“If you were a son of mine, I wouldn’t want you to be an architect, because it’s a tough way to be in the world. Look, my son who graduated from law school three years ago makes more than I do after 40 years of working.”
- Peter Eisenman
Ooh, ouch.
Oh, gorgeous. Can you see this at the entry to some crowded public space, like the zoo, where people have to wait around outside for entrance?
I love seeing these kinds of projects come out of an area I consider an old stomping ground. Yay for contemporary design getting a foothold in Southern cities.
This is Vernacular Studio’s renovation of a 1000 SF bungalow in Raleigh’s Five Points area - it respects the historic frontal street presence but brings the family’s living space definitively into the present century in the back. More photos are in this slideshow, and the article is here.
Add VS to the list of firms I will apply to when I go back east!
Image by Mark Herboth
So I was browsing my weekly Residential Tuesday Digest and saw an article about IKEA Flat Pack houses that are currently in first phase construction in Britain. I must have missed the memo on the flat packs, so I did a Google search and turned up various images…to which I had some pretty strong reactions. I gather these are different versions in different locations (as they’ve been tested in Denmark and other countries already).
I’m always interested when modern residential design is featured in the south. Here’s an article about a renovation in Atlanta that took a 50’s brick ranch and converted it into a relatively contemporary home. I’m not crazy about the white and gray marble everywhere, but I do appreciate the sentiment and I think the exterior massing looks great. There’s a generous slideshow under “Related Links” on the lower left hand side of the page.
before
after
Almost can’t recognize it, can you?
Images by Allen Sullivan / Staff (AJC)
That is just about the prettiest surface I have ever seen. It looks like labradorite, my most favorite stone ever, doing 24/7 what it normally only does when the sun hits it just so.
Seen in: Making Dark Rooms Glow in NYT Home & Garden section
Image by Bonny Makarewicz
I’m loving this cottage renovation. Pictures! I bliss out on pictures.
Images by Roger Davies
Via Shelterific
“The causes of the malaise in the architectural profession may be traced back to education. Four weeks into first year and students are exposed to the barbarity of the review/crit/jury. Power, hormones, fear, vanity, genius, and individuality form a rich mix that sets the ethos for what is to come. Architectural education is still guided by the Victorian values of the (male) individual genius architect silently supplying aesthetic delights for rich patrons. The Rural Studio explicitly challenges these paradigms. It champions collaboration, communication, and process over product. It exposes students to a range of issues that they are sheltered from in normative architectural education — group working, social responsibility, lateral thinking, building skills, new ways of building procurement, sustainability, contingent creativity. But at the same time one should not get too misty-eyed and see it as a completely non-authoritarian structure. Mockbee and his successors are far from shrinking violets; one needs this overarching vision (and it is vision, not mindless control) to avoid the work descending to a level of worthy mediocrity, as so easily could have happened.”
- Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth, originally published in Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture, reprinted in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, (2007).
(via A Daily Dose of Architecture)
(image via www.cadc.auburn.edu)
That prominent front and center row of adult men sitting in line like a firing squad…*shudder*… Just remembering crits makes me break out in a cold sweat. When we finally did get female critics, they were just as snarky and rude as the men. Which is funny, because out in the ‘real’ world, I’ve never had a boss be as dismissive about an idea as a professor could be at a crit. What exactly was that trauma preparing us for? Other than baptism by fire into the cult of architecture?
