All-American dreams

The current US architectural scene is not noted for its innovation – but a new book about some of its wilder renegades offers cause for hope, says Jay Merrick

The future's elastic. The architect and designer Alvar Aalto said so decades ago, and today new-wave American architects are trying to prove it by fusing spatial research with computer power to create buildings that might be described as craft-cum-cyber objects. But are their buildings worth a damn?

Damnation is an issue here. British architects may think that their creative lives are tough, but they're a cakewalk compared with the general aridity of architectural conditions experienced in the United States. The 20 practices that are featured in Thames & Hudson's latest round-up of hot-shots, All American, have risen randomly like poppies from the world's ultimate killing fields of industrialised design and manufacturing. The surging demand for commercial buildings and housing in the UK makes the American experience all the more relevant at the moment.

In Fifties America, Levitt and Sons – It's a Beautiful Life 'burbs a speciality – was manufacturing four-room homes at the rate of one every 16 minutes. That's faster than factory-made timber-frame houses roll off the line in Britain today. The industrialised, off-the-shelf sameness of larger-scale US architecture went back even farther than that, so that genuine architectural creativity has been increasingly marginalised. In Britain, by contrast, funky young practices are commonplace and can try their hands at anything from rural-barn makeovers to groovy shops selling expensive unguents and chakra alignments.

Post-war America may have produced some fabulous architectural renegades, such as Frank Gehry, but a recent survey by the American Institute of Architects reveals that the majority of that country's 95,000 architects are boxed into a single design sector. The reason is obvious: endless repeats of generic building types reduces costs and increases profits. But it's also an expedient damnation of architectural aspiration and progress. Which means that if you break out of the architectural box in the US, you may not get another chance. You have to make it count, and hope the ripples get noticed.

If Brian Carter and Annette LeCuyer's sit-rep is right, the way to do it is either to reinvent that obdurate box or to smash it up. And nobody, of late, has taken the second route more wholeheartedly than the New York architects ShoP.

The practice has pulled off quite a beguiling stunt with its setting for Dunescape, an urban open-air pool and changing rooms, fusing ordinary cedar two-by-twos with complex, computer-generated trajectories to produce a building-cum-cyber-dream. The subtle variations of its timber frames were knocked together on site by students, who formed the trusses by using full-sized paper templates. One glance tells you that Dunescape was computer-modelled. But it also subverts that idea by being made of crude, hand-assembled materials. And another simple, visceral point: it cheers you up just to look at it.

There's equally adventurous work from others, including Office dA, which is developing interesting, though not yet radical, textural façades; from Wendell Burnette, and from Dan Hoffman, whose playful structures allude to the work of those icons of timber architecture, Fay Jones in America, and the brooding, folkloric sage of Budapest, Imre Makovecs. But it is to the dreaded box – invariably the acid test for reinventions of enclosure – that we must look for real evidence of progress. And two of Carter and LeCuyer's All Americans seem to spring with particular alacrity from the cuboid pack.

Rick Joy is an architekton, a master builder; he studied architecture after working as a builder and jazz drummer. At first glance, his buildings may seem to be merely pleasant graphic exercises. But, like the pared-down Yankee Modernism of the Case Study homes of the Fifties and Sixties by architects such as Richard Neutra, there's a great deal more at play here than tightly ordered form and shadow-lines sharp enough to cut yourself on.

Joy's Tyler residence in the Arizona desert is a refined essay in texture and contrast. The façades are of ungalvanised sheet steel that has been allowed to rust, and the effect in this desert setting is perfect. The building's distinct outline is mediated; there may be frameless glass windows, smooth white plaster and maple flooring within, but the desert is still the boss. Joy's own studio in Tucson takes rough-smooth improvisations to the sensual limit: rammed earth walls, full-height glazing, reflective ceiling; light transformed into a dozen overlapping textures and gradations of colour so that solid very nearly becomes liquid.

Not everything on show in this book is riveting. Thomas Phifer's two-storey Workstage office building is a nicely scaled and detailed piece of lightweight glass and steel structure, but that's it. One's heart does not thud at the sight of it; the mind goes blank. The building might have been cooked up by anybody. As for Kuth/Ranieri's Greene residence, can architects please stop jamming together materials in this clumsily ironic and witlessly uncouth way? Thick wooden posts passing through a smooth, plywood-sheathed lintel, topped with a steel I-beam, industrial kitchen units, coarse stone walls, super-minimalist light arrays. You look at all this and you don't think "architecture"; you think "gubbins".

There is an antidote. The most compelling structure in All American is Maryhill Overlook, and it's by Allied Works Architecture. That firm, like the London Eye's designers, Marks Barfield, came up with the idea first, then found somebody to commission it. The Overlook is not a building as such, but a conceptual object designed to remind us of the crumple-zone between man and nature. A house, of course, does that; so, too, does the sight of gulls wheeling over a landfill site. The difference is that the Overlook – part of a network of architectural interventions in environmentally sensitive areas called Sitings – can't be ignored. It is both landish and outlandish.

Allied Works says the structure is architecture "suggested by the simple demarcation of boundaries within a spatial field". How can architects capable of creating such an intriguing object utter such pointless, soul-destroying tosh? Of course the Overlook sets up boundaries: it's an intrusion, a thing; that's what they do. It has power not because of tidily intellectualised "boundaries" and "spatial fields", but because it is several things at once: random sculpture; a reinvention of the lunar bluffs overlooking the Columbia River; a building in the process of construction; abandoned foundations; a songline in reinforced concrete.

This is the kind of protean Modernism that keeps coming back stronger. And architectural damnation? Thanks to buildings such as this, it's on hold – for now.

'All American', by Brian Carter and Annette LeCuyer, is published by Thames & Hudson, price £24.95