The first monograph on Boston, Milwaukee, and Miami-based architecture firm LA DALLMAN.

Originating the practice of LA DALLMAN in what they call a “middle city”—either coastal nor peripheral—founders Grace La and James Dallman have come to see the middle as a concept rather than a geography, and a commitment rather than a default. Contemporary architecture gravitates toward poles: avant-garde spectacle or ordinary building, industry or craft, building or landscape. To work between them is not to split the difference. It is to hold opposing forces in balance and to treat that stance as a new front: a position pressed from both sides and worth holding. Over twenty-five years, LA DALLMAN have approached constraint as generative. Projects such as the Marsupial Bridge (Milwaukee, WI), the Nautilus House (Sanibel, FL), or the Door County Granary (Sturgeon Bay, WI), demonstrate that underutilized infrastructure, difficult sites, and modest budgets are not obstacles to design but the material thereof.

Middle Front explores LA DALLMAN’s thoughtful work and vision across eighteen projects, both built and unrealized, which are presented lavishly through photography, plans, drawings, and visualizations. Five illuminating essays by Grace La and James Dallman and a foreword by distinguished architectural historian Antoine Picon make the case for an architecture measured by how well it sustains concept through execution, rather than by how loudly it announces itself—for architects, students, and anyone interested in what serious practice looks like when chasing neither novelty nor convention.