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© Liao Yusheng

Progressing from the International Style, Louis Kahn believed buildings should be monumental and spiritually inspiring. In his design for the Salk Institute, he was successful in creating the formal perfection and emotional expressions that he so vigourously tried to achieve. Kahn was commissioned to design the Salk Institute in 1959 by Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine. Salk’s vision included a facility with an inspiring environment for scientific research, and Kahn’s design decisions created a functional institutional building that also became an architectural masterpiece.

More on the Salk Institute after the break.

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© AIA

Hovering over the shores of Lake Michigan, the Douglas House was built by Richard Meier in 1971-1973 for Jim and Jean Douglas. The house is gently placed on a steep slope over the water, almost as if it is floating amongst the trees. As Meier stated about the house, “So steep is the slope to the water that the house appears to have been dropped into the site, a machine-crafted object that has landed in a natural world. The dramatic dialogue between the whiteness of the house and the primary blues and greens of the water, trees, and sky allows the house not only to assert its own presence but to enhance, by contrast, the beauty of its natural environment as well.”

More on the Douglas House after the break.

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© http://www.flickr.com/photos/72696783@N00/286614763/

The Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was one of the first glass International style office buildings in the United States. Located in midtown Manhattan, it was originally the American corporate headquarters of the soap company Lever Brothers. Built between 1951-1952, the Lever House extends 24 stories in height right across from Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, and stands as its own perfect glass box.

More on the Lever House after the break.

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© Archi-tectonics

Completed in 2004, the Greenwich Street Project by Archi-tectonics is a 64,000 square foot multi-unit residential building in New York just a few blocks from where the Hudson River meets the city. With the West Village to its north, SoHo, the heart of style to its West, and TriBeCa, where entrenpreneurship has transformed industry into lofts to its south, the Greenwich Street Project is the meeting point of three of downtown’s major cultural districts. Ironically enough, its design also involved the merging of an old renovated warehouse with a completely new structure, combining both to create appropriate live-work spaces that served its context.

More on Archi-tectonics Greenwich Street Project after the break.

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© Scott Francis

Part of the New York Five, architect Charles Gwathey designed the Gwathmey Residence and Studio for his parents in 1965. The house was located on a one-acre flat site on eastern Long Island, New York near the ocean surrounded by undeveloped land (this land was planned to be used for an addition to the house). As his first residential project, Gwathmey was given the freedom by his parents to have full control of the design as long as it was in their $35,000 budget.

More on the Gwathmey Residence and Studio after the break.

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© Michael Moran

Stretched upon three acres of land in the Hamptons in Long Island, New York, the Long Island Residence by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien is a quiet, serene home that blends in with the tranquility of nature that surrounds it. Also known as the Rifkind residence, Williams and Tsien designed the house for clients Robert, a lawyer, and Arleen Rifkind, a pharmacolegy professor, and their children. Due to their busy city lives in Manhatten, the Rifkinds wanted a weekend retreat where they could go with family and friends to relax and embrace the outdoors. Therefore the solution, in the words of Williams and Tsien, was “a house that is marked by quiet serenity, openess to the landscape, and a sense of spaciousness without monumentality.”

More on the Long Island Residence after the break. read more »

Swelling out towards the city of Manhattan, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was the last major project designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1943 until it opened to the public in 1959, six months after his death, making it one of his longest works in creation along with one of his most popular projects. Completely contrasting the strict Manhattan city grid, the organic curves of the museum are a familiar landmark for both art lovers, visitors, and pedestrians alike.

More on Wright’s Guggenheim Museum after the break. read more »

© Creative Commons - Photo Credit: Melody Kramer

Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, the Glass House by Philip Johnson, with its perfect proportions and its simplicity, is considered one of the first most brilliant works of modern architecture. Johnson built the 47-acre estate for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut. The house was the first of fourteen structures that the architect built on the property over a span of fifty years.

More on Johnson’s Glass House after the break. read more »

© Columbia University

Designed and built between 1908-1910, the Robie House for client Frederick C. Robie  and his family was one of Wright’s earlier projects. Influenced by the flat, expanisve prairie landscape of the American Midwest where he grew up, Wright’s work redefined American housing with the Prairie style home. According to Wright, “The prairie has a beauty of its own and we should recognize and accentuate this natural beauty, its quiet level. Hence, gently sloping roofs, low proportions, quiet sky lines, supressed heavy-set chimneys and sheltering overhangs, low terraces and out-reaching walls sequestering private gardens.”More on the Robie House after the break. read more »

© Hagen Stier - Crown Hall

More on the IIT Campus and Buildings after the break.

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© Robert Ruschak - Western Pennsylvania Conservancy

In Mill Run, Pennsylvania in the Bear Run Nature Reserve where a stream flows at 1298 feet above sea level and suddenly breaks to fall at 30 feet, Frank Lloyd Wright designed an extraordinary house known as Fallingwater that redefined the relationship between man, architecture, and nature. The house was built as a weekend home for owners Mr. Edgar Kaufmann, his wife, and their son, whom he developed a friendship with through their son who was studying at Wright’s school, the Taliesin Fellowship. The waterfall had been the family’s retreat for fifteen years and when they commissioned Wright to design the house they envisioned one across from the waterfall, so that they could have it in their view. Instead, Wright integrated the design of the house with the waterfall itself, placing it right on top of it to make it a part of the Kaufmanns’ lives.

More information, images, and a short video on Fallingwater after the break.

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Greg Robbins

 More on the Farnsworth House after the break. 

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A few months ago we reported on the restoration of Mies van der Rohe’s 860-880 Lake Shore Drive by Krueck & Sexton Architects, but still, taking a second look at this project is important to show its significance in the field of architecture. Built between 1949-1951, the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive towers by Mies van der Rohe are two iconic skyscrapers on the Chicago skyline that redefined highrise living for the post-war generation. The 26-story towers border Lake Michigan, giving residents a beautiful waterfront view. Mies’ reason for the scheme involved his concept that architecture should be independent of the site, and the towers did indeed follow their own rules by being the first step towards the industrialization of architecture.

More on 860-880 Lake Shore Drive after the break.

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Located in the heart of New York City, the Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe epitomizes elegance and the principles of modernism. The 38-story building on Park Avenue was Mies’ first attempt at tall office building construction. Mies’ solution set a standard for the modern skyscraper. The building became a monumental continuity of bronze and dark glass climbing up 515 feet to the top of the tower, juxtaposing the large granite surface of the plaza below.

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