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Last Friday, American designer Florence Knoll Bassett passed away at age 101. A pioneer of midcentury design, Bassett was the creative force behind the legendary furniture company Knoll, where she helped to change the landscape of the modern home and office. A pupil of Eliel Saarinen, Mies van der... View full entry
[...] a demolition application was filed for 270 Park Avenue, the current, but not for long headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. The filing is a pivotal step for the bank, which plans to replace the 1.5 million-square-foot Modernist tower with a 2.5 million square foot supertall skyscraper designed by Lord Norman Foster. — CityRealty
The clock is ticking for the midcentury modernist HQ of banking giant JPMorgan Chase: despite preservationist and environmental concerns, the fate of 270 Park Avenue appears sealed, and the 50-story structure is likely to become the world's tallest building ever to be intentionally demolished... View full entry
“We just don’t build houses like we used to.” Whether we’re criticizing an individual home or a wave of boxy buildings, it’s a common lament... It’s a statement that contains some truth, but it also misses crucial context about the material conditions, functionality, and style trends of the past. — Curbed
Kate Wagner, the writer and critic behind McMansion Hell, has turned their sights towards an often-uttered statement about the current state of architectural craftsmanship: "We just don't build houses like we used to." Listen to our conversation with Kate on Archinect Sessions: Wagner... View full entry
“Every child,” lamented Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House of 1981, “goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse”. Had there ever been another place on earth, he also said of Bauhaus-influenced America, “where so many people of wealth and power paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?” — The Guardian
Observer architecture critic, Rowan Moore, on the vast and enduring impact of the "short-lived but longlasting" Bauhaus movement—both the sympathetic and the averse. The famed school celebrates the centenary of its original founding this year. View full entry
The weather in Hawaii is fickle, always shifting depending on the island, the time of day, and the direction of the trade winds. How to design a building in such a place? One must account for the abundant sunshine, the humidity of the air, the salt of the sea, and the damp layers of maritime fog that settle around the smoky mountain peaks. For Vladimir Ossipoff, whose brand of midcentury modernism would define Hawaiian architecture, the answer lay in simplicity. — Artsy
Though Vladimir Ossipoff may not be a household name in the continental United States, his work has become the stuff of legend in the Aloha State. Producing over 1,000 buildings in Hawaii throughout his 60 year career, Ossipoff championed a style of architecture now described as 'Tropical... View full entry
Zoo workers withdrew the birds from Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool after it was claimed the concrete was causing them a bacterial infection known as “bumblefoot”. His daughter Sasha said it was “terribly sad” to see her father’s design sitting unused in the zoo. “Perhaps it’s time to blow it to smithereens.” — Evening Standard
As a truly rare example of architecture at a non-human scale, Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool at London Zoo is a Modernist classic. But it has been disused for several years, given the fact that its concrete ramps were giving the penguins a bacterial infection known as... View full entry
The Los Angeles Conservancy, which spearheaded the landmarking efforts, canceled plans to name the property a Historic-Cultural Monument after agreeing to a deal with owners Paul and Gigi Shepherd to “take demolition off the table.” That means buyers must be willing to relocate the home if they plan to build on the stunning hillside vista where it sits. — Curbed LA
Now listed for $6.25 million, Richard Neutra's historic Chuey House in Hollywood Hills is still up for grabs. “According to listing material, the one and a half acres upon which [the house] sits could accommodate a 20,000 square foot megamansion. That’s more than 10 times the size of the... View full entry
The Tel Aviv coastline is crowded with a mishmash of skyscrapers, Ottoman-inspired villas, and four-story cubes painted a sunlight-reflecting shade of white. But in a place where stylistic jumble is the standard, one strain stands out as the defining architectural aesthetic and a beloved household name: Bauhaus. — Artsy
Design fans may know to pin Tel Aviv as an architectural destination for its unlikely connection to the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Dessau, Germany, but few know why the style traveled over 2,000 miles during the 1930's. Krieger House | Courtesy the rothschild 71 hotel, Tel-AvivWhen... View full entry
In the construction of the new Yugoslavia, modernist thinking and design were deployed to guide the country’s rapid urbanization and industrialization as well as to unify the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population. — Places Journal
In columnist Belmont Freeman's latest article for Places, he examines the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and finds a rigorous and revealing survey of Yugoslavia’s extraordinary built... View full entry
Over the last two years, the Central European University (CEU) has been subjected to verbal and thinly-veiled legislative attacks by Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán. [...]
Should the university choose to relocate, it would be forced to abandon not only the country it has operated in since opening in 1991, but also its recently opened premises.
— CNN
CNN Style explains why the celebrated Phase 1 design of the Central European University's deliberately modernist Budapest campus may potentially not be able to save the school's existence in the city. Photo © Tamás BujnovszkyDesigned by Irish firm O'Donnell + Toumey, the part-new... View full entry
The Bailey House, one of the approximately 20 surviving Los Angeles residences from Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study House program is once again up for grabs.
Designated CSH No. 21, the Hollywood Hills home was built between 1956 and ’58 by Pierre Koenig for psychologist Walter Bailey and his wife Mary, whom Arts & Architecture described as a “contemporary-minded” couple with no children and an informal lifestyle.
— Curbed LA
Looking to purchase some property in the Hollywood Hills? Something iconic maybe, preferably midcentury? How about a Case Study House? — Lucky you! The Pierre Koenig-designed CSH #21B 'Walter Bailey House' just came back on the market and asks for $3.6 million. View full entry
As Lake Point Tower, once the world’s tallest all-residential high-rise, celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, it’s an apt time to reflect on its legacy. The 70-story condominium tower, which sits just west of Navy Pier at 505 N. Lake Shore Drive, is both hero and villain, though it is more the former than the latter. — Chicago Tribune
Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin looks back at the history and the significance of Lake Point Tower; as he calls it "by all accounts a spectacular and rare object — a poetic expression of curves in a city that worships the right angle." View full entry
Yet now, in our era of elegantly restrained and frequently dour minimalism, when architecture is almost always the province of the rich, it may be that Goff, with his aesthetic idiosyncrasies and affinity for middle-class Midwestern clients (schoolteachers, farmers, salesmen, small-town newspaper publishers), still has lessons to teach us, 36 years after his death. — The New York Times
In her NYT feature, Amanda Fortini revisits the flamboyant and impressive work of the largely forgotten midcentury architect Bruce Goff. "His daring, elaborately imagined homes—he loved unusual shapes and made ample use of found materials—are often dismissed by cultural mandarins as... View full entry
On August 24, 2018, the Atlanta Fulton Central Library was unanimously nominated to the National Register of Historic Places and listed on the Georgia Register of Historic Places by the Georgia National Register Review Board. It will now be sent to the National Park Service for listing on the National Register. Fulton County spoke in opposition to the nomination. [...]
Atlanta’s Central Library is currently closed for extensive renovations.
— Docomomo US
Previously: Central Atlanta Library: debate over adding windows to 'dark' Marcel Breuer building View full entry
If Michigan isn’t the first place that comes to mind when considering [the Modern era] — unlike, say, Germany or France in the 1920s — it should be. The presence of Ford in the city and Booth in the country was enough to make Michigan ground zero for the Modernist experiment [...] making the state home to perhaps the most diverse and best-preserved collection of early Modernist experiments in the world. — The New York Times
A look at Michigan's history in the Modernist movement and the story it tells for our future. M.H. Miller traces three main convergences in the state: Henry Ford's first Model T factory, the Cranbrook school's presence, and numerous influential architects most notably Albert Kahn and Minoru... View full entry
