You are browsing the archives of 2007 November.

While the impracticalities of life in a glass box rendered the Farnsworth House an unlikely model for the mainstream housing market, the concept fascinated many architects. In 1949 Philip Johnson (b. 1906) began work on his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. In some ways, the Farnsworth and Johnson houses studies in contrast. Painted white [...]

In 1946, Mies van der Rohe designed a weekend retreat for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois, near Chicago. A number of architects including Richard Neutra and Buckminster Fuller had grappled with the practical problems of using metal-framed structural systems for domestic design but no one idealized the concept to the degree Mies did in [...]

Showroom, office, press box, or artist’s atelier - there are almost no restrictions to the variety of uses of the container module, Cocobello. The prototype which was presented for the first time at the biennale architecture exhibition in 2003 is a vision of the architect, Peter Haimerl, and defines the term mobility in a completely [...]

With the simultaneous appearance of Lever House in New York and the Unite in Marseilles, it had become obvious that the stylistic schism between Europe and the New World had entered a decisive phase. The issue of art or technology had divided the ideological basis of the modern movement, and the diverging styles apparent since [...]

b. St Petersburg (Leningrad), 1761;
d. St Petersburg, 1811.
Leading Russian Architect, the classicist of the early 19 century. Son of a minor admiralty official, Zakharov entered the preparatory school of the Academy of Arts in 1767, ultimately graduating from its Architecture School in 1782 with the gold medal. The prize took him to Paris for four [...]

Architecture has always been commonly regarded as one of the arts. Incorporating as it does the arts of both painting and sculpture, it has indeed been called the “mistress” art. But unlike the other arts it alone is useful in the ordinary sense of the word. Unlike pictures, poems, sculpture and music, it protects us [...]