As Seagram’s director of planning, Lambert visited the site daily. “I had intended to go back to Paris, but I stayed in New York, convinced that if the one person who really cared about the building was not there, Mies would not build Seagram,” she says. With Lambert as his protector and Johnson as his assistant, Mies went on to create in 1958 the Seagram building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture. — wmagazine.com
For the latest entry in the ShowCase series Archinect published the Shrine of the Virgin of "La Antigua" by Otxotorena Arquitectos. The project is located in Alberite, La Rioja, Spain and the architects main constraint was the need to "incorporate a preexisting stone archway in the design. This... View full entry »
Reading this was for me an epiphany. I could see, almost in a flash, the unity of building and landscape developing throughout Mies’s building art, ultimately morphing into the podium that binds the Seagram tower to the urban landscape — plaza, platform, an oasis amid the chaos of New York. This led me to reevaluate the importance of surrounding context, in Mies’s architecture throughout his career and to understand in a new light some of his statements, drawings, and photomontages. — Places Journal
"What led Mies to create the union of skyscraper and plaza on Park Avenue, a binding together so profoundly important in his oeuvre?" On Places, in an excerpt from the new book Building Seagram, Phyllis Lambert recounts the evolution of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architectural philosophy, from... View full entry »
Above freezing temperatures and continued rainfall has left the Fox River that runs next to the Farnsworth House in a state of rising flood waters today, March 11, 2013. The house is fully surrounded by river water, but neither the lower deck nor the upper deck has yet to be breached. — miesglasshouse.wordpress.com
The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street. — Places Journal
When architect Melissa Dittmer moved from New York City to Detroit, her reaction was a "year-long panic attack." Where, she wondered, were the people? "Where was the density, the sense of connection with strangers?" But then Dittmer and her family bought a townhouse in Lafayette Park, the... View full entry »
The building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is a historical landmark but has been expensive and troublesome to maintain. The library’s management, led by D.C. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper, has been considering whether it can be renovated or expanded in some way, or if the library needs to find a new home for the central library. — washingtonpost.com
... the buyer will be contractually obligated to shell out over $10 million to execute a detailed, 80-page list of renovations, ranging from a handful of new peepholes to a sweeping overhaul of the buildings’ bathtubs. On top of that, the buyer must deposit just over $2.5 million into an escrow account that HUD can access in the event that repairs are not on schedule, as evidenced in the illustrated quarterly progress reports the buyer will be required to send. — artinfo.com
In 2009 and 2010, we visited residents of Lafayette Park with photographer Corine Vermeulen while researching our forthcoming book Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies. Vermeulen’s portraits of townhouse owners in their homes appeared in the New York Times. Here we present the corollary to that series: tenants of the Pavilion and the Lafayette Towers in their apartments. Vermeulen’s portraits are accompanied by Lana Cavar’s photos of the views from each apartment window and by excerpts from interviews — places.designobserver.com
In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world's most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city's former glory. — online.wsj.com
The British architect David Chipperfield will oversee a major renovation of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a concrete, steel and glass landmark at Potsdamer Platz completed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968.
Chipperfield has worked extensively in Berlin, finishing work on the war-ravaged Neues Museum on the Museum Island complex in 2009.
— bloomberg.com
To celebrate 126 years since the the father of modernism was born, Google is honoring Mies with a Google doodle tribute, referencing the classic IIT Crown Hall building. View full entry »
Mr. Summers “was Mies’s absolute right-hand man, always,” said Phyllis Lambert...
Asked in 1987 why he and Mies got along so well, Mr. Summers speculated that, as a Texan, he talked so slowly that Mies, a German émigré with halting English, could understand him.
— nytimes.com
RIP Gene Summers, 'modernist', architect of McCormick Place, and Mies' lieutenant for the Seagrams Building has died. Oh, he turned down pursuing the design of the WTC and was dean of IIT among other storied accomplishments. Previously: Chicago architect Gene Summers dies also: LAtimes View full entry »
Clips from documentary of modern architectural masterpiece built in 1930 in Czechoslovakia by German architect Mies van der Rohe for a Jewish family that had to flee in 1938. Interviews with the Tugendhat daughter and Mies' grandson about this unique house now owned by the government in Brno, Czech Republic. — youtube.com
Chicago architect Gene Summers, the former dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the chief designer of the muscular McCormick Place convention hall, died Monday. Summers also served as a right-hand man for Mies van der Rohe, working on such significant projects as the Seagram Building in New York. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com
A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect. — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
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