At a time when fashion rules, architecture and architects seem to be orbiting the fashionable. To pick up a recent architectural journal, ours included, it might seem that everything built, or worth writing about, emanates from New York or Los Angeles (or London or Amsterdam or Berlin or Tokyo). Obviously, that is not the case. The majority of architects lives and practices out there, in the towns and cities across America—away from the hype, far from Wilshire Boulevard or midtown Manhattan.

This month, RECORD presents a geographically dispersed, selective sampling of projects and people along less traveled roads. As the work of this talented group of architects demonstrates, the results of operating in smaller towns and cities can be rewarding: Each architect represented in the pages that follow has developed an inventive architecture, enriched by place. The work of this unusual group doesn’t look like it emerged from the latest computer rendering, but has an authenticity borne of texture and memory and allusion that is personal if not idiosyncratic. The styles vary from vernacular essays to straight-up Modernist to found art to the cosmic; it may veer from fashion. It should not be ignored.

Click below to see more.