Okay, I’m pushing it a bit here, since these are only birdhouses.
But they are such great examples of mid-century modern architecture.
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Okay, I’m pushing it a bit here, since these are only birdhouses.
But they are such great examples of mid-century modern architecture.
Minangkabau paddy houses, West Sumatra, Indonesia, 1950s
Casa Álvarez
Mexico City
1971 - 1975
Augustín Hernández
The Green Cape Hotel, Lake Balkhash, Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 1973
It should be obvious by now that I have a weakness for monumental neo-classicism.😎
Étienne-Louis Boullée's, Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (Second project for a Royal Library), 1785.
I have always been transfixed by the work of the French Visionary Architects of the Enlightenment. Let's start with Étienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton, 1784.
House of the Temple, Scottish Rite Masonic temple in Washington, D.C., United States, Architect, John Russell Pope, 1911-1915 A masterpiece by the last great practitioner of the American Renaissance.
Chichén Itzá
Mexico
I was transported by the brilliant TV production of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in the early '80s. The scene of Lord Marchmain's funeral procession approaching Hawksmoor's severe and somber Mausoleum at Castle Howard, (in Yorkshire, an estate Bill writes about visiting often), was one of the most influential images of my impending architectural career.
St George's Bloomsbury (1716–1731)
St. Mary, Woolnoth, 1716-23
To throw in some more, I was captivated the first time I saw images on Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches in London projected on a screen in a dark lecture hall. They were the first buildings I went to see went I first went to London. Christchurch, Spitalfields, 1714-29
A sad loss; not a brilliant building, but an interesting one and certainly evocative of a time when Modernity was somehting to look forward to rather than fear. I like the way idt addresses the corner. It's a good, though not contextual building.
And talking of Le Corbusier, there are a handful of modernist-style buildings (some with Art Deco features) scattered where I live in north Wales. They might not be masterpieces, but they stand out, situated in bland suburbs. Historical curiosities.
The local council has recently given approval to have one of them demolished, to make way for a faceless £££-spinning apartment "development". All too typical of modern councils, sadly. Anyone would think they were on the take.
Good to see this thread alive & kicking. I posted the following in another discussion back in May, but it's probably more suited to this thread:
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye sunk in Danish fjord. (This is actually an artwork - the artist said it was "a symbol of how the values of modernity have been swamped by technology." He was protesting against Brexit and the election of Trump, at the time, and commented that, "Every user has become his or her own media-platform, thereby allowing the targeting of specific information through the development of psychometric algorithms."). Not sure how that relates to a sunken scale model of a famous modernist building, but I like it!
I think every architecture student is awed the first time they see the drawings of Italian Futurist Antonio Sant Elia.
Grundtvigs Kirke, Copenhagen, Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, 1927-40
Rotonde de la Villette, Paris, Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, 1784-1788