© Maria Buszek

Most critics usually regard consistency in architecture an important aspect of the design. However in the Vanna Venturi House Robert Venturi took the road less travelled and tested complexity and contradiction in architecture, going against the norm. Located in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania on a flat site isolated by surrounding trees, Venturi designed and built the house for his mother between 1962 and 1964. In testing his beliefts on complexity and contradition (for which he also wrote the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture), Venturi went through six fully worked-out versions of the house which slowly became known as the first example of Postmodern architecture.

More on the Vanna Venturi House after the break. read more »

At an exhibit at the Gallery of Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, A1 Architects produced several new housing typologies.  In the sampling of 1:125 models, and one 1:1 model, the firm explored the idea of “limitless living in a limited space.”  The challenge lay in the ability to make a residence maintain a feeling of openness and functionality, while contained in a small size.  We enjoy the work because experimenting with this small housing typology is becoming imperative as our population continues to grow exponentially with land availability decreasing rapidly.

More about the homes after the break. read more »

Our friends at Inhabitat shared Patrick Nadeau‘s Wave House with us to enjoy.  Situated in Reims, France, the house features a new take on a green roof – a  cascading green surface that blankets the artificial to disguise it as a grassy hill.   While we enjoy the addition of any green roof, Nadeau’s approach of a roof that is integrated with the overall form of the house and is then blended into the larger landscape is a nice strategy.

More images and more about the home after the break. read more »

© Wikimedia - dDxc

Alvar Aalto designed the Baker House in 1946 while he was a professor at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, where the dormitory is located. It received its name in 1950, after the MIT’s Dean of Students Everett Moore Baker was killed in an airplane crash that year. The dormitory is a curving snake slithering on its site and reflects many of Aalto’s ideas of formal strategy, making it a dormitory that is both inhabited and studied by students from all over the world.  

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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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Atelier Christian de Portzamparc

Being awarded the Pritzker means you’ve hit it big.  Having that ribbon placed around your neck proves you’re top dog in the architecture world and you’ve practically become a household name….doesn’t it?  While that may seem that case for Gehry and Hadid, even Piano and Meier, the Pritzker’s seventeenth honoree, (France’s first laureate, in fact) Christian de Portzamparc sometimes feels forgotten. read more »

© 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 »

© 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 »

© 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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For their latest commission, Visiondivision addressed the extension of an 18th century cottage with their typical offbeat approach (check out their other projects previously featured on AD).  Abiding by the clients’ request for the house to blend in with the environment, particularly from the one side where the client’s conservative mother “has her cottage and watchful eyes”, the extension becomes a unobtrusive living space that is part of the earth, making it appear “almost invisible”.

More images and more about the extension after the break. read more »

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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A few days ago, we shared Forrest Fulton‘s Lace Hill proposal for Armenia, and tonight we share the firm’s idea for a retreat that creates two distinct meditative spaces through its relationships to the landscape.  A floating wooden deck and a small, dimly lit enclosure,which is sunken into the ground, intend to respond to one another as a way to “intensify a spiritual experience of the place.”

More about the retreat after the break. read more »

Manuel Márquez, an architect from San Luis de Potosí, Mexico shared with us “The Box Mix”, a two unit apartment building. You can see more images and architect’s description after the break. read more »

One of the most ambitious projects of Risco architects is the concept design for the new towers – Sky Residence II + Sky Businees – located in Luana Sky Center. Two towers with great programmatic diversity, aiming for high urban density and encouragemente of further developments around this so-called Sky Center, the future new town.

More images and architect’s description after the break. read more »

NL Architects‘ Blok K is part of a master plan for 500 dwellings in Amsterdam.  The site’s triangular shape sits between the historic center and the recently redeveloped harbor area.   The block measures 31 x 28 meters and is about 2.5 stories tall.   According to the guidelines established in the master plan, it was obligatory to build the first two stories in alignment and the third story had to contain 50% roof terrace.  The volume’s form is “redistributed” in an effort to push it as far away as possible from the adjacent volumes.  The roof’s strong diagonal stands as a bold contrast to the orthogonal grid.

More about the block and more images after the break. read more »

GLR Arquitectos‘ residence in Nuevo Leon, Mexico sits on higher topography than its neighboring houses.   This “privileged situation” provides the home with greater height, and as a result, better vistas toward the National Park of Chipinque.   The home is comprised of simple, pure geometric volumes that intend to evoke an image of lightness within a language of heavy and massive volumes.

More about the project after the break. read more »