Uncrating Kahn’s Fisher House

Dr .Fisher tells an amusing story about the house that Louis Kahn designed for him and his wife in Hatboro, just outside Philadelphia. Soon after its completion, two of Fisher’s new neighbors walked past, pausing for a moment to consider this unusual double-cube structure. One condemned the flat-roofed house made of vertically hung natural wood siding, thinking it out of place in a neighborhood of traditional dwellings of white-painted clapboard and stone. The other reserved judgment. “I’ll wait and offer my opinion,” he declared, “when the thing is uncrated.

Authenticity and the popular appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright

The inside cover of the January 17,1938 Life magazine featured a photograph of the recently completed Kaufmann weekend house,\u27Fallingwater,\u27 designed by America\u27s best known architect, the then 70-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright: The house is shown emerging from thick woods, hovering above flowing water.The view is not from the approach to the house or from within, but from the outside, downstream, a vantage point that renders the conceptual idea of the house in its entirety: the magic of immense heaviness levitating; the Biblical metaphor of water from rock; an exclusive retreat alone in acres of wooded paradise

Waiting for the Site to Show Up

Henry Luce, owner of Life, Time, Fortune and Architectural Forum in 1937, recognized Frank Lloyd Wright’s immense talent, though clearly he did so for his own ends. Author or “The American Century” Luce needed an all-American poster boy for his campaign purposes. Despite Wright’s immense unpopularity at the time, Luce featured him on the cover of Time and promoted him in his three other journals. That Luce’s ideals were not those of Wright mattered little. Wright became the most popular American architect in history. But how very odd that decidedly artificial mediation could so effectively disseminate and popularize an architecture whose essence was authenticity

What good is bad photography?

In 1957, for the small picture book Ronchamp, in a handwritten note that itself serves as illustration, Le Corbusier called attention to the book’s photographic text, instructing the reader to observe the play of shadows. Play the game...Try looking at the images upside-down or sideways. You\u27ll discover the game

Book Review: LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer

Widely regarded as the most influential architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier wrote more than fifty books, nearly all of them with extensive illustrative text. Yet in these books he almost never used the photographs he himself took. Rather, the books are most often illustrated with photographs that Le Corbusier appropriated from other publications, nearly always modifying, cropping, and ordering these images before placing them on his pages. Books made from these pages ultimately formed collections; and these collections became essential toLe Corbusier\u27s promotion of his view of modern architecture and modernist ideals. Photography was at the heart of this endeavor

Frank Lloyd Wright in Iowa

Why Wright in Iowa? Are there ways that Wright\u27s Iowa works are distinguished from his built works elsewhere? Iowa is a typical Midwest state, exceptional in neither general geography nor landscape. The state\u27s urban areas are minor, and Iowa has never been known for its subscription to avant-garde architecture. Its most renowned artist, Grant Wood, painted Iowa\u27s rolling hills and pie-faced people in cartoon-like images that simultaneously champion and question the coalescence of people and place. Indeed, the state\u27s most convincing buildings are found on its farms with their unpretentious, vernacular, agricultural buildings

Εμμέσως – Η Villa Savoye του Le Corbusier στο Poissy / In a Mediated Manner – Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy

Αν είναι γεγονός ότι το έργο του Le Corbusier μπορεί με αρκετή ευκολία να διαιρεθεί στα δύο –το πριν απο την Οικονομική Κρίση περί το 1930, στιλπνό και λευκό, και το μετά την Χιροσίμα, αδρό και γκρίζο– η Villa Savoye είναι εκείνη που κατά κανόνα εκπροσωπεί την πρώτη περίοδο. Και όμως, η Savoye ούτε το καλύτερο έργο εκείνης της περιόδου είναι, ούτε ενδεικτική των γενικότερων προβληματισμών του Le Corbusier περί των μεμονωμένων κτηρίων, ως προπομπών μιας νέας πολεοδομικής τάξης. Κτίσθηκε τόσο πρόχειρα, ώστε δώδεκα μόλις χρόνια μετά την ολοκλήρωσή της είχε ερειπωθεί σε βαθμό που τα γερμανικά στρατεύματα κατοχής στη Γαλλία να την χρησιμοποιούν σαν αποθήκη και γκαράζ. Βρίσκεται σε βουκολικό τοπίο, εντελώς εκτός αστικού περιβάλλοντος, και συνιστά μια ακόμη μομφή κατά των αστικών συνθηκών, που κατ’ επανάληψη είχε στηλιτεύσει ο Le Corbusier, παρά λύση τους. … -- If Le Corbusier’s works are rather easily divided into two sorts –pre-Depression, slick and white; and post-Hiroshima, brutal and gray– it is the Villa Savoye that most often represents the early period. Yet Savoye is not the best work of this period, nor is it representative of Le Corbusier’s larger concerns for individual buildings as candidates for a new urban order. Badly built, within a dozen years of its completion, the Villa Savoye was so dilapidated that it was used as a kind of storage barn by German troops occupying France. Its site is pastoral, removed from the urban environment and as such it stands as an indictment of, rather than solution to, urban conditions that Le Corbusier regularly condemned.

Colin Rowe and another Aalto

On the 29\u27h of May 1995, the preeminent British-American architectural theorist Colin Rowe wrote to his friend Michael Spens in Scotland, sending him a postcard of Alvar Aalto\u27s library at Mt. Angel Abbey. \u27I send you a present from Oregon; he began, \u27James Tice took me here the other day and I became a convert: and I don\u27t mean to the Order of St Benedict but to this particular Aalto library. But have you seen it?\u2

Review of Tim Benton, LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer (Lars Müller Publishers, 2013)

Tim Benton is an extraordinary historian of Le Corbusier. Thirty years ago, he published Villas of Le Corbusier, 1920–1930; in 1987, the prized catalogue to the London centennial exhibition Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century; and, in 2007, Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer. In LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Benton combines his knowledge of the architect with a remarkable understanding of architectural photography to reveal Le Corbusier’s personal activity as a photographer during the only two periods of the architect’s life when he took pictures: 1907–17 and 1936–38

All the World is a Screen: A Computer Atmosphere for Latter-Day Learning

Even from a distance one senses a crystalline presence about the Pappajohn Education Center. It glows from within-not unlike the way E.T. glowed when emoting, or, one presumes, the way a nuclear reactor glows in production. Photographic images reinforce the building\u27s luminosity. Its all-glass wrapper, milk-ish and translucent, facilitates it. Had the building been built in Berlin, ca. 1920, its plan would have been either biomorphic or fractured, its gestures greatly exaggerated, and its style unmistakably expressionistic. In 21st century Des Moines, the plan is standard Modernism: L-shaped and undoubtedly economical