Frank Lloyd Wright is generally considered to have been an arrogant, irascible curmudgeon, whose voracious egotism was and remains legendary. But he could be a gingerly grandfather as well. Case in point, the Jim Berger doghouse. As Architects & Artisans reports, Wright designed the canis domus in 1956, after the 12-year old project’s namesake wrote the famous architect asking if he would fashion a house for the Berger family’s then 4-year old black Lab, Eddie. The boy, who specified in his letter that he would cover the expenses of the plans and materials with wages he earned from his bike route, wrote to Wright in June of 1956, saying that he “would appreciate it if you [Wright] would design me a dog house, which would be easy to build, but would go with our house.”
If there’s anything to attest to humanity’s belief that the future is what we make of it, it’s our unceasing obsession with mapping it out. Depictions of the future date back to drawings on cave walls and continue as 35 mm film and HTML; Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odysseybasically features an iPad, and yesterday on the Daily Beast, three architecture firms imagined what our cities will look like in 2030. But surpassing our obsession with the future is a newer fixation on the history of predicting the future (here’s a cinematic one), which is the topic of this fall’s issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which comes out this week. Check out our gallery of quaint, outdated, and scarily accurate images of the future through the eyes of the past after the jump.
If you’re planning on hitting the road this Memorial Day weekend (last year, 31 million people did), then the thought of stopping for gas is probably a bit of a buzz kill. While we can’t do anything about the prices at the pump, we would like to point out that it can be an aesthetically pleasing experience; in fact, over the years some of the world’s most famous architects — from Mies van der Roh to Norman Foster — have built what we consider to be beautiful gas stations. Click through to check out 10 of our favorite examples, and leave your own suggestions in the comments.
Six Architects is a series of minimalist posters by a designer who goes by Roosterization; his crisp black and white graphics simplify and recreate the work of some of modern architecture’s most famed structures — from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum to Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building in Bangladesh. Click through to check them out, and let us know in the comments which one you’d like to hang on your walls.
Ezra Stoller — considered a pioneer in the world of architectural photography — was known for snapping images of some of the 20th century’s most celebrated buildings, from the Guggenheim Museum to the TWA terminal at Idlewild Airport. In fact, his work was considered so influential that architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Rudolph, and Richard Meier all wanted their buildings “Stollerized.”
His method for magically capturing a building’s essence? Patience. ”Photography is space, light, texture, of course,” Stoller once said, ”but the really important element is time. That nanosecond when the image organizes itself on the ground glass.” A selection of his gelatin silver prints are currently on display at New York’s Yossi Milo Gallery through February 12th; click through to check out a few of our favorite images of iconic NYC landmarks, alongside a few lesser known gems.
We built our share of gingerbread houses as kids — shaky, crooked structures, crumbling under the weight of too much candy and often made with graham crackers rather than the real stuff. These days, we leave it to the professionals to awe us with their masterful creations. After the jump, we’ve collected incredible gingerbread renditions of ten of the world’s most iconic buildings, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater to the Chrysler Building to the Sydney Opera House.
Nothing screams the hubris of urban life like a giant building. And while for some cities a skyscraper is just another building, plenty peg their self-worth on mammoth projects, designed to serve as iconic credentials of progress. However of those planned, only a handful ever result in a shovel in the ground — and even then their completion remains uncertain, held hostage by economic and technical realities. Chicago and Dubai, while already boasting some of the world’s tallest buildings, suffer such disappointment on a regular basis. In the grim midst of the Great Recession, not even the best laid plans of city or architect are safe. After the jump, check out some prime examples of the Tower of Babel’s modern heirs.
At 765 pages, Architecture of the Sun, Rizzoli’s lavishly illustrated survey of Los Angeles modernism from 1900 to 1970, is as angular as an Eames building but with the warmth of a Charles and Henry Greene California bungalow. Perched on a coffee table, a monolith of receding straight lines and hard cover, the volume peers over an ocean of pacific blue rug and recalls Pierre Koenig’s famous Case Study #21 house. But like the modernism the book examines, there is more here than form; there is content too. To give proper due to the buildings and the men who built them, author Thomas Hines needs all the pages he can get.
Artinfo reports that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (located in Los Feliz, California and inspired by ancient Mayan ruins), is being offered for sale for $15 million (!) by the Ennis House Foundation. Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank’s grandson and a member of the non-profit’s board, believes that a private owner is the best way to maintain the home in the current economy. Read More »
Spending an afternoon with abstract expressionists, batting ideas back and forth about the latest Bacon exhibit, or wandering through a Warhol wonderland is worth more than money can buy. Yet, growing up amid the tentacles of global capitalism, it’s hard to turn our backs on the mantra, “spend, spend, spend” — especially now that shopping is the new religion. That, my friends, is what museum stores are for. Enabling us to get the best of both worlds in a heady combination of art, design, and retail therapy, museum stores let us feel all warm and culturally enriched inside while still feeding our consumer cravings. Here, we run down the best that the culture capitals have to offer.
, Rizzoli’s lavishly illustrated survey of Los Angeles modernism from 1900 to 1970, is as angular as an Eames building but with the warmth of a Charles and Henry Greene California bungalow. Perched on a coffee table, a monolith of receding straight lines and hard cover, the volume peers over an ocean of pacific blue rug and recalls 
