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Win the book, Glass House, edited by Toshio Nakamura, photographs by Michael Moran (Monacelli, 2007, $95.00).
In 1974, Philip Johnson’s Glass House was 25 years old. The Architectural League of New York celebrated with a birthday picnic on September 22 of that year, with photos documenting not only the house, but the grounds and other Johnson-designed structures.
Not much has changed but the people. All you have to do is identify as many guests as possible from the architectural community in the following photos to win the prize.
There's an inconvenient truth that preservationists typically gloss over in their ever-more-pressing fight to save mid-20th Century modernist buildings from demolition: Many (though certainly not all) of these buildings are tough to love.
Perhaps it's their cool abstraction, or their labyrinthine floor plans, or their harsh materials, like the serrated concrete that can practically cut your skin. Whatever the reason, the American public has yet to cotton to these buildings. A survey of America's 150 favorite works of architecture, released last February, didn't contain a single structure by Chicago's master of steel and glass, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
But popularity is one thing; quality is another. A half century ago, when Space Age America was infatuated with all things new, there wasn't yet broad-based popular support for preserving old Victorian houses or Beaux Arts train stations that evoked the grandeur of ancient Rome. They were, like today's threatened mid-century modernist buildings, too old to be new and too new to be old. And so, they were shortsightedly torn down. Now the question is whether we're about to make the same mistake again.
johns new fridge
the ashley book of knots (TABoK)
"Design for the Other 90%," on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan through Sept. 23, seems born directly from this big idea. As the title implies, the exhibition is meant to persuade designers and design aficionados to turn away in embarrassment from our usual preoccupations: namely, expensive vanity projects, including $599 cellphones (are you still in that iPhone line?), $4,500 sofas and $3-million second homes. In place of those designs, it gives us a range of projects aimed at increasing, in the words of the museum, "access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them."
An impressive exhibition of Modernist objects, and a missed opportunity to say something about Modernism, at the Corcoran Gallery.
castor design>>projects>>8'X8' container sauna
spider web chalet
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the plaza
so long hill country
sc rivershack
These men would do Roald Dahl's parson proud. Like the character in his short story Parson's Pleasure, who went scouring the English countryside persuading ignorant country folk to part for a pittance with furniture they thought was worthless, but was actually an exquisite Chippendale commode or pricelees Queen Anne chairs, a few French collectors have zeroed in on Le Corbusier's forgotten legacy in Chandigarh and made a killing out of it.via justin
Buying heavily at routine government auctions of "junk" furniture, stalking old employees of Corbusier and his cousin and collaborator on the Chandigarh project, Pierre Jeanneret, and acquiring neglected artefacts lying with them, these collectors have bought symbols of Corbusier's heritage—from manhole covers to wood-and-cane chairs—for as little as Rs 100, restored it to pristine perfection at a workshop in Delhi and shipped it to exhibitions and sales at Paris and New York galleries.
As recently as June 5, leading auction house, Christie's New York, auctioned off around 50 lots of furniture and other artefacts designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at extraordinarily high prices . They all came from the collection of Eric Touchaleaume, a French dealer who has been on an active buying spree in Chandigarh for the last few years. At the Biennale des Antiquaires held at the Grand Palais in Paris in September last year, yet another Frenchman, Patrick Sequin, proudly displayed his 'collection' from Chandigarh.
Yet it is also easy to see why Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a pillar of early Modernism and Johnson’s mentor, stormed out in a huff when he saw it. The house was famously influenced by Mies’s Farnsworth House, which was designed before Johnson’s Glass House but built, in Illinois, several years later, leaving the impression that the student had leapfrogged over his master. More important, Johnson’s vision lacked the intellectual rigor and exquisite detailing that were so critical to Mies’s genius. The steel I-beams that mark the corners of the Glass House are clumsily detailed — especially disconcerting in a work of such purity.
strong like bull house
hairpin legs
200 sf norway house via materialicious
Gentilly, home to about 47,000 people before the storm and a thin fraction of that now, is not dead. Haltingly, in disconnected pockets, this eight-square-mile quadrant north of the historic districts that line the Mississippi River is limping back to life, thanks to the struggles of its most determined former residents.
But they have had to do so largely on their own, because help from government at any level has been minimal, in their accounts. In recent weeks, some residents have reported getting checks from the state’s Road Home rebuilding program, but four-fifths of applicants have not.
Each block still contains only a handful of occupied houses. But a beachhead has been established here, a residential area critical to this city’s survival and one that before the storm was dominated by black homeowners, professionals and multigenerational citizens of New Orleans.
A similar story is unfolding in two other once-flooded family-centered neighborhoods, neither of them flashy but both equally important to this city’s future: Broadmoor, in central New Orleans, and Lakeview, in the northwestern corner, show signs of life here and there along the wounded streets. Neighbors, encouraged by the earliest post-Katrina pioneers, are moving back in.
pendleton and old hickory fabrics
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