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Though a relatively young city in America, Los Angeles is no stranger to significant architecture: Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House, Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis Brown House and the Eameses own home alone solidified the city as a hotbed for modern architectural production. New Architecture Los... View full entry
Le Corbusier has been the subject of countless books, but this is a first: Richard Pare visited every known building designed by the Swiss architect over his 60 year career. Le Corbusier, The Built Work. Photography by Richard ParePublished by Monacelli Press, Le Corbusier: The Built Work is... View full entry
By championing virtues such as speed, technology, youth, and flight, the Futurists worked to cement Italy’s status as highly advanced and, thus, superior. In Asmara, the handsome structures built between 1935 and 1941 became multi-faceted tools of oppression.
Eight decades later, these Italian-designed edifices are still standing, albeit in need of rehabilitation. But preserving Asmara’s Futurist architecture necessarily preserves the fascist agenda that erected them in the first place...
— Atlas Obscura
Though the Futurists are featured in virtually every textbook on Modernism, their politics can be described as more than controversial. As they embraced speed, technology and scientific progress, the Italian group was also upfront about its misogyny, sympathetic towards fascist ideologies and... View full entry
Though he was described by architectural historians as "humorless," Walter Gropius "was in fact a charismatic figure," according to The Guardian's Fiona MacCarthy. His life and career are shrouded in myths of solemnity and passionlessness, though the fact remains that he imparted a significant... View full entry
Kevin Roche (1922-2019) had a lasting influence on the American architecture scene. After moving here from his native Ireland in 1948, Roche studied under Mies van Der Rohe, another significant European emigré, and quickly found his footing in the country's largest cities, producing numerous... View full entry
Kiley was among the most important, influential, and idiosyncratic landscape architects of the 20th century and the designer of more than 1,100 projects. Yet today his work is not well known outside of the field of landscape architecture and, to a lesser extent, the architecture profession. Despite his renown and importance, his legacy remains fragile. — Metropolis
There are many amazing architects and designers whose work sadly remains unnoticed due to the lack of exposure and presence outside of certain circles. With Modernism Week well underway the traveling exhibition "The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley" makes its debut in California's... View full entry
Last Friday, American designer Florence Knoll Bassett passed away at age 101. A pioneer of midcentury design, Bassett was the creative force behind the legendary furniture company Knoll, where she helped to change the landscape of the modern home and office. A pupil of Eliel Saarinen, Mies van der... View full entry
[...] a demolition application was filed for 270 Park Avenue, the current, but not for long headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. The filing is a pivotal step for the bank, which plans to replace the 1.5 million-square-foot Modernist tower with a 2.5 million square foot supertall skyscraper designed by Lord Norman Foster. — CityRealty
The clock is ticking for the midcentury modernist HQ of banking giant JPMorgan Chase: despite preservationist and environmental concerns, the fate of 270 Park Avenue appears sealed, and the 50-story structure is likely to become the world's tallest building ever to be intentionally demolished... View full entry
“We just don’t build houses like we used to.” Whether we’re criticizing an individual home or a wave of boxy buildings, it’s a common lament... It’s a statement that contains some truth, but it also misses crucial context about the material conditions, functionality, and style trends of the past. — Curbed
Kate Wagner, the writer and critic behind McMansion Hell, has turned their sights towards an often-uttered statement about the current state of architectural craftsmanship: "We just don't build houses like we used to." Listen to our conversation with Kate on Archinect Sessions: Wagner... View full entry
“Every child,” lamented Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House of 1981, “goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse”. Had there ever been another place on earth, he also said of Bauhaus-influenced America, “where so many people of wealth and power paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?” — The Guardian
Observer architecture critic, Rowan Moore, on the vast and enduring impact of the "short-lived but longlasting" Bauhaus movement—both the sympathetic and the averse. The famed school celebrates the centenary of its original founding this year. View full entry
The weather in Hawaii is fickle, always shifting depending on the island, the time of day, and the direction of the trade winds. How to design a building in such a place? One must account for the abundant sunshine, the humidity of the air, the salt of the sea, and the damp layers of maritime fog that settle around the smoky mountain peaks. For Vladimir Ossipoff, whose brand of midcentury modernism would define Hawaiian architecture, the answer lay in simplicity. — Artsy
Though Vladimir Ossipoff may not be a household name in the continental United States, his work has become the stuff of legend in the Aloha State. Producing over 1,000 buildings in Hawaii throughout his 60 year career, Ossipoff championed a style of architecture now described as 'Tropical... View full entry
Zoo workers withdrew the birds from Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool after it was claimed the concrete was causing them a bacterial infection known as “bumblefoot”. His daughter Sasha said it was “terribly sad” to see her father’s design sitting unused in the zoo. “Perhaps it’s time to blow it to smithereens.” — Evening Standard
As a truly rare example of architecture at a non-human scale, Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool at London Zoo is a Modernist classic. But it has been disused for several years, given the fact that its concrete ramps were giving the penguins a bacterial infection known as... View full entry
The Los Angeles Conservancy, which spearheaded the landmarking efforts, canceled plans to name the property a Historic-Cultural Monument after agreeing to a deal with owners Paul and Gigi Shepherd to “take demolition off the table.” That means buyers must be willing to relocate the home if they plan to build on the stunning hillside vista where it sits. — Curbed LA
Now listed for $6.25 million, Richard Neutra's historic Chuey House in Hollywood Hills is still up for grabs. “According to listing material, the one and a half acres upon which [the house] sits could accommodate a 20,000 square foot megamansion. That’s more than 10 times the size of the... View full entry
The Tel Aviv coastline is crowded with a mishmash of skyscrapers, Ottoman-inspired villas, and four-story cubes painted a sunlight-reflecting shade of white. But in a place where stylistic jumble is the standard, one strain stands out as the defining architectural aesthetic and a beloved household name: Bauhaus. — Artsy
Design fans may know to pin Tel Aviv as an architectural destination for its unlikely connection to the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Dessau, Germany, but few know why the style traveled over 2,000 miles during the 1930's. Krieger House | Courtesy the rothschild 71 hotel, Tel-AvivWhen... View full entry
In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population. — Places Journal
In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built... View full entry