by Frank Escher Photos by Cameron Carothers In a booklet that client Kenneth Reiner and architect John Lautner published for tours conducted at an un-finished Silvertop in early 1960 (to raise funds for another collaboration of theirs, the Midtown School), one finds, among pages describing in great detail the many technical and structural innovations the visitors would encounter, this statement: a...
by Marc Atlan In 2008, I had the idea to search for a parcel of land in the high desert near the town of Joshua Tree, California, on which I could create a completely unique and radical hideaway. The contrast between the unspoiled, almost prehistoric landscape of the area and an avant-garde 21st century structure appealed to me. During my hunt for an appropriate plot, I met a real estate agent who...
by Jocelyn Gibbs Many houses evoke personal memories for current or former inhabitants. Some great houses, if they are recognized and preserved, become part of our collective memory for cultural and historical reasons. The William Ford house in Ojai, California, designed by Paul Revere Williams in 1929, is remarkable for its client, for its excellent design by a historically important architect, and for...
by Nicholas Olsberg American architects in the first years of the Twentieth Century were in desperate search for an end to what Joy Wheeler Dow called “the reign of terror” wrought by the grandiose, over-wrought and bombastic taste in building of the Gilded Age, with its deference to the chateaux and palaces of Europe. Calling, like many others, for an “American Renaissance’ that could uncover a...
The John A. Smith House La Habra Heights, California by Jocelyn Gibbs Cliff May (1908-1989), the designer and builder famous for popularizing the California ranch house, insisted that he “built just one kind of house, had just one style.” The persistence of his vision of what a house should be and how people should live, came from his pride in his family’s California heritage —he was related...
By Nicholas Olsberg Current Photographs by Tim Street-Porter “Frank Lloyd Wright . . . creates architecture as a plastic whole and perceives the new spiritual forces working in the inner being of the masses, in the abstract form.” — TH. Wijdeveld 1925 The Storer house is one of four homes, built at almost the same time, in experimental textured concrete block. They were an effort by Wright to...
Pierluigi Serraino, AIA Current Photographs by Cameron Carothers Behind great architecture there is always a great client. It is a known fact. The past ancient and recent is full of such examples. That kind of patronage is both rare and precious. Its scarcity is self-evident in the blighted built environment of our time. In fact, it takes concerted effort and sustained determination to transcend a list...
A New Dialogue Between Architecture and Nature By Crosby Doe In the still native countryside in Southern Catalonia outside of Barcelona in Spain, fresh and exciting concepts for living with nature are taking shape. Like the Houses at Sagaponack in New York, each of the proposed international vacation retreats, which range in size from 160 to 250 square meters, is designed by a different noted...
Why a marketplace for architecture? To quote none other than Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” And they not only shape us as individuals, but as a society as well. In the depths of the Great Depression William Lamb’s 102-story skyscraper, the Empire State Building, became an instant American cultural icon bolstering national pride, and a sense of possibility...
Marmol Radziner & James Turrell: Arrowhead By Nicholas Olsberg Photographs by Scott Mayoral Arrowhead is a luxury estate with a radical difference. It lies on the rugged edge of a ridge west of Las Vegas, dramatic views of the mountains behind it and a panoramic vista of the ever-changing city before it. Arrowhead stands as the prototype for a new type of suburban dwelling that lies more lightly on...
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