Archinect - News

FreelandBuck's LA hillside home design responds to a challenging topography

2024-06-27T15:53:00-04:00

FreelandBuck has designed a pair of stunning single-family residences, built with a shared foundation, atop a steep lot in Los Angeles’ Mount Washington neighborhood. They are defined by strong rectilinear forms and a restrained material palette, in addition to white open spaces illuminated by natural light.

Image: Eric Staudenmaier

The houses are each 2,000 square feet and stretch four storys in order to minimize their impact on the hillside. They respectively respond to the curve of the adjacent street, with one home featuring a perpendicular façade and the other taking on an angled one.

Image: Eric Staudenmaier

They both include an open, loft-like main level that joins together the front living and dining areas and a double-height kitchen. The homes also each include three bedrooms, an elevator, backyard, and patio spaces.

Image: Eric Staudenmaier

Responding to the topography of the site, the lower house is composed of shifted floor plates that cantileve...

FreelandBuck's new Washington Metro art installation invites viewers to an engrossing play on perspective

2024-04-23T13:24:00-04:00

FreelandBuck has released images of a recent art installation for the Washington Metro Area Transit Agency (WMATA) in Washington, D.C. Staged as an optical illusion, their new piece titled ‘Tunnel Vision’ works by projecting an image of a metro station over three intersecting aluminum cones that are suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the organization’s new Alexandria, Virginia, offices.

Image courtesy FreelandBuck and WMATA

The sculpture's grid pattern and convex geometry center a 3D image of an iconic coffered station designed by Harry Weese in the viewer’s vision field, creating the effect of watching a metro train approach while standing on the platform. The firm says, "The piece suggests both realism and familiarity, inciting curiosity for passersby to come take a closer look."

Image courtesy FreelandBuck and WMATA

Brennan Buck, the firm's principal and co-founder, told the Washingtonian magazine recently, "We thought it was just a real...

FreelandBuck designs geometrically reflective art installation for Palo Alto

2019-12-11T17:47:00-05:00

Bicoastal architecture firm FreelandBuck has designed Cache Me if You Can, a new installation currently on view in King Plaza, Palo Alto right in front of city hall. The installation utilizes imagery that captures the activity that took place within the plaza over the course of one day, documenting everything from fluctuating light levels to shifting shadows.

Each of the 10 triangular panels that make up the art piece contain perforated patterns mimicking the captured imagery. Concerning the design approach, FreelandBuck co-founder and principal Brennan Buck said, "This project follows several of our previous large-scale installations designed as constructed drawings. In this case, we worked with images of the site, articulating them graphically as a pattern of overlapping circles. Each pixel of the photograph produced 5 circles in a range of hues that, when averaged together, match the hue of the original pixel. From a distance, the photograph is clear, but up close, the surface o...

FreelandBuck creates a "three-dimensional drawing" installation for the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

2019-11-13T18:54:00-05:00

A new installation created by architects FreelandBuck will be permanently installed in the Museum Lab of the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

The installation, titled Overview, is inspired by Renaissance era trompe l'oeil ceilings and features geometries that correspond to those of a historic leaded glass ceiling that was once installed above the room where the "three-dimensional" drawing is currently located.

The installation changes as one moves around it. Image courtesy of Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

The original ceiling was removed as part of a 1970s-era renovation of the historic former Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny building that now houses the museum. Describing the design, Brennan Buck, partner at FreelandBuck, said, "The intricacy of the original ceiling allowed us to create a dense cloud of lines overhead while clearly evoking the ornamental style of the original building."

Corner detail of the installation. Image courtesy of Children's Museum of ...

Freeland Buck's alluring ceiling installation draws the public to look up

2019-04-26T14:44:00-04:00

Los Angeles and New York City-based architectural office FreelandBuck expand on their exploration of three-dimensional drawing with their new site-specific installation, Over View. On display at Museum Lab adjacent to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, the ceiling installation is a three-dimensional drawing depicting the site's central lobby of the former Carnegie Library. The 34-foot x 38-foot suspended installation is made of printed textile cut and hung over an aluminum frame. The piece recreates the site's ornamental building accents and former glass ceiling before its renovation in the 1970s. FreelandBuck's design approach for the project was influenced by Renaissance-era trompe l’oeil ceilings.

Brennan Buck, partner at FreelandBuck shares, "The intricacy of the original ceiling, allowed us to create a dense cloud of lines overhead while clearly evoking the ornamental style of the original building." Through the power of depth perspectives Over View creates an illusionary vi...

FreelandBuck's LA edition of the world-traveling MINI LIVING Urban Cabin just opened on a Downtown Los Angeles rooftop

2018-06-07T17:49:00-04:00

The 8th Los Angeles Design Festival kicked off today with a plethora of events happening throughout the city over the next four days. One of the featured attractions appears to have fallen out of the sky and landed on the rooftop of the ROW DTLA building: MINI LIVING Urban Cabin is a site-specific installation designed by LA/NYC-based studio FreelandBuck in cooperation with MINI LIVING and will be open to visitors by day and welcome overnight guests after 10pm. The LA edition of this traveling urban cabin is the third stop around the world since its launch in 2017.

Photo: Laurian Ghinitoiu

"The Urban Cabin is a continuous installation project, a small living unit that travels to various locations across the world, adapted for each city by local architects," the project description explains. "Each variation is designed with limited space and inspired by local surroundings, demonstrating creative approaches to the challenge of saving space while creating unique ...

Thinking with a box, to think outside the box.

2017-12-07T14:50:00-05:00

FreelandBuck has recently completed an 8,000-square-foot (or square-cubed) office interior/exterior for Hungry Man Productions headquarters in Los Angeles. Hungry Man asked FreelandBuck to potentially think outside the box and evaluate the traditional organization of an office. The result being a design just as playful and inviting as Hungry Man's own identity.

Drawing by FreelandBuck

The parti of the project creates a composition party of stacked, unstable cubes and playfully composes them through informal arrangements creating a diversity of stable and flexible working configurations while maintaining the scalelessness of discovery and fragility. Feigning randomness, the cubicles are calibrated to support specific relationships between staff while leaving adjacent breakout spaces open and flexible.

In addition, cubicle boxes pile up to make visually prominent display and projection areas that take full advantage of the generous ceiling height of the warehouse shell.

Photos by E...

FreelandBuck's "Parallax Gap" installation goes up at the Renwick Gallery

2017-07-14T13:31:00-04:00

Created by architecture firm FreelandBuck, the piece consists of nine different illusions that click into place only if you stand at the exact right point underneath each of them and gaze upward. “We want people to wander through this room and really figure out this puzzle for themselves, while also enjoying this wonderful, confusing, complex shifting of patterns and geometries,” Renwick curator-in-charge Abraham Thomas says. “Touch wood, there won’t be collisions.”

Back in May, the Los Angeles-based studio FreelandBuck was selected to design and install a temporary ceiling in the Renwick Gallery’s Grand Salon in the Smithsonian. This is a first for the gallery that plans on turning this into a recurring installation series called "Above the Renwick." The firms project, which utilizes digital technology to achieve the trompe l'oeil effect, recreates iconic American ceilings from quintessential buildings such as D.C's Eisenhower Executive Building and SF's Palace of Fine Arts. The visual puzzle opened to visitors July 1st and will be on display through the rest of the year.

FreelandBuck craft a temporary trompe l'oeil ceiling for the Smithsonian

2017-05-19T12:54:00-04:00

The Los Angeles-based studio FreelandBuck has been selected to design and install a temporary ceiling in the Renwick Gallery’s Grand Salon in the Smithsonian, the first in what is expected to be a recurring installation series called Above the Renwick Installation.

Their project draws on the tradition of trompe l’oeil ceilings, using various techniques to create an illusion of depth. The design comprises a “catalog” of various notable American architectural styles, brought to life with 21st century technology.

“Trompe l’oeil illusion functions from a single key point – the center of a nave or directly under a dome,” they write. “From other points of view, the illusion malfunctions: figures appear suddenly out of scale, space flattens out, or an entire dome seems to change orientation. Given the constant stream of visual illusion we encounter every day, the glitches may now fascinate more than the intended illusion. The Renwick installation amplifies and coordinates these gaps, opening...

Editor's Picks #278

2012-08-21T11:50:00-04:00

Reacting to Tatzu Nishi’s concept for Discovering Columbus, Donna Sink exclaimed "Wow, I love the interior environments he makes for these installations! The existing piece is so out-of-place." The conceptual piece will consist a living room six stories up in the air wrapped around the historic statue of Christopher Columbus found in Columbus Circle, NYC.

In the latest edition of the UpStarts: feature FreelandBuck aka David Freeland and Brennan Buck (an architectural design practice based in New York and Los Angeles affiliated with Yale School of Architecture, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) and Woodbury University, ed. wow that is a lot of affiliated withs...) discussed; their first built project, "scale jump moments", the impact of the recession on the architecture + construction industry and finally the importance of "Making work" via email with Orhan Ayyüce.

Jason Muller shared "While I was studying for my undergraduate in Architecture at Woodbury University in Burbank California, my second year design architecture studio was tough by David Freeland and it was one of the best and inspiring experiences of my life."

House KE12 is the focus of the latest Showcase. The project by SoHo Architektur is in Memmingen Germany. It is a townhouse with two housing units, designed as a “three-window house”. ...