Archive
Build your own Richard Neutra House…
Now that’s a blog post title to grab the attention of architects with a love for Modernism..
Richard Neutra, one of the best American architects of last century gained a reputation for designing beautiful and elegant houses, mostly on the West Coast, mostly with large overhanging flat roofs and azure blue swimming pools but always with an enviable style and conviction.
Well I’ve just read on Architizer, that thanks to a new partnership between the Neutra Architectural Office, Richard Neutra’s son Dion (who took over the office after his father’s death in 1970) and the California Architecture Conservancy, it’s now possible to buy a licence that allows you to build a brand new house from the original plans of 12 of Richard Neutra’s finest designs, including the Lovell Heath House, The Richard Bailey House and the Kaufmann House (click on the document to the left to find out more…)
I’ve been thinking about this rather intriguing offer, and I can’t work out who I think it’s aimed at.. Will a 60+ year old Neutra house designed for a specific site in California, work as well (or at all) in contemporary Dubai, Coventry, Moscow or Buenos Aires? Surely local constraints would make an exact replica impossible, and arguably inadvisable: flat roofs in Oslo, swimming pools in Reykjavik…
At college we talked much about the Genius Loci of a place, the spirit or uniqueness of a location that should inform any development proposed there. Despite the usual lazy criticisms of Modernist architecture being a universal solution and non site specific, Neutra’s version of Modernism was most definitely a tailored response. Not only to the immediate landscape and the client brief, but also to the technical innovations available at the time, and you only have to look at the Case Study Houses programme to appreciate the variety and quality that Neutra brought to his designs and which can be seen in these images below of the Kaufmann House from 1946.
Maybe this project is more about taking the essence of the original design (the key moves if you like: flat planes, rectilinear geometries, lots of glass) and then using them to make another building, which by definition won’t be the first building, which takes us back to the beginning of the conundrum (who is this aimed at) and which then begs the question, why don’t the design office of Dion & Richard Neutra use their skill, knowledge and experience to, wait for it… create a brand new house designed specifically to fit the clients requirements…
Still it would be pretty cool to own a Richard Neutra House, and if you were fortunate to own a site overlooking the sea, in a warm sunny climate (and this is no longer available) then why not…
For Sale – A Modernist Masterpiece
We were out with friends last week and somewhat out of the blue, they mentioned that they had recently been tempted to move out of London.
After expressing surprise at such a statement (especially from these two who live in the heart of urban London in Golden Lane, near the Barbican) I was directed to these photos from the ever wonderful “House Porn” site The Modern House.net.
These pictures illustrate what I can only describe as what looks like an almost perfect place to live, and I suddenly understood why they might by contemplating such a big move…
Designed by the Architect Peter Womersley and completed in 1954 (then extended in ’56), Farnley Hey has everything you could ever want from a Modernist home: a Grade II listing, strikingly good looks, acres of space, timber and stone finishes throughout, floor to ceiling windows, a double height living room, beautiful built in furniture, clever use of existing site levels, 4 bedrooms and a double garage… It was even awarded an RIBA Bronze medal in 1958.
And all for a not unreasonable £575,000.00… Yes it’s a lot of money, but when you compare what you would get to some of the other properties for sale on the The Modern House website in and around the Capital, I can see why it all became rather tempting.
The thought that such beautiful houses as this are still available to buy and live in, is something I haven’t really considered before, and it got me to thinking how fantastic our own mid century teak furniture and 1960′s ceramics would look occupying these rooms…
You see how easy it is to fall in love with a good building, I’m already thinking about gazumping my friends…
Not really though. Sadly (for us not the house) it’s all the way up in the The Yorkshire Dales, and the daily commute (3 to 4 hrs via Wakefield apparently) back down to South London would be a real bugger…
The Great Pacific Trash Vortex…
Something definitely in the” Things I don’t like…” category today.
I’m ashamed to admit that I only recently became aware of The Great Pacific Trash Vortex (or Garbage Patch), an area of floating rubbish whose size is difficult to assess, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 square miles (i.e. the size of Texas), possibly up to as much as a mind numbing 6 million square miles (or roughly 1/10th of the entire pacific Ocean) and which contains an estimated 3.5 million tons of rubbish, reaching a depth of between 10 and 30 meters below the surface.
There are five of these huge floating rubbish tips, one in each of the ocean gyres, a natural phenomenon connected to the Coriolis effect and the oceans currents, where the sea forms a huge slowly circulating body of water that despite its circular motion, remains relatively static in terms of where it is. Although the Pacific rubbish tip is the largest of these accumulations, between all five of them, it’s estimated that they might cover upwards of 30% of the surface of the sea (although that can’t possibly be right can it?)
Approximately 90% of all the rubbish in the seas is plastic based. Not as you may think as recognisable bottles and bags etc. but broken down into billions and billions of tiny granules that are not only undetectable by planes and satellites, but are often invisible to the human eye. Which explains why these huge areas of rubbish weren’t much known about until the late 90′s, especially after being discovered and publicised by the American yachtsman Charles J. Moore.
Some facts that we would all do well to remember :
- Plastic never totally biodegrades. It breaks down into ever smaller pieces through photodegradation, losing colour and form along the way, until the polymers become almost microscopic and small enough to be ingested by organism’s like plankton and krill at the bottom of the food chain…
- A single 1 litre plastic drinks bottle will break down into enough fragments to put one on every mile of every beach on the planet.
- More than 60% of the plastic in the sea is 1mm or smaller.
- 70% of all plastic that ends up in the sea sinks to the bottom.
- It is estimated that over 1 million sea birds and upwards of 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die each year from deaths related to plastics, usually ingestion or entanglement.
- Apart from any that has been burnt, every bit of plastic that has ever been produced since its invention about 120 years or so ago, still exists.
To end on a more positive note (although I accept that it won’t make the impending disaster go away), I came across this interesting architectural proposal that suggests a way to deal with these floating continents of waste.
Designed by three young architects from Serbia, and entitled Lady Landfill (although I can’t work out why) it was an entry into a 2011 Skyscraper competition and received an honorable mention.
To radically summarise the key aspects of the scheme, these huge, self-sufficient systems are floated to the areas where the rubbish accumulates whereupon they set to work vacuuming it out of the sea. The islands can move around to enable all areas to be covered, and as the facility fills up with rubbish, any additional weight is offset by pumping air into and out of the structure to keep the habitation zone at the top at the correct height above the water. All the rubbish that is collected is then transformed into energy via a number of on board and inbuilt methods (including conversion into plasma)…
I don’t know much about plasma, but I’m guessing that some of the technologies in the proposal are not currently practical, not least building the Eiffel Tower sized islands in the first place. Still it’s a very neat idea, elegantly presented and very worthy of recognition.
It’s also a big step in the right direction in terms of raising awareness of this fundamentally critical issue, one which we should all do our best to address, no matter how small the gesture feels…
RECYCLE OR DIE (as my good friend Waitey is always telling me)
The DLR and London Docklands (before anyone took them seriously…)
I love the internet, you can find so much amazing stuff, things you never even knew existed, just tucked away waiting to be found…
Take the photos that accompany this post for example. They are all borrowed from Steve White’s amazing Flickr site here, where he’s gathered over 1100 images. I can’t begin to imagine how long it must have taken to scan in all those original prints…
I came to London at the end of the 1980′s to do my year out and take my Architectural Diploma and by the early 1990′s was working for a Greenwich based architectural practice. Then, as now (apart from buses of course) there were really only two ways to get to Greenwich from north of the river: overground from London Bridge or via the Docklands Light Railway (DLR).
In the early 90′s the DLR (much like the Docklands themselves) still had something of the novel about it: driverless trains, elevated trackways, unfinished stations, continuous weekend and evening closures, an abundance of blue powder coated steel structures and a track that stopped north of the Thames at Island Gardens.
What Steve obviously did and what I regret not doing, was documenting these early days with his camera, and for someone like me who regularly used the fledgling service to commute to work, his images are a treasure trove of visual clues and reminders of what a different world it was back then, covering everything from Tower Gateway to Beckton and Stratford and all points in between.
Admittedly these images won’t mean much if you’ve never been to the Docklands or had the opportunity to ride on the DLR, but trust me when I tell you that NOTHING looks like this anymore: not the buildings, the landscape, the trains, the stations… its all now super shiny, super busy, super dense and super expensive…
Even having lived here over the last 12 years and experienced it all first hand, it’s still staggering the rate and amount of change the Isle of Dogs has been through. The huge empty spaces around West India Quay (above) and Limehouse (below) are particularly impressive especially when you think that these photos were all taken less then 30 years ago…
I’ve taken the liberty of stitching a few of Steve’s photos together to give them a more panoramic feel, but even without doing that, the amount of space that the developers had to work with must have been simultaneously exciting and intimidating…
So a huge thanks to Steve for taking the time to document it all, I for one am very appreciative of his efforts.
The above four photos are especially poignant for me as they show the old Island Gardens station as it was before the extension below the Thames made it all redundant and it was demolished.
Being the end of the line, the tracks split into a V either side of the central steps so that one train could wait for the other before it ran along the single track that ran most of the way to the next station, Mudchute. Reliability was not the DLR’s strong point in the early days, and I used to spend seemingly endless hours on these two platforms waiting to get back to civilisation in North London. 
It’s incredible to think that when Steve took this photo in June 1988, looking north from Heron Quays, nothing of the Canary Wharf existed… at all. One day I should go and take the same view as it its today and put it up here for comparison…
Patrick Gwynne in The Manchester Modernist Magazine…
With all the excitement of Christmas, I completely forgot to post about a short architectural piece I wrote being published at the end of last year in the Modernist Magazine…
Started a couple of years ago and based up in Manchester, the Modernist Magazine is now up to issue no. 6. which is no mean feat for a self published hard copy magazine. The editors, Jack, Maureen and Emily can be very proud of this achievement
Each edition has an over arching theme, with “Cuppa” chosen for this one, a teasingly simple title that encourages subjects as varied as Billy Butlin’s cafe in the Telecom Tower, Melamine, Lewis’s Department Store in Liverpool, David Mellor’s cutlery and the Czech Pavilion from Expo 58. Anything really as long as it fits within a Twentieth Century modern architecture & design umbrella.
My piece was about one this countries most overlooked architects Patrick Gwynne, and his timeless extension to the Theatre Royal in York from 1968.
Each issue of the magazine has a limited print run, so if you’re interested in getting a copy (for the very reasonable price of £4.50) you can visit the Manchester Modernist website here…
Alternatively you can browse back issues which have already sold out here…
And finally, a big thanks to Stephen Cole for allowing me to use his photo of the Theatre.
Michael Wolf : Architecture of Density
A friend sent me a link to the work of Michael Wolf recently and having been lucky enough spend 10 days in Hong Kong a couple of years ago with my Little A, his images immediately struck a chord with me, as I took a number of very similar photos myself.
The density in Hong Kong really is something that’s difficult to grasp unless you’ve seen it for yourself. In one article I read, it suggested that there were well over 7 million people living on Hong Kong’s 1,108 square kilometers of land.
So housing this many people can only mean one thing… developing ever skywards, and as can be seen from the images below, this resulting in huge backdrops of steel, concrete and glass buildings where neither light nor anything organic are visible.
What I like about these images, and why I was moved to take similar ones myself, is the way that the buildings are reduced to nothing much more than wallpaper. As the mind struggles to comprehend the scale and endless repetition of the cityscape, it converts the individual homes into nothing more than shapes and colours.
I’m pretty sure however, that this would NOT be a good argument to describe or justify the quality of life in these developments, and I for one am very glad I don’t live there… (especially the very last photo, that really is hardcore urban living and pretty shocking…)
It’s definitely worth a visit to Michael Wolf’s site on the link above as there are some truly excellent photos of Hong Kong. Try the Window Watching, Backdoor and Lost Laundry collections for some really wonderful views of life in a super dense city…
Island for sale (includes a Frank Lloyd Wright house)… or does it?
If you have a spare $20 million dollars and are looking for a new home, you might be interested in this…
Petre Island is a heart shaped piece of land, approximately 11 acres in size that sits in Lake Mahopac, about 50 miles north of Manhattan and for your money you not only get the whole island, but your very own Frank Lloyd Wright House as well…
Sounds like a bargain, except not everything is exactly as it seems… The island, the price and its availability are all real enough, it’s the Frank Lloyd Wright house that seems to be the issue.
FLW did design a house for this island back in the 1950′s, when the owner asked for something that would surpass Wright’s most famous house, Falling Water (from 1937). Unfortunately the owner at the time couldn’t afford to build Wright’s vision, and so settled instead for a small cottage.
Roll forward to 1996 when the island was bought for £770,000 by a new owner who was determined to realise the original FLW scheme. He approached the FLW Foundation, and ended up suing them after they claimed copyright of the original designs and wanted to charge more than half what he had paid for the island to use them. The courts found in the new owners favour and with the help of an FLW expert and some 3D software, he set about converting the single finished floor plan, a perspective and a handful of elevations into a best interpretation of Wrights’s vision, claiming upon its completion in 2007, that it was “within two inches of Wright’s original design”
Except that not many people agreed with him. Without the great Frank Lloyd Wright (who died in 1959) to oversee the project and work up the details, the resultant 480sqm building, although impressive in some regards, appears lacking and a bit thin in many key areas…
The biggest issues seem to revolve around wrongly shaped roof lights, chimney tops and more tellingly the inclusion of the existing rocks and landscape into the design. A trademark of FLW’s approach, this usually resulted in dramatic juxtapositions where the natural met the man made.. and looking at the photos here, there does appear to be something amiss.
There’s just not the detail and quality you would expect of a Lloyd Wright house. Compare the following images, the first one is from Petre Island, the second two are from the place it was supposed to surpass, Falling Water. Do I need to say more? The lumpen blue walls with the stones stuck into them and the unadorned fire place at the end of the room are surely enough to agree with the critics… let alone the everyday paneled ceiling and overlong, uninspired banquette…
Still it’s easy to be critical and if I had $20 million dollars (and US residency of course) I would definitely be going for a nosey around…
You can find more on this story here and here if you’re interested.
Lebbeus Woods – A Visionary Architect
I’m rather late with this small tribute to an architect who was little known outside of the profession, and who sadly died at the end of October at the age of 72.
When I was at University in the late 80′s & early 90′s, I became rather obsessed with the work of Lebbeus Woods, an American architect and academic who had an amazing imagination that was luckily for us, coupled with an unbelievable talent for drawing.
I tried (like many others I guess) to copy his style and I borrowed his ideas for the basis of some of my projects, most notably this one with a series of faceted structures stuck to the side of the Post Office Tower. I soon realised however that despite my best efforts, my drawing and presentational ability were not up to the task, and so I had to be satisfied with buying his books and stroking the images that lay within…
And what wonderful images he could make.. flying, dynamic, structures rendered in layer upon layer of perfectly weighted pencil crayon lines, truly wonderful stuff…
Woods was unusual for an architect in that I don’t think he actually ever completed a building. In fact I think he only ever completed one physical project, a light sculpture that sits within a Steven Holl building in China, completed earlier this year. All his projects were almost always theoretical, often based around ideas of conflict and war and the resultant destruction and rebuilding of the cities fabric.
He was often described as a fantasist, producing work and imagery that would grace any decent sci-fi story. This was an accusation he always fought however, saying instead that his work was intended to invoke real architectural albeit one which was free of conventional limits, and lived by a different set of rules. One fine example of which would be his Einstein Tomb in which a structure travelles the universe along a single beam of light forever..
I will leave you with just a small selection of some of Lebbeus’s wonderful drawings, but if you would like to know more, Oliver Wainwright’s blog at the Guardian is a good place to start, as it gathers comments from some of his many students and contemporaries, all of whom hold him in very high esteem…
Patrick Vale – Empire State of Pen
This is a sickeningly enviable thing to be able to do…
I’m not sure how Patrick (who is a London based artist) is drawing this, by memory or from a photo on his computer maybe. He dosent even seem to pencil it out first.. just gets on and draws it..
From the Vimeo site it seems it took Vale “about 4/5 days on and off, shot on iPhone so had to export a lot of pics every half hour!”
An amazing achievement and undoubtedly a lovely thing… and for £345.00 you can even get a beautifully coloured version.. very nice indeed.
Suppose Design Office
Based in Hiroshima, Japan, SDO a small architecural and design practice formed by Makato Tanijiri in 2000, has produced some of the most intriguing and wonderful houses that I have seen for a long time.
Whilst not always the most traditionally “beautiful” of things from the outside, the internal spaces are more often than not something really special, demonstrating an enviable ability to manipulate seemingly tiny and unprepossesing plots of land into spacially impressive and practical (at least in Japanese terms) places to live.
Take this image of a house recently completed on a challangeing site next to the railway lines in Miyoshi, a town near Hiroshima
From the outside it appears to be grey box with no windows, oddly angled walls sitting on a plot of concrete. Not a great start you might think, but then look what happens on the inside. Top lit light wells invisible from the outside, flood the interiors with daylight, creating a series of interlinked spaces which, whilst undeniably contemporary in appearance, nevertheless create a warm and welcoming place to live.
There are many more examples of these amazing spatial conundrums on the SDO site with bigger and more legible photos, but here are some screen grabs to whet your appetite…
