Archinect - News

Hidden rooms, from 16th century England to a current-day New York city apartment

2021-03-17T19:14:00-04:00

The mystery of something hidden always brings curiosity to us. In the movies, we can surely reminisce about hidden rooms and passageways behind bookshelf walls or behind a classic Impressionist masterpiece. During the 16th century in England, Roman Catholic priests were feared of persecution due to state restrictions. “Priest holes” were built in wealthy homes for hiding and allowed a passageway to exit, if needed. Several still exist today, behind bathrooms and inside chimneys, as mysterious tourist attractions.

Harvington Hall

Another mysterious destination on travelers’ bucket lists, is Chicago’s speakeasies of the 1920s Prohibition era. Hidden taverns and basement bars were the scene for gangsters and bootleggers gracing with flair and dancing with illegal alcohol.

Chicago Prohibition Bust 1931. Photograph by Daniel Hagerman

As we shift from 16th century England to 1920s Chicago, next, we look into the mysterious history of New York City’s buildings. Buildings built prior to Wor...

Hidden well discovered in home built in 1800s; man falls through floor

2020-07-08T12:14:00-04:00

According to The New York Times' Allyson Waller, "Chris Town was assembling a bed frame for a friend's son in a 19th century house in Guilford, Connecticut....when the floor gave out beneath him." Town had fallen into a fieldstone cistern well that was concealed beneath the floor boards, Waller reports. The well was 20 feet deep and was filled with about seven feet of water.

Firefighters were called to come and rescue Town from the well, a feat Capt. Chris Gode said he has never had to execute in his 26 years of service. According to Waller, the house was built in 1843 and the floorboards over the well was likely a later addition.

"Sometimes homes had wells in their basements in order to protect them from freezing,” Dennis Johnson, director of health for the town of Guilford told The New York Times. "Then, with really historic homes, sometimes we occasionally find them in an addition on a house, or in a basement or right next to the house. Occasionally you do find them, but it’s not...

Photographer discovers Chicago's hidden modernist gems along Peterson Avenue

2018-09-18T15:20:00-04:00

The buildings aren’t the work of celebrated modernist architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. They bear no resemblance to the towering glass and steel monuments to postwar rationalism that you see downtown. They house doctors’ offices and dry cleaners, furniture stores and accounting firms. Some are vacant, their prim hedges and topiary gone to seed.

Architectural photographer and critic Lee Bey discovered a group of quirky modernist buildings on a section of Chicago's Peterson Ave. Overlooked and unkempt, these low-rise gems draw from Southern California's modernist vernacular prompting an unexpected, sunny and 60's nostalgia on the Northwest Side of the city. Check out these hidden structures documented here.

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries

2018-04-10T15:30:00-04:00

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.

Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting strawberries, experiments with modes of resistance.

Miniature manhole rooms highlight reality of Bucharest's underground dwellers

2016-04-15T13:30:00-04:00

Borderlife is a street art intervention by Biancoshock in which three abandoned manholes in Milan’s Lodi district have been transformed into miniature dwellings. [...] With Borderlife the street artist wants to make us aware about the distressing living conditions of many fellow humans who are forced to live in confined spaces, especially manholes. He got his inspiration from the reportedly hundreds of people that are occupying manholes and sewer systems in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Images of the BORDERLIFE street art intervention via Biancoshock's website.

This secret swimming pool in the Mojave desert could be all yours...

2014-06-30T18:51:00-04:00

The piece was completed last Friday and it consists of a single, diminutive swimming pool located somewhere in the southern Mojave Desert between Joshua Tree and Apple Valley. The public is allowed to use the pool, but in order to do so visitors need the key that unlocks it (it is kept covered) as well as the GPS coordinates. Only once you have the key, which is kept at the MAK Center, are you given the coordinates.

London's hidden interiors – in pictures

2012-10-29T17:37:00-04:00

From the grandeur of Whitehall to an unremarkable high street in south London, a peek behind the capital's less well-known facades reveals an amazing architectural heritage that rivals some of its most visited and celebrated sites, as these images from a new English Heritage book illustrate

New York City’s Hidden Subway Station

2012-05-14T17:59:00-04:00

Deep in the belly of New York’s subway system, a beautiful untouched station resides that has been forgotten for years with only a limited few knowing of its existence. Stunning decoration with tall tiled arches, brass fixtures and skylights run across the entire curve of the station, almost a miniature imitation of Grand Central Station…

Hidden historic ceiling found in University of Toronto reading room

2008-10-28T23:35:00-04:00

A renovation of the University of Toronto reading room has revealed architectural details hidden for almost a century. Diamond and Schmitt Architects discovered carved wooden trusses, rafters and a dramatic glass skylight while renewing the heritage wing of the Gerstein Science Information Centre. CBC

before