The Henry Ford / Living History magazine

Adam Reed Tucker is a grown man with a seemingly childlike ambition: to build a world out of LEGOs. As one out of only 11 LEGO Certified Professionals, Tucker has made it his mission to work with and explore the possibilities of the little plastic bricks, regarding them not as toys but, as he told Living History magazine, his “artistic medium.”

According to an interview with The Chicago Tribune, Tucker began his career designing luxury residences, but when the housing market/entire economy started to sink, he found himself out of a job and back at home with his parents. He tinkered around, brought some samples to a LEGO convention, and caught the company’s attention. Now, he runs a company called Brickstructures that’s contracted to design kits for LEGO. And he’s just signed on to be a part of Architizer’s A+ Awards jury, where he’ll bring his imagination and boundless drive to reenvision the limits of architecture. The deadline for entry to the awards is today, so get your entry in ASAP. Click through to see 10 classic buildings Tucker has reworked for LEGO.

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Whoever is curating LEGO’s Architecture series has our approval. The legendary toymaker has already pixelized some fantastic, if obvious, buildings, from the Villa Savoye to the Farnsworth House and, of course, Fallingwater. Now, LEGO has announced the next classic to be immortalized in the plastic colored bricks. Frank Lloyd Wright’s tragically demolished Imperial Hotel will be the first of the LEGO “Architect” sets to be released in 2013, setting the bar high for the coming toy year. Continue.

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Gammage Auditorium in Arizona. Photo courtesy Tempe Convention & Visitors Bureau

Ask average Americans to name their favorite architect, or any architect for that matter, and the answer will likely be Frank Lloyd Wright. His life may have been peppered with scandal and financial woes, but this pioneer of organic architecture was a genius—and he made an everlasting mark on the built world. We know you’ve all seen his brilliant work, but in case you’re craving a refresher: The Huffington Post, a media partner for the Architizer A+ Awards, has rounded up three dozen Wright-designed structures, most of which are open to the public. See them all here!

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Frank Lloyd Wright; Photo: Library of Congress

Someone at Google dropped the ball. Today marks what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 145th birthday, and there’s no honorific doodle to commemorate the event, no cutesy homage to Fallingwater, no “lilypad” columns from the Johnson Wax Headquarters (perfect for the ‘oo’ in ‘google’!) or even a stained glass facsimile. Mies van der Rohe got his due this past March, with the search engine posting a Sketch-up-like drawing of Crown Hall on its homepage, prompting an outpouring of halfhearted tributes to the “architect of the future”. Wright, generally considered to be America’s greatest architect, deserves some love, too. In an attempt to right the slight, we’re listing our top 5 Frank Lloyd Wright posts we’ve covered.

1. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Long Lost Doghouse

FLW’s “Yes, Virginia” moment. It’s safe to say that when then 12-year old Jim Berger scrawled a letter asking the notoriously cantankerous architect to design him a home for his dog Eddie, no one, not Berger’s parents, for whom Wright had designed their house, nor even perhaps the boy himself could have expected a response from Taliesin, let alone a commitment to take on the project. Wright answered Berger with a hesitant yes, saying that “a house for Eddie is an opportunity”, before belatedly sending the boy a folio of drawings some months later. Don’t miss out on the paper correspondence between Wright and Berger, whose elementary cursive on looseleaf is a endearing contrast with the former’s almost mechanistic letterhead.

2. A Good Ol’ Fashioned Tale of Architecture and Suspense: Saving A Pair of Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Landmarks

Who knew architectural preservation could be so…thrilling? This rescuing of two Wright-related buildings is a knotted tale of intrigue and suspense. Watch out for all the twists and turns!

3. Abandoned Wright Rescued in Detroit

A 1954 Wright house in the Motor City was reclaimed and restored last year, which speaks volumes of Detroit’s fighting spirit and FLW’s undying appeal.

4. Frank Lloyd Wright, Gas Station Innovator?

Explore this (righfully) obscure filling station which could be called the only built fragment of Wright’s theoretical “Broadacre City”.

5. Fallingwater….with Zombies!

Last year’s (inadvertent) birthday tribute to the the great architect, we examine America’s most famous house, Fallingwater, and its cultural dissemination in video games, from Half Life 2 to an 8-bit Minecraft rendition.

Bonus!

The winning entry for Reality Cues‘ Le Cor(nudie)r competition depicted an elvish Wright poking a nude Le Corbusier, whose surprised reaction is undeniably classic.

“Franked” by Emily Fischer

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Ah summer. A time to kick off those sandals, run through the sprinklers, and bask by the cool breeze of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. That’s right, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pennsylvanian masterpiece is now accepting applications for summer residency programs, and the aforementioned fantasy is all true, except the lucky high school students who will be ushered into Wright’s chef d’oeuvre won’t be doing much relaxing. Instead, they will be given the opportunity to “explore one of the world’s most famous and architectural important buildings independently and without the pressure of crowds” and “examine how architecture and design can exist in harmony with nature” through investigation, analysis, and hands-on design projects. Through April 30, students can sign up for a one-week studio at Fallingwater Architecture Camp, where they’ll attend workshops, engage in scholarly discussions, build their portfolios, and soak in the tutelage passed down by Frank Lloyd Wright. Meanwhile, K-12 teachers eager to experience learning through architecture and design can sign up for teaching residencies at Fallingwater. Best summer ever? Yes, you architecture nerd! To learn more or to apply, visit the Fallingwater website.

[via The Daily Courier]

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Architectural light shows seem to be having their halcyon days, as more artists, architects and designers are turning to nighttime neon projections to breathe life into already incredible spaces. Last year, Lyon’s Festival of Lights saw a building reprogrammed into a massive playable pinball machine, and the Bring to Light Festival featured a total of fifty-nine site-specific artworks that illuminated Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s urban context. Starting today, Chicago’s famed Millennium Park will be another site for luminous architecture, as Anish Kapoor’s beloved Bean, more properly known as ‘Cloud Gate,’ will give off warped reflections of Chicago-based collective Luftwerk’s choreographed light show. When the sun sets, a total of ten projectors will be used to generate ‘Luminous Field’ and turn Chicago’s AT&T plaza into an even more vibrant, interactive public space.

This is not Luftwerk’s first collaboration with an iconic architectural setting; creative duo Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero were also the team behind the light installations at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in 2011 and at Wright’s Robie House in 2010. Their fascination with the interaction between space, structure, and material landed them this most recent commission from the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture, which Bachmaier calls “a great gift to the city.”

‘Luminous Field’ will be on show at Chicago’s Millennium Park from Feb 10th – Feb 20th.

[Images and video via Colossal]

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If you’ve never visited Fallingwater (and who are you?), now you can do so just by using your tablet or smartphone. Planet Architecture, a production company of documentaries and films about great architects and works of architecture, has released a Fallingwater app for the iPad and iPhone. Beyond high-res images and architectural drawings, the app offers 360° panoramic views of the house, interactive tours, animations, and 25 minutes of video from the documentary film “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater,” with interviews and tours by the director of Fallingwater Lynda Waggoner and several historians. The iPad app markets at a relatively costly $9.99 rate, while the iPhone app can be yours for $4.99.

In more Fallingwater news–isn’t there always more?–we came across an impressive gingerbread rendition of the 20th Century’s most iconic house, complete with fondant cantilevers beset with sugar icicles and bending slightly under the perennial weight of gravity. The layered sandstone has been translated into stacks of SweetTarts, the rust-colored window casements recreated with some sort of red-colored candy variety (I’d like to think unraveled Twizzlers), and the “falling water” rendered in a sludge of aqua icing. Here’s to the holidays!

Photo via

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Atmos Studio’s “Meltingwater”

Many an architect has been fashioned as such since infancy, molded by design-conscientious parents who mistake their child’s first scribbles for a perceptive creativity to be encouraged with sets of crayons, smart clothes, and, above all, geometric toys. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier both had their Froebel blocks, and, since the 70s, when they made the material change from wood to plastic, Legos have been the young architect’s favorite mode of play. Let’s not lie, we still play around with them.  Last month, ICON Eye asked several architecture firms, including Foster + Partners and Adjaye Associates, to reinterpret Lego incarnations of canonical architectural works. More fun after the jump!

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A significant number of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, including Fallingwater, Unity Temple in Oak Park and the Robie House in Chicago, could be nominated by the U.S. for the United Nations’ World Heritage List. Let’s hope they fair better than Le Corbusier. [via Chicago Tribune]

Have your 5-year old budding architect get accustomed to building materials with the new Lego concrete blocks! Each block exactly replicates a traditional Lego unit, but realized in concrete, which will add weight and a weathered look to any “structure”. [via Gizmodo]

Film is over, and the auteur is dead–or rather, smart phones enable all users to become auteurs in their own right. So says hallowed film director Jean-Luc Godard. Read the rest of his interview here.

Traditional Architecture Group (TAG) in London has crossed the pond and breached our borders. The group, which is affiliated with the RIBA and Prince Charles, has partnered with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) in New York. The alliance hopes to promote their interests through public awareness and understanding of architecture, urbanism and allied arts. [via BDonline]

Miss your satellite television when you’re off on trips? Well, a company called GATR has developed a new inflatable satellite antenna for transport. When inflated, the device balloons to the size of a large beach ball with the actual satellite “hidden with its protective elements.” When deflated, the whole assemblage weighs less than 50 lbs. and can fit into a backpack. [via OhGizmo]

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s classic Kaufman House, better known as Fallingwater, isn’t just a classic of early modern architecture, it’s also an unlikely video game staple. Architecturally-inclined gamers have a seemingly endless fascination with using games to recreate this dramatic landscape and iconic home.

After the jump we look at three of our favorite pixelated Fallingwaters.

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