May 10, 2013
Photo: Scott Frances/Esto
Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and if you’re (un)lucky enough to have a child working as an architect, you may be in for a big surprise come Sunday. Along with designing an iconic chair, building a house for one’s mother is a longstanding architectural tradition. So in honor of this holiday, we’ve rounded up five of the most important of houses designed by famous architects for their parents, ranging from Le Corbusier to Richard Meier. Think of it as a long-overdue thank you for the years of emotional and financial support in the arduous process of becoming an architect!
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March 5, 2013
It’s the outhouse refined. The “Superlative Space” room (original Japanese name: gokujo no heya) is an immersive installation that brings the garden into the bathroom, or vice-versa. Designed by architect Naruse-Inokuma Architects and botanical artist Makoto Azuma for the HOUSE VISION 2013 in Tokyo, the room is quite the head trip, a jarring collage of organic plant life, cold white walls, and pristine bathroom fixtures. The latter were furnished by TOTO, who, along with window maker YPP AP, sponsored the project. The room is part of a 1:1 mock-up house, one of the nine that make up the exhibition. Click for more.
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February 27, 2013
Project: Caterpillar House
Architect: Feldman Architecture
Location: San Francisco
Set among the rolling hills of the Santa Lucia Preserve, the Caterpillar House combines the client’s love for ranch houses with a sensitivity to the location’s beautiful, idyllic natural surroundings. The architects used excavated earth for the construction of the walls, connecting the home literally and figuratively to the site, and have combined sustainable elements–rainwater irrigation, natural ventilation, and photovoltaic panels–with standard ranch tropes–low, horizontal massing, an open plan that connects the indoor and outdoor spaces, large glass doors, and a Western feel.
Read more about this project in the Architizer database!
This project received a special mention for the A+ Awards.
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December 13, 2012
Photo courtesy of Kevin Scott/Olson Kundig Architects
What if you could lift up your roof as easily as you can open a door? Olson Kundig Architects principal Tom Kundig took the idea of indoor-outdoor living to its logical (and mechanical) extreme with Shadowboxx, a private home in the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington. With shifting shutters, walls, and doors, Kundig’s design effectively turns the entire house into a sleeping porch. The bathhouse has a roof that opens like a hatbox.
Olson Kundig just released a time-lapse video demonstrating it all—a first for the firm and for the project, which was completed in 2010. The short documents a day in the life of the house and demonstrates its many possible configurations against a backdrop of whizzing clouds (and the sped-up reaction of the dog pictured above). Video after the jump!
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November 30, 2012
House by Diane Keaton. Rizzoli, $85.
Many would be surprised to know that famed actress Diane Keaton is also an architecture lover. Her new book, House (Rizzoli), takes readers on a meditative tour of both Keaton’s reflections on what homes mean to those who reside in them, as well as her evolving architectural taste, which moves from the traditional to the, ahem, “modern”. The book is divided into two main sections, ‘Farm’ and ‘Factory,’ both of which are compiled more or less the same. Keaton has carefully curated a selection of domestic projects by a wide variety of architects. Each project is prefaced with a thoughtful essay by Keaton, and then explored in a series of beautiful full-page photographs, making this book a primarily visual exploration. Continue.
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November 29, 2012
Hans van Heeswijk Architects’ concept for the Meandering Tower House.
It’s not often that a European architect approaches American-style tract housing with anything resembling desire. But on a tour of the modernist developer Joseph Eichler’s homes in and around San Francisco, the Dutch architect Hans van Heeswijk was taken with the region’s hilly expanses of single-family homes. Imposing that style of development onto the already saturated Dutch Randstad—the urban super-region comprising Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht—is obviously out of the question, but California’s spaciousness got Heeswijk thinking about how to build a Dutch residence with the same sense of air and possibility. Read more!
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September 28, 2012
Do Ho Suh‘s floating fabric structures explore the concept of “home” and the relationship between the nomadic artist and his temporary living quarters. The South Korean sculptor recreates his former residences — crammed studios, traditional family units, Manhattan pre-war apartment buildings — in diaphanous silk or polyester, which he suspends over a metal framework, giving these solid structures a tenuous, transitory quality. Read more!
By Raquel Laneri
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September 11, 2012
All images: © Kojima Junji for LEVEL Architects
For a couple, moving in together usually means the throwing away of beloved things and hobbies that no longer fit into their new shared lifestyle. One awesome duo in Tokyo created a home with LEVEL Architects that not only celebrated each other’s differences, but combined them into an awesome co-working space. Their his-and-hers garage that doubles as a skatepark and a piano concert hall is just the beginning! Read More.
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August 15, 2012
The Chinese city of Zhuzhou, the second largest in the province of Hunan, is being pressed under the tremendous pressure of growth. Home to many a manufactory and textile mill, residents are seeking new ways to live close to work while preserving the spaciousness of the countryside. Thus, these wonderful photos of McMansion-style housing atop a five-story shopping center in the central district of Zhuzhou.
The four houses are perched above the city, invisible to street-level action. They do not cast a shadow on the ground, and seem to exist solely in the rarefied world of smoggy skies, with scenic views into the apartments surrounding their airy enclave. Though the landscaping around the houses leaves something to be desired, the overall approach is one we’d like to see replicated on blank and bare urban roofscapes everywhere. Now that’s mixed-use development.
Images: China Foto Press/Barcroft Media via The Daily Mail
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March 28, 2012
We tend to get an avalanche of angry emails when we publish anything even remotely political on Architizer. But with election season rocketing towards us like a TV playing an attack ad thrown by a campaign manager, we’re broaching a topic many political blogs have been talking about for months: the real estate profiles of the presidential candidates. Who’s got a thing for half-bathrooms? Who’s really, really into exposed timber? Click through.
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