Archinect - News

Interview with the man who designed Putin's (allegedly) billion dollar palace

2021-02-28T14:42:00-05:00

Architecturally speaking, it’s not the biggest or best project I made. It’s nice neoclassicism – that’s what was asked for. As an architect, I build what the customer wants...But aesthetically speaking, it is very correct considering historical proportions. It is not kitsch...It's not overdone, but naturally it is rich, as it was supposed to be. And we used fantastic materials. I was proud of my job.

Christian Esch chatted with Lanfranco Cirillo an architect who has spent decades providing Moscow’s super rich with villas and Italian-inspired designs.

Helen Liu Fong is the visionary Googie architect you've never heard of

2019-05-31T19:08:00-04:00

[Helen Liu] Fong’s specialty was Googie architecture, what Wong calls futuristic “Jetson kind of aesthetic” coffee shops and motels that would sweep the highways of America in the middle of the last century. Some of Fong’s most famous projects include the Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw Boulevard, the first Norms Restaurant, Johnie’s Coffee Shop, and the still kicking Pann’s Restaurant at 6710 La Tijera Boulevard.

A whimsical subcategory of mid-century design, known as 'Googie' architecture, was as integral to the Southern California architecture scene as any modernist homes designed by Schindler, Neutra or the Eameses. This is because Googie architecture was the design of choice for coffee shops, delis and other public architecture patronized by local and tourist alike.

Pann's Restaurant, Inglewood, California.

Helen Liu Fong, a Chinese-American taught at UC Berkeley's school of architecture, was an indispensable member of the design movement during the middle of the 20th century. "In 1949," according to Curbed LA, "she fulfilled her childhood dream, earning a degree in city planning from the architecture school at Berkeley."

Norm's Restaurant on La Cienega. Photo by Jack Laxer

A few years later, after a long stint as a secretary, the architects Armet and Davis, known for producing Googie architecture throughout Southern California at the time, hired the young architect to work on The Clo...

John Margolies elevated roadside attractions to high art with his photography, now digitized through the Library of Congress

2019-05-28T13:47:00-04:00

There are many names associated with the documentation of American fringe culture during the transformative middle of the 20th century, among them Johnny Cash, Hunter S. Thompson and even architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. But one of its principal photographers - whose images may be significantly more well known than the name behind them - is John Margolies, the man behind nearly 11,000 photos of American roadside attractions taken throughout the 1970s, as well as several books on the subject.

Star Lite Outdoor Theater, Route 81-B, Fargo, North Dakota.

Without a touch of irony or derision, Margolies found inspiration in what other critics readily dismissed as "low-brow" and "tasteless." As the New York Times once profiled him, Margolies made a career out of "scouring back roads for those vanishing emblems of midcentury enterprise, which were already imperiled by air travel, interstates and big-box sprawl."

Christie's Restaurant sign, cowboy shrimp, Houston, Texas.

The...

Long derided by architects, Prince Charles' model town Poundbury might not be all that bad after all

2016-10-27T13:22:00-04:00

If Poundbury is a game, it is one that has become a good deal more convincing over time. For years derided as a feudal Disneyland, where Prince Charles could play at being planner like Marie Antoinette with her toy hamlet in Versailles, this supposed ghost town feels increasingly like a real place...[Strip] away the fancy dress and you find a plan that far exceeds the sophistication achieved by any modern housebuilder.

“We are engaged in creating a convincing fake,” [Ben Pentreath, an architect who has worked in Poundbury] says. “All architecture is essentially wallpaper: underneath, it’s all the same stuff.”

More New Urbanism:

Pyongyang's inner Wes Anderson shines through in its architecture, then and now

2015-11-03T13:24:00-05:00

'Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,'...Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue...These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country.

Macedonian Makeover: Europe's Flailing Capital of Kitsch

2013-11-21T19:17:00-05:00

The Macedonian government has spent huge sums turning its capital, Skopje, into a neo-baroque architectural nightmare. The project's gaudy excesses camouflage a disastrous economy and troubling record on human rights.