May 14, 2013
Architects know how to party. Seriously! In preparation for our A+ Gala on Thursday, we’ve looked at some notorious architecture bashes throughout history, and—let’s just say we have a lot to live up to! From a country happening with a special performance by the Velvet Underground to a Bauhaus party featuring a tinfoil slide, here are some historic architecture fetes we wish we could have attended!
April 30, 2013
When it comes to the classic function of a building—namely sheltering and providing privacy from the outside world—the idea of a glass structure would have seemed entirely foolish decades ago. Luckily, with the advent of modernism and acceptance of new building materials in the earlier half of the 20th century, a couple of revolutionary architects said “Kiss my GL-ASS” to traditional notions of building and embraced the transparent material as key to a progressive aesthetic.
Noted for its ability to harmoniously merge private spaces with their surroundings, glass has been a crucial component in the designs of some of the world’s most iconic buildings. Yes, people walking on by may be able to see more of your private life (ahem, Michael Fassbender in Shame), but hey, that never hurt anyone! From the glass standards to contemporary wonders, we bring you our top crystal clear glass buildings. Click through to see them all!
April 11, 2013
Project: Glass/Wood House
Architect: Kengo Kuma and Associates
Location: New Canaan, Connecticut
In the 1950s, the small town of New Canaan became a sort of laboratory for architects to construct their novel modernist homes. Situated in a forest not far from Philip Johnson’s famed Glass House is Joe Black Leigh’s gorgeous glass and wood residence, which has been in dire need of renovation for decades. Kengo Kuma was commissioned to repair this home, as well as build a brand new wing that would evoke the same grandeur as the original structure. Kuma drew inspiration from the classic L-shaped plan, a prototype of Japanese architecture, and built a glass wing connected to the older home by a transparent hallway. Through isolating the two sections from each other, Kuma has preserved the house’s integrity and harmony with nature while creating a new space that is equally as awe-inspiring.
Read more about this project in the Architizer database.
Photos: Scott Frances
March 1, 2013
Photo: JUCO
In case you haven’t noticed, we at Architizer are obsessed with pools. (And spas, and fountains…) So for this week’s Guess The Building feature we’ve picked an extreme close-up of one of our favorite pools. Can you guess what it is? Share your speculations in the comments section below!
UPDATE: The answer is Philip Johnson’s Fort Worth Water Gardens, in Texas.
January 21, 2013
A model poses by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for Vogue China. Photo: Greg Kadel
Fashion designers have long looked to architecture for inspiration (see Givenchy’s latest collection in honor of Gio Ponti). So it makes sense that fashion magazines have scouted the world for the most iconic, majestic, interesting buildings to compliment the clothing in its pages. From model Lisa Fonssagrives hanging off the Eiffel Tower to Coco Rocha racing across the TWA Terminal’s campus in New York’s JFK Airport, here are some of our favorite architecture-fashion shoots. Click through to see our picks!
November 22, 2012
Montreal 1967 World’s Fair, “Man and His World,” Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome with solar experimental house.
If CAD software had existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, would the Grand Palais, the Eiffel Tower, and the Palais de Tokyo have been built? All three grew out of the giant collective experiment of the World’s Fair, which, beginning in 1851, mounted futuristic exhibitions that invited crowds to glimpse the society of tomorrow—and allowed architects to prototype tomorrow’s building concepts and engineering strategies without having to design usable spaces for today’s irate client.
Like the speculative renderings many architecture offices put out today, most of the World’s Fair structures and pavilions weren’t intended to actually stand on Earth for the better part of a century. Even when they were commissioned from top architects (Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, and McKim, Mead & White, to name a few), the expo buildings were the equivalent of jumbo pop-up shops or a sparkly CAD experiment brought to life. If the Eiffel Tower hadn’t proved so useful transmitting radio signals from its top, it might have been torn down long ago. Read more!
November 15, 2012
All photographs © Paul Rivera courtesy of Roger Ferris + Partners
When Roger Ferris + Partners was asked to design an addition for the Wiley House, a glass, mid-century home built by Philip Johnson, we can imagine the challenges they must have foreseen. First, how could the firm respectfully alter the legendary designer’s vision without compromising it, and secondly, that’s a lot of glass! After careful consideration, Roger Ferris + Partners chose to exploit the site’s natural and man-made features and use them to shape the boundaries of their project. The architects co-opted a crumbling 19th-century barn located just off from the main house and transformed it into a new art gallery complex, complete with adjacent pool house and garage. What, you don’t see them? That’s because the additions are pulled back far enough from the house so as to not be considered alongside it, while the pool and garage are submerged in the hillside, and thus, disappear from the horizon. Read more.
October 16, 2012
Nettleton 198 by SAOTA
Apparently, good architecture is essential to the art of seduction. The notorious Playboy magazine has greatly influenced the spread of this belief—or so asserts a new exhibition at NAIM in the Netherlands. Curated by Princeton School of Architecture’s Beatriz Colomina, ”Playboy Architecture: 1953 – 1979” examines how “architecture was mobilized to shape a new sexual and consumer identity for the American male.” The show, which includes vintage issues of the magazine that visitors are invited to peruse, runs through February 10, 2013. In the meantime, we’ve let our imaginations run wild and compiled buildings we feel would be ideal for a Playboy photo shoot. Click through to see them all!
April 2, 2012
What do architecture students do over spring break? If your answer contained the words ‘wet t-shirt’ or ‘mezcal worm,’ you are way off the mark. To give you some idea of how off, a few thesis students at UC Berkeley spent their down time creating architecture-themed cat memes and posting them on tumblr. So without further ado, here are your architecture LOLCATS…
February 21, 2012
The place, the image, and the myth of Long Island can evoke everything from the flickering green light in the Great Gatsby to Ina Garten’s epic gravlax plates (to be enjoyed with a Hamptons breeze), or perhaps the burgeoning suburban pop punk scene or a sweet and tangy grandma pizza slice. For a few, however, Long Island brings to mind an impressive list of architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson to John Hejduk and Marcel Breuer. Long Island’s East End was, in fact, once a testing ground for modernist architecture, a place for experimental design, and home to a medley of prototypes that dared to imagine how modern architecture could and should be. In the upcoming film “Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island,” director Jake Gorst pieces together Long Island’s rich architectural history, much of which has been “subtracted from the cultural legacy,” according to the film’s trailer. Gorst attempts to restore the lessons of Long Island’s architecture and learn from the ghosts of modernism driven out by new development. Take a sneak peek at the trailer below.
Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island from Design Onscreen on Vimeo.
[Photo and video via Design Onscreen]
