Design/Build with Jersey Devil Book Release

The three principals of Jersey Devil, and the subjects of a brand new book, Design/Build with Jersey Devil (Princeton Architectural Press) will be featured at the book’s world release event at Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield, Friday August 5 at 7:00 PM. The public is invited, refreshments will be served, and the event is free. Yestermorrow is located three miles south of Waitsfield Village on route 100.

Steve Badanes, Jim Adamson, and John Ringel are now working into their fifth decade as Jersey Devil, the loose-knit design/build group they founded in 1972, which according to Michael Sorkin “is by turns artful and relaxed, whimsical and serious, classical and out to lunch.” The three are also long-time Yestermorrow instructors and provocateurs, and accompanying their annual summertime pilgrimage to Vermont this year—from their academic and professional callings in Washington, Florida, and New Jersey respectively—will be the publication of the newest book to chronicle the Jersey Devil influence, which has spawned more than one hundred design/build programs.

Featured will be a presentation by Steve Badanes, called “Speak of the Devil,” which will endeavor to capture the nuts-and-bolts of the Jersey Devil philosophy and perspective and navigate the elusive challenges of design/build. Themes in the book—written by Charlie Hailey, an architecture professor at the University of Florida—touch on socially responsible architecture, intuition and intentionality, detailing and fostering craftsmanship, group work and collaboration, off-the-shelf components and nonstandard applications, educational reform, ethos and risk, good life and play, the politics of building, and university-community relations. 

The release of the book at Yestermorrow is fitting. Not only because of the hundreds of Yestermorrow students who have over the years learned the basics of design/build, the principles of public interest design, how to put the “funk in functionalism,” and who-knows-what else, but also because of Yestermorrow’s roots in the Mad River Valley’s Prickly Mountain design/build movement which shares much of its DNA with Jersey Devil.