is published in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City and his essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. The edited collection Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain was published by Lars Müller in 2011. His most recent book, Four Projects: A Stan Allen Sourcebook, was published in 2017 by The Ohio State University and ORO Publishers.