A large tome on garden architecture and furniture led me to this delightful little folly, a chinoiserie Rococo aviary of curious provenance. My fascination is with the four small Ionic pavilions that make up the aviary proper, which are arranged to make up the eight sides of a single central octagon. Good stuff.
Let’s start with the detail this time, reading top to bottom: 1.) A shingled wall curves in to meet a stucco wall in a re-entrant corner. Square windows are cut from this, mullioned into the four-square, with small, beveled squares around. 2.) This shingle wall is the second story with a colonnade below, the stucco is an otherwise blank wall, with only one tall window cutting through the middle and terminating in a dormer at the roof. 3.) This tall window only hints at the circular interior volume behind, one side a stair, the other an entry. Other than that, no record of the two wall systems is traced on the interior, where only the radius of the curve exists. 4.) And just like that, we’re back at the detail again.
Lacking any particular program (that is, use), this courtyard structure plays on several ideas: the plan is neither a true double-courtyard, neither is it truly H-shaped (where the courts would be open on one side); one half of the project is more abstract modernist while the other is more expressly traditional; glass walls sit next to Classical colonnades; all the while the two side volumes are topped with that dormer I posted a few weeks back.
Driving along the coast through Laguna Beach, I noticed a funky little structure now operating as the offices for a small auto repair shop – it was clearly an old gas station, with the concrete pump pads still extant, which I’ve drawn in the top-most drawing. The fascinating bit was that the overall building was a gabled Spanish stucco hut, complete with a red tile roof and chimney, but the service awning was a flat modernist roof, and which cut deep into the gabled volume. The overlap and simultaneity of languages was so simple, irreverent, and playful. So I did my own variation: the plan is the bottom half of the top drawing, the half-elevations are below.
Stepping back to a previous topic, I’ll share an unbuilt Robert A. M. Stern project I stumbled upon a few months past titled simply ‘House in Cold Spring Harbor’ from 1985. The house in interesting for a few reasons: the formal entrance is off of a motor court on the secondary axis, and is below grade (the bottom sketch in the drawing above); a large square stair makes up the majority of the central volume, and is capped with an enormous north-facing monitor; there is a wonderful play between the formal portico-ed facade and the rear garden facade, which takes on a u-shape; a large chimney-piece makes up the east facade, though the flue is not centered on the entire building, rather a window. My own circular take on the central staircase follows.
A typical typology of Southern California, the bungalow court is typified by a series of low, one-story units arrayed around a small courtyard, all fit onto a single residential lot. Most often, the structures were fitted in the Spanish Colonial Revival, Moderne, or (less frequently) the Arts and Crafts styles. My interpretation favors a hybrid language of the Moderne with hints of Gill. After drawing a perfectly fine elevation, I couldn’t help myself but to fit out a delightful little tiempetto on the corner. . . working a bit of Michael Graves back into things – because, why not?
Yet another take on the theme, this time with a symmetrical wrapper, with studies on how the core might sit within the volume. The thought was to more directly synthesize Wright’s Usonian Houses with Mies’ 50X50 House. But more on those later.
Continuing yesterday’s Miesian Cheney (and derivatives), this example pulls its plan directly from Schinkel’s Neue Wache in Berlin, which I’ve drawn below.
So I took the Cheney house plan and put it on Mies’ module, replaced the central hearth with a modified Farnsworth core just to see what happened. Iterations ensued, and even Schinkel reared his head.
Keeping the Chicago theme, but moving a bit back in time, today I’ll feature some early Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly the Cheney House in nearby Oak Park. The plan is fascinating because it is an effectively square structure under a large hip roof, divided into two halves: the front is made up of three public rooms (nine square), while the back is broken into four bedrooms (four square), with servant spaces filling out the middle. The hearth is at the very center of the house, typical Wright. This basic parti (formal planimetric diagram) still fascinates me to this day – a simple form with a complex, yet brutally clear interior logic. The variations it inspired will follow over the coming days.
After a short weekend break, I’m back with a few loose ends of Mies that I stumbled on in my sketchbooks. Another take at Seagram (above) and Farnsworth (below), as well as an overlay of Schinkel’s Bauakademie (1836) and Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) both square, modular, structures in Berlin.
It’s been a long week of Mies, Mies, and yet more Mies. So here’s a bit of a respite from the daunting Modernism his work exemplifies: Karl Friedrich Schinkel. And yet, there’s something afoot – a link between Mies and Schinkel, which I am definitely not the first to make (see Kenneth Frampton and Thomas Beeby). But whatever the reason, take a little solace in the capitals, pilasters, and peristyles – if only for the now.
In contrast to yesterday’s post, I’m featuring Mies’ earliest work in the United States (and his first experimentation with the ‘revealed’ corner, where the exterior envelope is set off of the structural grid), classrooms at IIT, for which Mies also completed the masterplan. Here, the frame is still made up of wide flange steel sections, but with buff brick infill panels. The window systems are still solid steel bars welded together – the thermal break found in the aluminum and bronze curtainwall systems was still a long way off.
Today, I’m featuring the pinnacle of Mies’ urban tower typologies: the Seagram Building of 1958. The wide flange steel mullions on the Lake Shore Drive apartments are rendered in custom bronze extrusions, with thermal breaks at the windows, but all appearing as though they were constructed of arc-welded steel sections (as at the Farnsworth House). The glass curtainwall is brought proud of the structural column line, allowing the windows to be consistently sized throughout. A contemporaneous example in Toronto follows:
Continuing yesterday’s post, here are yet more of my year-plus studies of Mies van der Rohe’s mature works in details, plans, axonometric, etc.
While working in Chicago, I became painfully aware of how little I actually understood the mature work of Mies van der Rohe, especially with regard to his command of modules, structural regularity, and the finesse of his details. So I drew. I drew every one of his corners I could get my hands on – from the early simplicity of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments to the apex of complexity at the Seagram Building only some 10 years later. Over the next few days I’ll be overwhelming you with these drawings. Enjoy.
I’ve been fascinated with the impluvium for some time now – a large roughly cubic room with an inverted roof that is open to the sky at the center, an essential feature of the Roman domus house typology. This project places a large impluvium at its center, with modern courtyards and bedrooms flaking it, and more traditionally-scaled living spaces at the entry. Formal echoes of Irving Gill, H. H. Richardson, Richard Neutra, and Michael Graves abound.
Two outer walls are traditionally detailed, while the porticos between them take on an abstract formalist language. The cubic volume of the villa proper is more Mies-ian, and is topped with large shingled hip roof (with the dormer I featured yesterday), while a round stair tower sits on the other side of the far wall (alla John Hejduk’s ‘Wall House’ series).
In a final touch upon the last few posts here (this one, this one, and these two), I just up and slapped Richardson and Nervi on top of one another, aligning the square towers of each project, and highlighting the enormous piers (inner squares are from Trinity, the other ones are St. Mary).
Between reading a biography on H. H. Richardson and glancing through one of Michael Graves’ volumes, I thought up this little dormer – taken from the cantilevered round dormers found throughout Richardson’s work (and the Shingle Style at large), and met it with a perfect circular window (divided into nine lites, of course) such as Graves was wont to use, and made into a lantern of sorts, having windows on two sides. My documentation of Graves’ examples follows.
Where the previous project offered more of a synthesis between the modern and the classical in terms of style, this one poses a synthesis between types – structuring a basilica form with equal transepts, similar to a Greek cross.
This hybrid typology is not new, and can be found in early Christian churches, such as San Nazaro in Brolo or the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Stylistically, my interpretation takes cues from H. H. Richardson, with thick masonry walls, continuous cornice lines, and a large hip roof, which obscures the tower over the crossing from the outside. Below are earlier studies of a similar plan with much different attitudes towards envelope.
Looking through my sketchbooks, I stumbled across further drawings for the project I featured yesterday. These are studies of the tower, the interior pendentives (the triangular surfaces that mediate between the arches and the tower corners), and the apses themselves.
Taking cues from both the Nervi and Richardson projects, this church places a large tower campanile at the crossing. The circular geometries owe more to Trinity, but the glass corners and spatial fluidity are direct quotes of St. Mary. The tower transitions from a square at its base to a circle at the crown, paying homage to Nervi’s typical hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces.
Following Friday’s post on the High Modernist St. Mary of the Assumption, I present you with another Greek cross church plan, H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston. A large tower sits on on four enormous piers at the cubic volume of the crossing, which commands the entire sanctuary, where the apse, transept, and nave ‘arms’ are rather shallow.
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