Archinect - News

Frank Lloyd Wright-designed doghouse is back on display at the Marin County Civic Center

2022-06-15T17:10:00-04:00

In 1958, Frank Lloyd Wright broke a personal record with a cottage he designed for Seth Peterson, a longtime admirer of his work. At just 880 square feet, the home along Mirror Lake, in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, is the smallest residential building Wright ever touched. But it isn’t his smallest structure. Instead, that honour goes to a doghouse, which Wright conceived in the mid 1950s and is now on display at the Marin Civic Center, in San Rafael, California.

In the early 1950s, Robert and Gloria Berger commissioned Wright to design a Usonian-style home for their family in San Anselmo, California. In 1956, their 12-year-old son, Jim Berger, wrote to Wright asking for plans for a matching doghouse for his Labrador retriever, Eddie. The architect provided the plans for a four-square-foot structure, written on the back of an envelope, the following year. The miniature home, dubbed Eddie’s House, was triangular in shape and featured signature Wright details, such as a low-pitched roof with an exaggerated overhang. Wright suggested Berger use scrap pieces of Philippine mahogany and cedar left over from the home’s original construction.

The doghouse wasn’t built until 1963, following Berger’s return from an army tour. When Jim’s father died in 1970, the original structure was scrapped. However, in 2010, Jim and his brother Eric rebuilt the shelter using the original plans and donated it to the County of Marin, in Northern California, in 2016....

An early drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge showcases a radically different design

2021-08-16T18:37:00-04:00

The single image published Dec. 8, 1922, resembles the industrial Carquinez Bridge, except at 20 times the scale. It’s the kind of bridge one designs when all they have to work with is Popsicle sticks and string.

An engineer turned newspaper editor named James Wilkins was the first to propose the bridge in a 1916 San Francisco Bulletin article. Joseph Strauss' early plans called for a cantilever-suspension hybrid but were later changed due to eight-figure cost concerns.

Illustration of the preliminary cantilever-suspension hybrid concept by Joseph Strauss in 1921.

The bridge has recently been put to use as an impromptu music prop after a 2020 retrofit added an unintended sonic feature. Car traffic on the bridge has also declined in a potential harbinger of pandemic-produced changes. The Chronicle has more on the unearthed early drawing here.

Archinect Sessions Episode #26: Modernism - Peru's Common Denominator; A Conversation with Lima Architect Sebastián Bravo

2015-04-23T15:39:00-04:00

This week on the podcast, Paul shares an interview he did in Lima with Sebastián Bravo, a local architect and maker of award-winning pisco. Studying and practicing architecture in a city with a very fresh history of terrorism and ongoing political corruption is no easy feat, and the rapidly urbanized/urbanizing city makes practicing all the more challenging, but Bravo is up to the challenge.

We also briefly discuss a recent workshop Paul attended with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, which took a close look at why enrollment rates at architecture schools are falling, and the stereotypical misunderstandings of what skills high schoolers need to study architecture. In the news, we consider what it means for George Lucas to be building affordable housing in Marin County, whether metal really can move by itself, and briefly look to the deluge of Whitney Museum reviews.

Listen to episode twenty-six of Archinect Sessions, "Modernism - Peru's Common Denominator":

iTunes:...

"We've got enough millionaires": George Lucas wants to build affordable housing on his own land

2015-04-20T14:40:00-04:00

When George Lucas tried to expand his production company studios in California’s wealthy Marin County, the community pushed back. Then the “Star Wars” creator wanted to sell the land to a developer who would build affordable housing. “It’s inciting class warfare,” Carolyn Lenert, then head of the North San Rafael Coalition of Residents, told The New York Times at the time. Now, two years after that project stalled, Lucas has decided to build the affordable housing and pay for it all himself.

Lucas has also been in the news lately for the design of his Museum of Narrative Arts in Chicago.