Archinect - News

Marcel Breuer's Grieco House hits the market for $1.5 million

2022-06-27T17:08:00-04:00

This weekend, a home designed by modernist architect Marcel Breuer will hit the market in Andover. Named for its original owners, “The Grieco House” offers three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 3,721 square feet on 1.07 acres. The Janovitz + Tse Team of ModernMass at Compass is handling the listing at 81 Sunset Rock Road, which will come with a $1,500,000 price tag.

Breuer supposedly took the commission after the Grieco family dismissed Frank Lloyd Wright from the project following a disagreement. Its binuclear plan incorporates some of the lessons Breuer learned in the Bauhaus studio of Paul Klee that relate to relaxation and the spatial distribution of light. It is one of Breuer’s last completed New England residential designs following his tenure on the faculty of the Harvard GSD, and comes with a fully renovated interior, refurbished original woodwork, and brutalist wine cellar, according to the website ModernMass.

News of the listing comes just months after the demolition of another early binuclear design – the erstwhile Geller House on Long Island – which preservationists saw as evidence of the difficulties in maintaining some of the traditionally overlooked examples of midcentury modernism in America.

“There aren’t very many tools to aid the preservation of these houses,” Docomomo US executive director Elizabeth Waytkus told the New York...

Marshall Brown collages post-war architectural photography

2019-05-30T20:06:00-04:00

Marshall Brown, an Associate Professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, has been producing a provocative series of post-war architecture collages since 2013.

14-9-2 2013-2014, Collages from magazine pages, glue, on archival paper, 17 x 14 vertical 14 x 17 horizontal

They often feature combinations of architectural photography from monographs on significant figures in recent architectural history. Projects by Enric Miralles, Gregory Ain, Zaha Hadid and countless other familiar names are mashed together to produce new compositions, impossible to build at full scale but fully realizable through Brown's unique collaging technique.

2019, Collage on archival paper, 24h x 18w in

The newest series, titled 'Je est un autre,' will be on view June 7th to July 27th at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Illinois. The series is a nod to the collaging techniques popularized during the middle of the 20th century by architects including Mies van der Rohe and artists including Richard ...

The quiet legacy of the late architect Gin Wong, who helped shape L.A.'s postwar cityscape

2017-09-11T19:43:00-04:00

In other ways — in almost every other way — Wong’s career was a study in complexity. Political and ethnic complexity, mostly. And the complicated question of credit in architecture: Who gets it, who doesn’t and who has the authority to hand it out. [...] If not for the persistence of that narrative, Gin Wong’s contribution to postwar L.A. would be far better understood. It’s that simple.

In a recent column, Christopher Hawthorne highlights the quiet legacy of architect Gin Wong, who passed away September 1 at the age of 94. Wong worked as director of design for William Pereira in the 1960s before opening his own firm in 1973. Some of his projects include LAX's original design in the 1950s, the swooping Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills, the ARCO Tower, and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, to name a few. In stories like Wong's, Hawthorne questions the “tricky conversation of authorship, which remains stunted in architecture”.

The Gadgetist: Bernard Khoury on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #22

2016-05-09T15:32:00-04:00

In the late 1980s, Bernard Khoury came to the US from Lebanon to study architecture at RISD and Harvard, then returned to establish his practice in Beirut in the mid-1990s. His father was a prominent modernist architect during Beirut’s booming pre-civil war years, and much of Khoury’s work somehow engages with Lebanon’s post-war urbanity. We spoke about his time at Harvard, studying “war architecture” with Lebbeus Woods, and how his practice is a constant reevaluation of how architecture can reflect upon, and come to terms with, the traumas of war.

Listen to One-to-One #22 with Bernard Khoury:

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Download: this episode

Shownotes:

B018, the subterranean night club Khoury designed in Beirut

Evolving Scars by Bernard Khoury and Lebbeus Woods

Drive-By Shooting...