Gae Aulenti, interior of Centro-Fly department store, Milan, 1966, via

Huberty House, 1962

here

said one ego to another

Maurizio Cattelan: Like many other people, the first time I visited the Guggenheim Museum I couldn’t help wondering where you got the idea of the rotunda from.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Why, I just shook the building out of my sleeves. The idea of the rotunda was to create a new form of union between visitor, painting, and architecture.

MC: But don’t the curve and the low ceilings create a limit for high sculptures or large paintings, for example?

FLW: If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!

MC: There has been for quite a long time now the tendency of building “neutral” contemporary art museums—white cubes. How do you feel about them?

FLW: I don’t think they matter, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think they’re for me and why should I be for them?

MC: Have you heard what I’m going to do in your museum?

FLW: Yes, I have.

MC: And what do you think? Too simple?

FLW: Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

MC: So you don’t mind having the building occupied by someone who has been defined as the art world’s court jester?

FLW: The court jester always spoke what other courtiers never dared utter.

-- an imaginary conversation between Cattelan and FLW at Vogue

Cristina Iglesias

Revisiting her work after discovering some renderings
I did for a sci-fi play I prop-designed back in the old days.
I'm happy to re-meet her.
I guess that no matter how much time passes,
you always love best the things you loved first.

wood-clad loft of Best-Things

via accabrera

brutal decay

There are those who still think the bravura brutalist design of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, 25 miles from Glasgow, to be an eyesore. There are those who say it was blighted by technical problems from the day it opened 45 years ago. Then there are those who believe that this is one of the greatest modern buildings in Europe. Whatever your opinion, St Peter's was deemed important enough to be placed on the World Monument Fund list of the "World's 100 Most Endangered Sites" in 2008.

Now, Scottish arts group NVA, funded by Creative Scotland and a number of UK trusts and foundations, has been given two years to raise £10m to enable the partial renovation of the great concrete structure. The aim is to transform the graffiti-plastered ruin and the surrounding Kilmahew woodland strewn with litter into an arts-led public space...

Since the early 1990s there have been several attempts to find new uses for St Peter's, but the NVA proposal garnered praise internationally when it was unveiled at the 2010 Venice architecture biennale. But NVA has just two years to raise funds and to spirit the project into life. It wants people – and not just locals and artists – to join in the discussion and, hopefully, help raise funds. St Peter's is a site of international importance, but if NVA fails, the lands and ruins will return to the Archdiocese; and, then – without purpose and funding – they can only fall into further decay.

from The Guardian, 12 May 2011
St. Peter's in Cardross, by architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia

Shugakuin Imperial Villa
1655

here

virtuous cinderblocks

W. J. VAN DER JAGT
CURVED WALLS AT THE ‘FLORIADE’ GARDENING EXHIBITION IN ROTTERDAM
1958-60

cave hotel

Architects Marco Giunta and Viviana Haddad
converted twelve little houses into the six suites,
which surround a courtyard in Modica, Sicily.

Casa Talia, here

guest room, Taliesin East, FLW

go west

We bid farewell to dear friends tonight
as they head out West into deserts and
the next chapter of their remarkable
little adventure in art and family.
Cheers, golden friends, to the good, the beautiful and the true.

(image of Arcosanti via Amourette.)

FLW by Pedro E. Guerrero

This picture, above, is one of my favorites of Frank Lloyd Wright by Pedro Guerrero.
Dapper, scoffing, scrutinizing and always tea-sipping,
the photo strikes at the heart of the man --
looming over his projects, a sophisticated overlord.

more here

house front

VDL Research House
( © Richard J. Neutra Archive,, © Richard J. Neutra Archive, / February 11, 2010 )
VDL Research House, Diane Neutra sitting on second-floor terrace.
Image from the book "Thomas Hines' Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970."

via

store front

Christo
Green Store Front, 1964
Collage 68,5 x 61 cm

via

Motherwell's beach house (hut)

By 1946, Motherwell commissioned the French architect
Pierre Chareau to build a house for him
in East Hampton. Chareau, an experimental
and inventive designer, used material from
an Army surplus Quonset hut kit.

from here

Nigel Peake

As a child I used to draw a lot,
play cricket with my brothers, fill up school books
with homework of looped text and neat diagrams in ruled boxes,
and go for evening walks to meet my father coming
home from work. Twenty years on, I still draw,
make books, go for walks, and instead of playing
cricket I tend to listen to it on the radio.
The country is peaceful. It is a place to draw
and work and be surrounded by things
that we could never make.

from interview here

monuments

Yugoslavian war monuments designed
in 1960s and 70s by an array of architects and artists.

Full of Socialist virility and striving,
all are abandoned now and crumbling.

So beautiful, and so aptly capture the monoliths of war and idealism.

(via arch daily)

Peacock Room

Whistler's Peacock Room, on view here.

Hear the incomparable Peter Schjeldahl talk about it here.

Tremendous rahr.

A Room for London

Living Architecture's newest project: a 'boat' perched, as if by retreating floodwaters, on the very edge of the Queen Elizabeth Hall... The building, designed by David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner, is intended to offer guests a place of refuge and reflection amidst the flow of traffic at this iconic location in the capital. The lower and upper decks offer extraordinary views, by day and night, of a London panorama that stretches from Big Ben to St Paul's cathedral. Inside, the boat is a beautifully crafted timber object, full of nooks and crannies to explore. On arrival 'aboard', a nautical flag will be raised to signal occupation, with the visitors invited to fill in a logbook on the 'bridge' of the boat, detailing what they have experienced during their stay, out of the window as much as within themselves. This is contemporary architecture at its most playful, beguiling and thought-provoking.

from here

One of my favorite essayists, Alain de Button, author of The Architecture of Happiness, is the brains behind Living Architecture. He always says it just right:

"I met a lot of people in the property business, and asked them why they did what they did... They said it was to make money. I said, 'Don't you want to do something else? Build better buildings?' Their idea of doing something better for society was to give money to the opera."

from the New Yorker, April 11, 2011

house (barn)

Small Box House by Akasaka Shinichiro Atelier (via Dezeen)

this bit from the Atelier is wonderful:

From the casual lifestyle of the client and his wife, and also the request to have a part of the house turn into a cafe in the future, we aimed to create a space to be flexible to support events, such as the new birth of a child and opening a new cafe, where various life-scenes existing with reasonable distances to each other inside a simple void, like a barn.

more here