What style is it? This is a common initial question people ask to learn more about a building. For architects, this seems like a poor entry point and the initiating question can seem naive and trivial. This varying degree of attentiveness to a building’s style leads to an impasse between the public—that wants to understand the built environment—and architects eager to share the nuances of their discipline.
Boats offer delightful distractions for a surprisingly large number of architects. So many in fact, that there seems to be something about boats that appeals specifically to those trained in architecture.
In this video, Will Quam of Brick of Chicago takes us around the American city to question Louis Kahn’s adage that all bricks are motivated to be arches. Here, in the Logan Square neighborhood, we find bricks of all sorts, that — in addition to arches — take on other configurations and metaphors to describe their qualities; textile bricks and diapering, brushstrokes of a painting, butter joints and glazes, soldiers and bullnoses.
In 1984, the Menil Museum in Houston, Texas, commissioned the Mexican architect Luis Barragan to build a 3,000-square feet guest house to be located across the street from the famous Rothko Chapel. The architect came back with a design for a dazzling purple, pink, and orange 8,000-square feet mansion that looked to be more at home in Mexico City than a Houston residential suburban lot. So, due to the ensuing conflict between client and architect, the house would never get built, only displayed as an exhibition within the Menil’s galleries.
The unbuilt design of a home for Josephine Baker by the architect Adolf Loos is perhaps one of the most analyzed unbuilt homes of Modernism. Its design and history touch on a number of complex social and political issues during the early 20th century. The design comes when Josephine Baker, an African American entertainer is beginning her rise to superstardom and represents a thoroughly modern and fresh artistic voice. Meanwhile, Adolf Loos was a physically ailing man on a steep moral and social decline. The house itself was never truly commissioned by Baker, rather it lives mostly as a fantasy concocted by the architect. This video presents the house through a 3D model and narrated walkthrough to discuss how and why the house was designed and allow you to explore this unique house for yourself.
What’s in a name? Well, when it comes to building names, it can be a lot. While some monikers are fleeting and change with the most recent highest bidder, some names are indelible and leave a lasting mark on the public imagination. Client names, towns, corporations, and streets provide ample naming fodder, but some architects are more strategic. Architects like Peter Eisenman created a numbered series (House I, House II, etc.) , or MOS architects adopt a composer-like generic naming system (House with 10 trees, House with 2 Chimneys). For these architects, the name situates each building within a larger collection of projects. It ensures people will consider each act of building as part of a grand plan. Finally, sometimes, no matter how diligent a marketing team tries, a building will find a nickname it just can’t shake...Gherkin. This video considers all these as it explores how buildings get their names.
The Resor House was a hugely pivotal project for Mies van der Rohe, in both his life, and his career. It was his first commission in the United States and prior to landing in Chicago, he lived for two months on the site of the house near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Its design was unique for Mies in its rural landscape setting and material choices, mainly its wood-clad exterior and interior. While it was never constructed due to cost overruns, the design documents and working models were collected by MoMA in NY, where the client, Helen Resor was on the Board of Directors. This video traces a digital reconstruction of the house — using those archival documents — to serve as the subject of an in-depth tour and analysis. What sorts of discoveries are to be found inside this unbuilt masterpiece?
Sometimes architecture’s most influential designs remain unbuilt. Their mark on the world is larger than the physical footprint of the building despite it never breaking ground. This is the case for the Errazuriz House designed in 1930 by Le Corbusier for a Chilean diplomat to Argentina. The house was intended for the mountains of Zapallar Chile overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its primary design feature, the uneven butterfly roof, was intended to reference the peaks and ridges of its surrounding terrain. This is the first instance of a butterfly roof, which would become a staple of post-war houses in California, built by the thousands. This video explores the Errazuriz house, its history, its design, and takes us on a virtual walkthrough of its digital reconstruction.
What if we could visit any building, regardless of whether it was ever built? Or, even after it has been demolished? This video and link below focus on a single house — the One Half House — designed by John Hejduk, to resurrect and explore. It uses the program Enscape to walk through the building in order to preserve and distribute the experience of architecture that does not exist in built form. The video offers a timeline to contextualize the role of the house in John Hejduk’s career and work, an analysis of the building, and initial reactions to walking through the building for the first time. In particular, the One Half House was pivotal for thinking about how architectural volumes might relate in space without the ordering device of a grid or a wall. What magic and other lessons are lurking in the design, hidden until we could experience it?