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Philadelphia, fashion victim:

Last week I shared the disrespect of our city for its home-grown superstar, Aldo Giurgola. Recently the local press has gone gaga over the latest imposition on our city by today’s starchitects, Herzog and de Meuron. You will not find a disparaging review in the mainstream press of their Calder Museum, as that would admit that Philadelphia has been shafted. Self-indulgent famous architects have to subvert the status quo in order to justify their exalted status as geniuses. But the promise of the City Beautiful parkway was simply that the city’s cultural institutions could line up and face the parkway in a collective demonstration of the city’s cultural heritage and demonstration of a collective beauty. Paul Cret’s Rodin Museum is the simple demonstration of the power of that promise. Herzog and de Meuron have rejected that and instead substituted a garden instead of a building (1), and in the process have subjected Calder’s lightweight masterpieces to entombment in underground vaults. The most common image of the new museum shows how Calder’s sculptures are suffocatingly stuffed into oppressive underground rooms, with overhead beams that cut off your view (2). And this is supposed to be a museum for a rotating display of his work, not designed around a few permanent displays! The Calder mobile in the entrance hall of the PMA has room to breathe in contrast to the museum supposedly dedicated to his work (3). The Dia Beacon on the Hudson, an adaptive reuse of existing industrial buildings, shows how wide open generic spaces are best suited to the display of monumental modern sculpture that creates its own space (4, 5, 6). The great 20th century sculptor Donald Judd understood this, and sought out the generic buildings of an old army base in Marfa, Texas for the display of his own, minimalist, space creating sculptures (7,8).

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We at MY Architecture wish everyone a very happy, hot 250th Fourth of July!

Every year I am reminded of Aldo Giurgola's demolished Liberty Bell Pavilion, a victim of the total redesign of Independence Mall a few decades back. I came to Philadelphia to work for Aldo, my hero, the "co-leader," if you will, with Robert Venturi, of the "Philadelphia School." Of course, as seen in the third image, there was an ego boost involved for Aldo as his pavilion on the north and his Penn Mutual tower on the south framed Independence Hall. His museum on the west side of the mall was also demolished by WHYY - one is never respected in one's home town! Aldo was another god-like draftsman - a sketch of Penn Mutual is image number 6. The man himself at his Australian parliament building is 7. Another bit of the previous Independence Mall design that is long gone and missed was the garden on the north end by the great mid-century modern landscape architect, Dan Kiley. Image 8 stands in for that lost garden, but it is a similar plan of Kiley's that still exists at La Defense in Paris!

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Summer is here, time to slow down a bit. Have a great weekend!

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Putting together two recent threads illustrated by the work of Adolf Loos: the rustic villa in dramatic natural setting and bathrooms to die for!

I was in high school when Life Magazine published a spread on this getaway in the Ozarks designed by Fay Jones, possibly the best Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte. This might have been one of the factors in making me want to be an architect. The cabin is romantic and Wrightian, but it sits on a grotto-like basement with a shower like a naturally occurring underground spring. I was totally smitten.

Stoneflower is a small weekend cottage in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, designed by E. Fay Jones in 1965. The cottage is a single-story structure with a large stone base and a wooden upper level. The stone base is divided into two sections: a lower level that is partially below ground and an upper level that is partially above ground. The wooden upper level is divided into two rooms: a living room and a bedroom loft.

This 1 bedroom house is available for overnight stays!

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David Hockney is gone, one for the ages. Though delightfully and joyfully productive up to the end, his early works were mesmerizing. And he could draw like a god. His early career coincided with my years as an architecture/art student, and I have been enthralled ever since. Here are some drawings (and prints) from those years, along with one of the great paintings from those years. Good bye sir, and thank you!

David Hockney obituary: A genius in practically every medium

The proud Yorkshireman, who also painted iconic pictures of America, was routinely described as Britain's greatest artist.

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While on the topic of Adolf Loos and his often unusual buildings, I am reminded of another untypical, early work of his, from 1904, a gut renovation of an 1820's villa in Montreux, Switzerland. It contains the ultimate bathroom to die for! If anyone one out there would like such a room in their own dwelling, we would be happy to oblige! On the other hand, the Villa Karma was recently for sale, for an undisclosed sum, for those for whom price is no object.

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The early modern architect Adolf Loos, who famously wrote “Ornament is a Crime,” also had a romantic streak, not unlike Carlo Mollino (see last week). In 1930 Adolf Loos completed two buildings: the (famous, urban) Müller House in Prague and the (not famous, rural) Landhaus Khuner (Khuner Villa) in Payerbach, Austria – two designs that could not be more different in appearance. While the Müller House is defined by an austere white cubic aesthetic, the Landhaus Khuner, is rustic, with log-and-stone construction sheltered under a pitched roof. The Müller House is hailed as a masterpiece of early modern architecture, while concerning the Landhaus Khuner, in contrast, there has developed only a sort of hush. We need to re-examine the Landhaus Khuner in order to embrace a broader understanding of what really constitutes architecture for today. You can visit, because today the house is a restaurant (and the colors are original).

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Our pool house is not for sale, but you have a chance to buy Villa K2, Carlo Mollino’s modernist masterpiece on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, for a mere $2.2 Million!

The floating 1950s retreat retains many of the legendary Italian designer’s original interiors and custom furnishings (like the coat hooks in the last photo). Mollino, who became famous for blending surrealism, engineering, and sensual Italian modernism into his work, designed the property to feel almost suspended in nature. Built in 1953 in the village of Agra in Lombardy, the current owner’s great-grandfather, Luigi Cattaneo, commissioned midcentury Italian architect Carlo Mollino to design the stone-and-timber home as a holiday retreat. In addition to being an architect, Mollino was also a bon vivant, playboy, skier, interior designer, furniture designer and photographer of risqué Polaroids. (Not too risqué example at the end.) One of his best-known buildings is Turin’s Teatro Regio, with voluptuous red interiors, of which he oversaw the rebuilding in the late 1960s and early ’70s, decades after a fire destroyed the original theater.

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Nature, light and architecture. More of our pool pavilion for a suburban Philadelphia location.

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Filtered light is the best! Our pool pavilion in suburban Philadelphia compared to the apartment complex clubhouse we shared two weeks ago: both at home in their natural setting, the filtering of light reminding one of the dappled light that reaches the ground under the tree canopy. Soothing and life affirming.

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Home Sweet Home - Spring has sprung!

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"RUSTIC AND LIVED-IN":

Check out the MY Architecture spring newsletter:

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Skylights, yes! A conservatory is a tremendous addtion to a home at any scale, from a grouping of potted plants on a large window sill to a traditional skylit sunroom. Here is a current MY Architecture project for a conservatory addition that is a contempory interpretation of two sources of inspiration (the last two photos): a Victorian green house, in this case the Fernery at Morris Arboretum outside Philadelphia, and a traditional Japanese wooden bath.

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What is the connection between daylight and shopping? That, too, has ancient origins. Trajan's Markets in Rome of approximately 110 CE are considered to be the first multi-level shopping mall, though the upper levels could also have been offices (not unlike a contemporary indoor mall). The maze of a an Islamic Bazaar can only be lit from above. Jumping forward to the 19th century, the invention of the department store required new buildings with appropriate grandeur, to celebrate the glories of shopping. So immediately skylit central courts were created, starting in Paris, as shown here in a contemporary photo of the court at Printemps. Of course, here in Philadelphia we have Wannamakers, now unfortunately devoid of shoppers. The Fremont Street experience in Las Vegas, brings the street literally inside a suitably spectacular enclosure with a suitably Vegas light show. And now in Chengdu, PRC, the tradition of the enclosed shopping paradise continues in what is currently the world's largest building!

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The atrium traces its history back to the Roman domus, the upper class townhouse. The atrium was the open central court with enclosed rooms on all sides. In the middle of the atrium was the impluvium, a shallow pool sunken into the floor to catch rainwater from the roof. Paradoxically for us, the term in Latin came from atr, black, or dark. The atrium was a dark space. In the domus as in the Pantheon, the contrasting image of the sun moving across the relatively dark interior in the course of a day is a sort of sundial, keeping the movement of the heavens and the passage of time top of mind. What follows are some of my favorite mid 20th century atriums, all of which avoid cliched responses:

1. The House of Menander, Pompeii, 2. The Pantheon in an 18th C. painting, 3. The Guggenheim, FLlW, 4.The Ford Foundation, Roche and Dinkeloo, 5. Exeter library, Kahn, 6. The Thompson Center, Murphy Jahn, before its current evisceration by Google

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Skylights again... In our own work we jump at the chance to accept the sun into a building to support the goals of the owner. At 3737 Chestnut, a 25 story apartment building on land owned by the Epsicopal Cathedral of Philadelphia supported renovations to the historic building, added up-to-date support facililites, and will continue to support the mission of the church far into the future. A linear atrium creates a light filled zone that keeps the apartment building from touching the historic building, lets light into the stained glass windows on the south side of the church, provides needed handicapped access and links all of the disparate parts of church functions into one luminous, spiritually uplifting zone.

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Skylights and clerestories have been as important in modern architecture as that of the past of course, and not just in religious buildings. Every one of Frank Loyd Wright's buildings utilized light as a powerful aesthetic and emotive factor. Yet another of my favorite architecture pairs are the buildings Wright designed for Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr., the president of Johnson Wax, in Racine, Wisconson, not far north of Chicago. The Johnson Wax offices and research tower utilized miles of glass tubing to create a glowing translucent enclosure that peaks out through the lilypad concrete columns and curving brick forms. (Wright designed the offoice furniture, too.) Then Mr Johnson's home, Wingspread, spirals out from the spectacular domed living room, ringed by clerestories, which Wright called a "wigwam." A marvelous pair of buildings that seem almost to be in perpetual motion, bathed in light.