Influential modern icon Bernard Judge has passed away in Los Angeles aged 90

2021-11-24T13:08:00-05:00

Leading modernist Bernard Judge passed away in his Los Angeles home last week at the age of 90.

The LA Times’ Carolina Miranda has an excellent write-up on the man who once designed a home for Marlon Brando on an atoll in French Polynesia.

Judge was in many ways the living definition of a “champion of modernism,” pioneering the geodesic dome form exhibited in his Triponent House and working to restore Rudolph Schindler’s then-eponymous West Hollywood home after taking out a personal ad in the Times in the early 1970s.

Judge was born in New York City to an artist mother and architecture professor father. He went on to study at USC at a time when the school was dominated by prominent residential designers like Gregory Ain and Conrad Bluff III.

Section drawing of Judge's Triponent House project. Source: Southern California Architectural History.

Judge designed a number of resorts and inexpensive and easy-to-construct homes through his firm Environmental Services Group. He was a lectur...

Walter Maria Förderer is the masterful modern architect you've never heard of

2019-05-07T13:48:00-04:00

In the 1960s, Walter Maria Förderer designed eight churches in Switzerland and Germany. Influenced by Le Corbusier, and even more so by the collages of Kurt Schwitters and Gothic architecture, Förderer designed cascades of concrete blocks and strange totemic objects that now form some of Europe’s most avant-garde religious buildings.

It is always a delight and a mystery when one learns of a new name to add to their account of architecture history — a delight because with their name comes new buildings, textures, contexts and drawings to discover; a mystery because their near erasure from historical canon can appear suspiciously willful.

While Gottfried Böhm and Le Corbusier are perhaps the first to come to mind when considering the significant architects of Post War European churches, Walter Maria Förderer rightly deserves a spot on the list. Like Corbusier, Förderer was a Swiss architect obsessed with the structural and material properties afforded by concrete, and was uniquely determined to treat the material as he had during his earlier career as a sculptor.

The Church of St Nicholas, by Walter Maria Förderer. Photo by David Willen.

The Church of St. Nicholas (above) is one of his most exemplary works. Though the building does employ a small handful of modernist principles, it signals an interest in post-func...

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Influential modern icon Bernard Judge has passed away in Los Angeles aged 90

Walter Maria Förderer is the masterful modern architect you've never heard of