Miller/Hull designed this house for a young couple that had a high interest in modern architecture. The completed house fits perfectly with the Pacific Northwest theme and is situated in the woods of Mercer Island near Seattle.
Personally it’s one of my favorites in the Pacific Northwest. The ratio of wood to metal beams/siding seems nicely balanced, especially on the deck.
The Fallingwater house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built during 1934-1937 in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. The house was originally a weekend home for Edgar Kaufmann and his family. Over time the house has become a historic landmark and also known as one of the most well known residences in the United States by the American Institute of Architects.
Wright’s goal for this house was to make man and nature harmonious, much like Japanese architecture. Instead of building the house alongside the waterfall like the Kaufmann family originally had planned, Wright designed the house to sit directly on top of the falls. The house then became part of the falls; the sounds of the water echoing throughout the entire house.
Images via Arch Daily.
The best thing about this residence is that it was built over thirty-five years ago by Bates Masi Architects and was recently restored back to its original simplistic form. This would explain why the exterior wood paneling is so perfectly aged in relation to the interior paneling of the house.
The wooden panels alongside other elements of the house, were re-used in the restoration. Nearly all of the panels both inside and outside of the house are twelve-inch wide cypress boards. These knot-filled boards to me seem like the perfect fit when viewing the house in its surrounding environment.
Any architecture that is built with nature in mind, is made with concrete and has wooden interior elements, immediately gets an instant like from me. There’s just something about the combination of wood, concrete and trees that I love.
In this case the trees were included by law. Local construction codes of Mar Azul, Beunos Aires, Argentina actually restrict the removal of trees. Instead of relocating the house the architects, Martín Fernández de Lema and Nicolás F. Moreno Deutsch, decided to build the house around them. Leaving the end result a beautifully designed, wide open house that is seemingly the perfect spring or summertime residence.
Images via Arch Daily.
Support Structures by Céline Condorelli “exposes an almost complete absence of literature or theory on what constitutes ‘support’,”. Sounds like an interesting concept, but honestly I would buy based on looks alone.
Via BLDG | More Info via Steinberg Press
Architectural imagery by Philipp Schaerer. I love the negative space created by the buildings in his Bildbauten series. As he describes on his site, the images are based on the photographic language, and “reflect a built, exaggerated reality.” I’m not sure the techniques used in the creation of the images, but I love the results. You can try and decode his description on his site.
ISO50 is back online after the server apparently took a much needed 24 hour nap, hope you didn’t miss us too much…
Anyways, before the outage I had planned on posting this amazing prefab home from architects Horden Cherry Lee. The “Micro Compact Home” is a joint Japanese/German project and it shows. You really can’t go wrong with that combination and you also can’t go wrong when your new home is delivered into the mountains by some Swiss helicopter. Awesome. Loving that antenna too, or is it a flag pole? Either way it makes the whole thing about 100 times better.
I purchased The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton because I loved the cover. I think it was the colors that first caught my eye. I was also intrigued by the shadow and the shape it created; how it almost touches the statue in the most perfect way. The eye follows the line it creates, and it helps reinforce the hierarchy of the page really effectively. For whatever reason, and as the title indicates the book may elucidate, the whole design makes me happy every time I look at it.
Why this design makes me happy, and to a greater extent, why architecture of a certain aesthetic caliber appeals to us, is largely what this book explores. It is a must read for designers of all disciplines as it pursues the question at the core of what we do: Why make things look beautiful (what does “beautiful” even mean?) and not just purely functional? One of my favorite parts of the book describes the principles of some nineteenth century engineers that felt like they had determined the end-all criteria for evaluating structural design:
The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statures, frescos or carvings. Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass or perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might henceforth be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.
As the rest of the book unfolds, Botton examines, as eloquently as he does above, the alternative to what these engineers proposed. Why it is that we strive to make things beautiful, and what qualities beautiful work possesses. The parallels between his chosen arena of architecture, and other realms of design, are easily drawn, and make it very worthwhile for interested minds in every field. My favorite paragraph is on page 72, and does a nice job bringing together a lot of what he discusses in the book:
In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness. [Buy on Amazon]
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On an unrelated Note: Peter, of Buchanan-Smith, wrote in to clarify the attribution information of a previous post on designer Josef Reyes. The work presented was produced by the studio Buchanan-Smith, where Reyes works as a designer, and the post has been updated to credit the work to the Buchanan-Smith studio. Definitely make sure to check out their site, they have a lot of great work.