November 28, 2011
This weekend we learned of the impending auction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1948 Kenneth Laurent House, a home Wright built for a wheel-chair bound veteran. Continue.
October 14, 2011
Photo: Oscar Ramirez
It’s well known that Le Corbusier looked to ocean liners, along with grain silos, French machinery, and biplanes, to formulate the basis of his early architectural theories. He, and modernists such as Walter Gropius and Moisei Ginsburg, praised these industrial objects for their relative lack of architecture, in that their functional capacities–economy made possible by rationalized technology and techniques, such as mass-standardization–exceeded preoccupations of style or form, and in doing so, would give birth to a new architectural movement.
Le Corbusier would exhaust the aesthetic possibilities of this new system in a series of private villas in the 1920s, culminating, of course, with the Villa Savoye. Yet, apart from his theoretical plans for Paris and the social housing experiment at Pessac, he would not explore its political implications until 1929, when he embarked on a series of projects for the Parisian Salvation Army, including an eighty-meter barge that he would convert into a veritable floating piece of heroic architecture. Read on.
Photo: Fondation Le Corbusier
October 13, 2011
The first known photograph of the White House, 1846. Image: Library of Congress
On this day in 1792, the cornerstone of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was laid. The year prior George Washington had announced to the American public the permanent site of the presidential residence, having chosen the spot himself. The administration launched a competition, sponsored by a commission under the supervision by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson–who himself had submitted a proposal clearly derived from the Villa Rotonda. Following Washington’s suggestion, the commission selected the Irish carpenter and architect James Hoban as the winner, whose designs for a Neo-Palladian estate would become the seat of executive power in the new country. Keep reading.
October 12, 2011
Highland Park,circa 1905 (via highlandpark wordpress).
This week, Southern and Central California public television station KCET released the first chapter of Departures: Highland Park, its new transmedia series. (And not a moment too soon; Jeffrey Deitch shouted out Highland Park as a center of LA’s emerging arts scene in today’s New York Times.)
Weaving together diverse storylines across multiple platforms using new and traditional media, Departures chronicle the largely under-told / untold history of the Highland Park neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles.
For hundreds of years, its close proximity to the Arroyo Seco tributary has attracted a constant flow of settlers who have created and layered Highland Park’s cultural, economic, and built identity.
At the turn of the 20th century, after a major population surge, Los Angeles’ identity as a cosmopolitan metropolis began to emerge. One hundred fascinating years later, the same remains true today, as Highland Park continues to influence the pulse of contemporary Los Angeles.
October 12, 2011
In the opening of issue #2 of the Daredevil re-launch, you’ll find the Man Without Fear perched beneath the iron undercarriage of a fully realized replication of the High Line Park, complete with “10th Avenue Square” viewing platform, antiquated iron filigree, and passing traffic below. Resting on a authentically rendered steel column, our hero listens in on a conversation between two men above. The following image exchanges viewpoints, establishing a wide shot with the park’s infamous benches, concrete planks, and “wild” flora on full display. The interlocutors now appear at eye level; beneath them, Daredevil calmly (read: creepily) waits in anticipation. The scene is set.
To younger audiences not native to New York City, the images may appear as a fanciful construct, an amalgam of familiar park elements, bridge-like infrastructure, and urban scenarios, held together by considerable amounts of imagination. This is an introduction to architecture, not only to its more palpable aspects of scale and material, but, more importantly, to its narrative and theatrical capacities. These scenes unfold on the psychological terrain of collective urban experience, manifested by dark, empty public squares, brooding towers, schizophrenic glass office blocks, and derelict religious structures. In the case of Daredevil, and all others, the superhero maintains an asymmetric relationship with the built environment, on which his existence rests. Simply put, the city doesn’t need its superheroes as much as they need it. Read on!
September 29, 2011
All photos: Paul Virilio, “Bunker Archeology” / Princeton Architectural Press
In 1941, Hitler ordered the construction of the first bunkers which were to become the building blocks of a vast Nazi defensive system that stretched the latitudinal limits of the German Empire, from Scandinavia to Spain. Built under the supervision of the Führer’s chief architect Albert Speer, the extensive chain of fortifications, called the Atlantic Wall, still stands as one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary infrastructural and engineering achievements. Yet, as the BBC reported a couple weeks ago, many of these bunkers have become endangered, made vulnerable by years of exposure to the threats of weathering, sinking sands, and vandalization. Read more.
September 20, 2011
This image of the American Standard Building (née the American Radiator Building) has been blazing through the internet (i.e. tumblr) of late, and it’s not hard to see why. Erected in 1924, the building, with its extensive application of bronze finishes and granite surfaces, is a perfect distillation of Twenties decadence, looming over Bryant Park in utter denial of rising economic troubles (past or present). More images after the jump!
September 16, 2011
Casa Vincens, Antoni Gaudí
We’re in the midst of partnering with Ceramic of Italy to bring you a design challenge, which is offering $10,000 in design fees and an additional $15,000 prize package to project manage your design!
Now, architects may delegate tiles and other similar design considerations to the margins of architecture, but, having spent some time this past week reading up on the subject, it was actually really interesting to discover the integral role tiles played in the modernization of the 20-century building aesthetic. Here’s an archive of my days of at-first-unwilling-but-then-willing tile-research.
September 8, 2011
Daniel Libeskind, A New World Trade Center
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, an array of competitions, conferences, and initiatives was launched to consider the appropriateness and terms of rebuilding Ground Zero.When, in mid-2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Company (LMDC) released an abysmal set of six initial plans for a new World Trade Center, a reactionary wave of architects entered the fray, each with their own vision to rehabilitate and transform Ground Zero into a thriving urban center once more. Their plans, however loose or conceptual they may have been, promised to offer the city something more than what it would receive a decade later–Daniel Libeskind’s diluted masterplan for a series of equally bland towers (Libeskind’s first ideas for a tower at Ground Zero above). Explore the alternatives to 2011′s Ground Zero.
September 8, 2011
The Kappa Sigma Fraternity House by Paul Rudolph, 1961. All photos courtesy of Chris Mottalini
Photographer and Architizer buddy Chris Mottalini has shared with us some new photos of another obscure Paul Rudolph work, the Kappa Sigma Fraternity at Auburn University. Not only did Rudolph attend Auburn, then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute, but he was also a member of the fraternity for which he designed the house. The photos after the jump!
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