An important step in Le Corbusier’s career as an architect was the 1912 house he designed for his parents – he charged them a fee. The house was too expensive to maintain so they sold it in 1919. By then, Charles-Édouard had already decamped to Paris, bigger fish to fry. Little wonder his mother always preferred his brother Albert. […]
Vladimir Paperny’s Architecture in the Time of Stalin contains the following wonderful analogy. Paperny uses it to describe the kind of ideal “horizontal society” imagined in the late 1920s in the Soviet Union in which all goods and population are uniformly distributed. Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote of the possible evolution of mass communication and transportation and housing. He described a world in […]
The Free Plan featured in an earlier post and Pilotis will feature in a future one. Roof Gardens have been mentioned and not much can be said about Horizontal Windows. The Free Facade always seems to come last. At the time, it meant nothing more than external walls having the potential to be arbitrarily penetrated by openings preferably sideways but, of the Famous Five, […]
New Realism implies a Realism just as Neo-rationalism implies a Rationalism, or Post Modernism a Modernism that once was. They’re all moveable feasts. Neorealism we know from Italian cinema, the most widely-known films being Obsessione (1943), Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Theives (1948). Neorealism kept it real and gritty but, as the memory and reality of WWII […]
Summer last year in one of Hyannis’ many secondhand bookstores, I found a copy of this 1980 book I had to have. Memories. It describes the then new Japanese houses in terms of our preconceptions of Japanese culture in 1980 when everything was rich in meaning. It’s heavy on terms such as “ritual”, “ritual-affirming”, “ritual disaffirming” and, at the end, […]
1927 was the year of the Weissenhoff Exhibition mainly remembered by history and architecture students for showcasing products by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Mercedes Benz. Depending on who you believe, LC’s Maison Citrohan was a compact, low-cost house for three people, a cook and a driver, or an artist, two guests, someone who sleeps next […]
This part of a two-part post will quickly revisit some ideas used to lend credence to some of last century’s new architectures – in preparation for part two to follow. Radical Functionalism. The idea of a building being configured according to certain useful criteria relating to buildings and their occupants’ needs didn’t last very long. Functionalism had an essential humanism at its core but this […]
July 24, 2014: Today we’re going to make an eroded cube. Actually, we started to do it back in 2007. When it’s finished, it’s going to be another of those buildings that was “ahead of its time a decade ago” so who knows what it’ll be in 2016 when it’s supposed to come online? In 2009 the cube […]
This post is about buildings for Yemeni by Yemeni. This is the town of Al Hajarayn. A bunch of boxy brown buildings covering a barren hilltop ought to be ugly but it’s not. What we’re seeing is the beauty not of repetition but of variations on a theme. We’re seeing similarities of colour, of patterns […]
The 1950s in Japan were a time of rediscovery and renewal in art, graphics, furniture, photography, ceramics, woodblock prints, cinema, literature, textile design, and architecture. Kazuo Shinohara was a Japanese architect who lived 1925–2006. This is his first house, House in Kugayama, completed 1954. It was very much of its time, as was Kenzo Tange‘s first […]
The Empire State Building made a mark on New York’s skyline, but was no game changer since buildings had been getting incrementally taller for a while. SOM’s 1957 One Chase Manhattan Plaza was a game changer for reasons that can be easily understood from this next image. The World Trade Center was also a game changer. It wasn’t incrementally […]
Here’s one last look at those buildings the memories of which, long unrefreshed, are now almost totally gone. Each of these buildings once had a place in history books. First up is Hofatelier Elvira by August Endell, 1898. My undergraduate history book said it was an example of German Art Nouveau and I’m sure it was. It’s just […]
Not that world! That one’s already got a Facebook Group with 3,801 members last time I looked. So that’s all sorted. I’m talking about the other The World. It’s ENDANGERED. © Nakheel; 2006-ish, judging from the size of Burj Khalifa People, listen! One of Nakheel’s lesser-known inventions was a new service charge for the residents of Palm […]
Architecture Without Architects is the title of a book by Bernard Rudofsky, published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art from November 1964 to February 1965. I first learned of this book when I was a student and in love with the idea of architecture. I thought the […]
