Glass House: New Play Explores Fascistic Modernism
Philip Johnson's Glass House at New Canaan inspired the play. (Courtesy. Ezra Stoller/ ESTO)
The Center for Architecture seems to be on a lively arts kick of late. After presenting Architect, the chamber opera about Louis Kahn just a couple of weeks ago, last Friday the Center staged a reading of Glass House, a new play by Bob Morris and produced by the Center’s Cynthia Kracauer. The show employs a premise that sounds like the start of an ethnic joke: an Arab and his Jewish wife move next door to a WASP and his black wife in an exclusive Connecticut enclave…
FLW Double Header! Experience Fallingwater at the Guggenheim
Attention Frank Lloyd Wright fans! You can satisfy two Wright cravings with this one event. Head over the the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to catch a screening of Kenneth Love’s lush new documentary Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterwork with Reflections of Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The film, which was supported by the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation, the Estate of Edgar Tafel, and the Laurel Foundation, will be screened in the museum’s New Media Theatre on October 21 and 28 and November 4 and 18 at 1:00 and 3:00 pm. The screenings are free with the price of admission to the museum. It’s the perfect marriage of content and container. Wright would approve.
Quick Clicks> Treehouse of Worship, Tanked, Frank Llego Wright, & Baking Building
Chêne Chappelle. (Via Boing Boing)
Treehouse of Worship. Everyone loves a treehouse, especially one that dates from 1696 (built in a tree that’s over 800 years old, no less). Boing Boing uncovered the chapel in Allouville-Bellefosse, France dedicated to the Virgin Mary that was built in the hollowed out trunk caused by a lightning strike.
Talking Tanks. Who can forget the Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania who, fed up with cars parked in the bike lane, crushed the offending vehicles with a tank. Classic. Transportation Nation couldn’t get enough of the car-crushing crusader, either, and has posted an interview where the mayor warns that tanks may return to the streets of Vilnius.
Frank Llego Wright. Will we ever tire of LEGOs? I hope not. LEGO has already immortalized Wright’s Fallingwater and his Guggenheim Museum in tiny plastic bricks, but Building Design just reported that the Prairie-style Robie House in Chicago is also available for architects and aspirants to assemble and adore.
Baking Buildings. Some of the most beautiful historic (and modern, too!) buildings feature terra cotta facades, but whether they’re ornate or sleek, we seldom have a chance to peek behind the scenes to see how the clay cladding is made. Buffalo Rising took a visit to a local terra cotta factory to check out what’s involved.
Churches Squabble as Furness Falls
The crumbling facade of the Furness designed 19th Street Baptist Church. (Courtesy of Naked Philly)
The titan of Titan Street is mighty no longer. On the corner of Titan and 19th streets in South Philadelphia, a robust Frank Furness-designed church has been crumbling for some time, but now the Department of Licensing and Inspections has threatened to tear the building down and send a bill to the owner, the 19th Street Baptist Church. Calls to the church went unanswered—the phone is disconnected. After Naked Philly broke the demolition news on Friday, readers identified the architect as Furness, and preservationists began to rally the troops on Facebook.
Quick Clicks> Prairie Preserved, Library Voyeur, Mapping Riots, & a Culver City Compromise
Hotel Skylight (Courtesy Wright On the Park, via ArtInfo)
Prairie Hotel. After a 2-year, $18 million renovation, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last standing hotel has reopened in Mason City, Iowa. The Historic Park Inn Hotel is a premier example of the Wright’s Prairie style, and features deep hanging eaves and a terra-cotta façade. A massive art-glass skylight drenches the lobby in multi-colored light. More at ArtInfo.
Library of Glass. Although Philip Johnson’s Glass House library is transparent, Birch Books Conservation will soon offer the public a view the architect’s library without a trip to New Canaan. The non-profit publisher hopes “to preserve the professional libraries of artists, architects, authors, and important public figures through publishing photographic and written research,” with an inside look at Johnson’s personal collection, reported Unbeige.
Map of poverty and riot hot spots in London. (Via the Guardian)
Mapping Poverty and Rebellion. The Guardian opened up the recent London riots for debate. Journalist Matt Stiles mapped the newspaper’s accumulated data of riot hot spots on a plan of London’s neighborhoods. Deep red stands for the British capital’s poorest regions, while blue represents the wealthiest communities.
Metro In-The-Middle. The long-awaited Culver City Expo Line station was delayed by a disagreement between Culver City and construction authorities. Now, the two parties have agreed to the $7 million budget increase, which will fund a pedestrian plaza, bike lanes, parking facilities and pavement improvements. More at Curbed LA.
Finally! Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis House Sold After Two Year Wait
Courtesy Ennis House Foundation.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles, which went on the market back in June 2009 for $15 million has finally sold for less than a third of that: $4.5 million. Local business mogul Ron Burkle, who also owns the historic Greenacres/Harold Lloyd Estate in Beverly Hills, is, according to Ennis House Foundation Chair Marla Felber, “committed to complete rehabilitation” of the beleaguered house, which despite a recent rehabilitation still needs a lot of work. “While we did receive some other offers, they didn’t come from sources that could meet our main objective of finding a good steward for the house,” Felber told AN, adding that the Foundation was “thrilled,” to find the right buyer for the house, despite the lower sale price.
Quick Clicks> Hi-Def Paris, Subway Songs, Biosphere 2, and Starchitect Pigs
The rooftops of Paris (Courtesy Paris 26 Gigapixels)
La Vie Gigapixel. It’s Paris like you’ve never seen it — even if you have been there. A super-high-def 26-gigapixel photo of the city of lights (yep, that’s 26 billion pixels) was stitched together by a team of photographers and a software company in France. Go ahead, pull up the full screen view and wander away the afternoon. We won’t tell. (Via Notcot.)
Metro Music. When Jason Mendelson moved from Tampa to Washington, D.C., the city’s subway literally moved him to song. NRDC Switchboard says that he’s creating a tune for every Metro stop across the system, each stylistically indicative of the station itself. Listen to his completed songs over here.
Biosphere 2 at 20. Not often do we design entire mini-worlds, but then, Biosphere 2 was always unique. Now two decades old, the three-acre terrarium-in-a-desert is still helping scientists figure out life’s little lessons. The AP/Yahoo News has the story.
Scraps, Glass, and Stone. Curbed found a new book by Steven Guarnaccia transforming the classic Three Little Pigs story into three little starchitect pigs where Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, and Frank Lloyd Wright each build houses and the big bad wolf huffs and puffs (and critiques?) the walls down. (Guarnaccia also reimagined Goldilocks into a tale filled with chairs by Aalto, Eames, and Noguchi!)
Quick Clicks> Heckling Hadid, HL23 Highlight, Gimme Shelter, and the Ennis House Blues
Zaha Hadid's proposed civic center in Elk Grove, California
Heckling Hadid. The New York Times reports that the city council in Elk Grove, California is reconsidering its Bilbao moment. Once upon a time before the recession, the community hoped a community center designed by Zaha Hadid would bring acclaim to the suburban city. Now as plans are being reconsidered, the council only sees a “squid” or an “animal from another planet.”
LA on HL. Usually found prowling around the west coast, Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, has found his way to New York and takes a look at HL23, that condo tower perched above Manhattaned beloved High Line by LA architect Neil Denari.
Gimme (Smartly Planned) Shelter. It turns out that when Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell isn’t rocking out, he’s pondering smart growth. Smart Planet relays a recent event at the National Press Club where Leavell and co-author J. Marshall Craig talk transportation, sustainability, and community growth.
Ennis House Blues. Curbed reports that Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 Ennis House in LA just can’t seem to find a buyer since it was put on the market in 2009. Originally listed at $15 million, the price has steadily dropped to its current $5.9 mil.
QUICK CLICKS> Support, Prefab, Wright, Genius
Temporary housing designed by the office of Shigeru Ban.
Shigeru Ban‘s Tokyo office is developing temporary housing structures for those displaced by the natural disaster in Japan, reports Archinect; click here to help support the project. Stateside, AIA president Clark Manus issues a statement encouraging U.S. architects to do all they can to support Japanese recovery efforts.
The New York Times covers Forest City Ratner‘s plan to use prefab building components for a 34-story apartment building at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Engineered by Arup and designed by SHoP, the units should be pretty high-end as far as modular housing goes, but construction workers argue that the prefab approach will mean less jobs.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy trumpets the news that twelve of the master’s houses are currently on the market (starting at $800k for the Arnold and Lora Jackson House in Beaver Dam, WI), via Design Crave.
Acorn Media announces that the acclaimed BBC “Genius of Design” series is available on DVD. The five part documentary focuses on the highlights of industrial design throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Quick Clicks>Trucking, Biking, Leaking, Exploring
Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution Truck debuted at TED and hit the highways.
Iron skillet meets iron fist. Some of the most striking visuals to come out of this year’s TED conference weren’t made for the stage but for the street: Jamie Oliver‘s Food Revolution truck, an 18-wheeled kitchen classroom designed pro bono by Rockwell Group, launched last week and represents just one of the outcomes of Oliver’s 2010 TED Prize wish to make kids healthier. The wish of this year’s TED Prize winner, the artist currently known as “JR,” is that people will participate in his global art project INSIDE/OUT and help paper streets with gigantic portraits of themselves. Step 1: set up photo booths that print poster size pics of conference participants–quite a surreal experience, writes Guy Horton for Good.
Get over it. So says the New Republic to New Yorkers who complain that New York DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has stepped on some toes in her quest to make streets slimmer, bike lanes fatter, and pedestrians safer. The griping was highlighted in a March 4 profile of the commissioner in the New York Times.
Leaky legend. The Economist reports that Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, is banking on this year’s 100th anniversary of the site to raise money for much-needed restoration work: the roof is leaking, the wood beams are sagging, and families of bats keep trying to settle down in the rafters.
Urban archaeology, armchair edition. Yurbanism rounds up new apps that are sure to appeal to urbanists, like “Abandoned,” which uses GPS to identify abandoned buildings near your location, complete with links to pics: “Explore modern day ruins from empty mental asylums to shipwrecks under the Great Lakes. Discover the history and location of dead amusement parks, overgrown hospitals, forgotten hotels and creepy ghost towns.”
Event> Organic Architecture for the 21st Century
Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum
- Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century
- Milwaukee Art Museum
- 700 North Art Museum Dr.
- Milwaukee, WI
- Through May 15
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is the single subject of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s new exhibit. Organic Architecture for the 21st Century, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of Taliesen, Wright’s Spring Green home and studio, also marks the debut of 33 never before seen drawings by the Wisconsin native. The show implores visitors to take a fresh look at Wright and his works, both built and unrealized, and how he envisioned architecture as something that had an essential relationship to context, time, and the people who lived or worked there. Sustainability, which we often think of as a 21st century innovation, is in keeping with many of Wright’s designs, especially those for a newly suburban America, including the outdoor arcade for the proposed Arizona State Capitol, Phoenix (above).
Organic Architecture for the 21st Century explores the idea that the famously outspoken architect was a visionary who foresaw trends including the use of mass produced materials, utilization of natural light, and attention to the surrounding environment. In addition to covering his major works, like Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax factory, and the Unity Temple, the exhibit also showcases plans for Living City, a culmination of Wright’s work and his utopian vision for suburbia.
So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Not many architects can boast being the subject of a pop song, but, then again, Frank Lloyd Wright was always something special. Back in 1969, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel eulogized the architect in the eponymous “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” appearing on their Bridge Over Troubled Water album. Garfunkel took an interest in Wright while studying architecture at Columbia and later challenged Simon to write the song while living in California.
While some argue that the song is really a cryptic breakup poem between the two singers on the verge of splitting, I’m sticking with architecture going mainstream. As the song says, “Architects may come and/Architects may go and/Never change your point of view./ When I run dry/I stop awhile and think of you.”
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