Newport Beach, California, Sunday, October 16, 2011—Around 200 Southern Californians enjoyed an extremely rare opportunity today, to enter the avant-garde Rudolf Schindler Lovell Beach House (1926). The MAK Center for Art and Architecture sold $80 and $100 tickets to raise money for its operations—based in Schindler’s own “King’s Road” house in L.A.

Some walked past unaware

With other things to do.

Others had waited many years

Just to sneak a view.

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For Iwan Baan, Modernism is not merely the old adage that “form follows function,” nor is it an idealistic, uniquely Western European architectural vision that can be easily transported globally. Instead in his book, Brasilia – Chandigarh: Living with Modernity, Bann shows how fluidity dictates all things, from buildings to definitions.

Baan’s goal was to document the changes that have occurred to both architecture and master urban plans over the past 50 years in both cities. We decided to interview him on his expedition in Brasilia. He began by “researching Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture, the elements of Lucio Costa’s urban plan, yet also the history of the construction of the city.”

As he sees it, “At the advent of Modernity, utopic [sic] aspirations were at play, as well as notions that today we find preposterous. For example, the vast networks of roads were designed so that every person could have a car, which today we find so misguided.” Which leads to questions regarding what elements would be instrumental in shaping our cities in the future. Says Baan, “Urbanism in Africa is increasing at unprecedented rates. Ultimately studying cities like Brasilia and seeing where they work and where they didn’t can inform our future city planning.”

In fact, what Baan discovered was that some of the most resilient elements of the city were not part of any grand vision: “One of the most vibrant neighborhoods is in fact the housing that was quickly built for the vast numbers of construction workers. The housing is still there, some fifty years later, and the neighborhood has a much more intimate scale for living.”

It is this ability to see beyond the standard architecture photographic trope of glorifying built structures as paeans to man’s genius, that makes Baan’s photographs so interesting: Read more…

The Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York. The lower levels are being renovated.

The ancient Egyptians were the ur-preservationists, but I have always thought that there was something perverse about their method of immortalizing dead kings. The first part of the process, carried out by skilled professionals, was to extract all the internal organs of the Pharoah’s body—all the parts that we call “vital” for good reason, that enabled the man to walk, talk, eat, and think. These the embalmers put away in sealed jars. They then went to great lengths to swathe the hollow shell of a body so we can go stare at it in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Much like the Egyptian mummifiers, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) of New York gave the Manufaturer’s Hanover Trust Company building landmark status in 1997, but protected only its exterior. Read more…

Groups of 1950-ish Modernist buildings usually mean Corbusian-style autotopias of heroic proportions (New York’s Empire State Plaza in Albany comes to mind). Plymouth Circle on Madison, Wisconsin’s leafy west side proves the opposite. Here, perched above a sea of generic bi-levels is a collection of, can we say “nifty”, yet modest, Mid-Century Modern homes with a distinctively local pedigree. More than just a collection of rare houses, the neighborhood represents something almost existential: a decades-ago marriage of enlightened consumerism and environmental ethics. So is this suburbanism as it was always meant to be—light on the land, lighter still on the ranch dressing? Read more…

The Lumenhaus in Chicago.

VirginiaTech’s Lumenhaus – the solar-powered house that won the International Solar Decathlon in June 2010 – is now biding its time in a cornfield. Before you think that’s a step down from the South Promenade of Chicago’s Millenium Park – where it was proudly displayed in conjunction with the GreenBuild Convention in November – you should know that the cornfield is on the grounds of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois.

The Lumenhaus is the cutting edge of sustainable home design, using several advanced systems to generate and conserve energy. But as its name suggests, the basis of its design concept is the optimal use of light. The Farnsworth House was in fact its architectural inspiration, providing the template of the glass pavilion – facades that are open to the landscape, with the utilities collected at the core. Read more…

Cohen House, Siesta Key, Florida, Architect: Paul Rudolph. Photo: Ezra Stoller/Esto.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft—they all had their buildings “Stollerized.” To have one’s building photographed by Ezra Stoller was to practically ensure its place in the architectural canon, such was the power of the black and white images he created. Stoller worked in a way few architectural photographers before him had, waiting for days, watching the light move across the surface of a building, studying it deeply before he clicked the first photograph. The crisp and clear pictures that resulted made him the ideal photographer of the Modernist movement in the 50s and 60s. Read more…

It is going to be a while before Jean Nouvel’s celebrated National Museum of Qatar blossoms in the desert. But in the meanwhile, an architecturally modest museum with a far more ambitious mission is ready to open its doors for the New Year. The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art aims to be a new pan-Arab center for culture and creativity, showcasing the work of modern artists from the region.

The Mathaf, pronounced MAT-haff and simply meaning “museum” in Arabic, is the third large museum project to be announced in Qatar in recent years. The expansive Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008 in a building by I. M. Pei, is concerned with history – its collection dates from the 7th to the 19th centuries. Jean Nouvel’s desert rose will mostly be a Qatari exercise in national pride. The earliest pieces in the Mathaf’s collection, however, date to the 1840s. This is a museum primarily concerned with Arab modernity, considering through art some very complicated questions of identity, values and geography. Read more…

On November 18th George Ranalli will receive the prestigious Sidney L. Strauss Memorial Award for 2010, from the New York Society of Architects. Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College, Ranalli also practices architecture in New York City, where he grew up. Since 1950 the award has been given to such important figures in architecture and urbanism as Ada Louise Huxtable (1970), still the strongest and most thoughtful voice in architecture criticism (now at the Wall Street Journal); Robert Moses (1976), the powerbroker who built modern New York; and Robert A.M. Stern (2004) who was instrumental in making us aware of our rich architectural history (now dean of architecture at Yale). Knowing about George’s meticulous preparation for everything he does, his ethics, his interest in history, his love of craft, and his attachment to New York City—all of it somehow related to his commitment to Modernism—we wanted to know what he’s thinking as his big day of celebration nears.

 Susan S. Szenasy: So, George, in thinking about the amazing company you’ll keep as a Sidney L. Strauss Memorial Award recipient, as a long-standing architecture dean at City College, and as head of your own architecture practice, what goes through your mind as you make notes about your acceptance speech?

George Ranalli: I am very honored to be in such illustrious company. Although the past honorees do not fit into one ideology, they can variously be described as free spirits, visionaries, and pathfinders. That’s not bad company.

You are very kind to ask me what has been going through my mind these days. My mind has been filled with oscillations and analogies. In my own architectural practice and as the dean of a school of architecture, I continuously think about balancing innovation and stability, often on my walks to the office in Manhattan’s flower district. The place where I practice is in a loft building on a street filled with hustle and clamor. Merchandise spills from doorways, pots of trees line sidewalks. Trucks park in the middle of the streets, and dozens of workmen shout in different languages. The flower district reminds me every workday of a city that stays the same as much as it changes, and that balance is what I am always seeking to find in my work. Read more…

A conversation between an architect and his client, first in their youth and later in old age, sets up Carl Stein’s argument for Greening Modernism, a book just released by W. W. Norton.  While drinking wine and playing chess, the young client says to the architect, “We may not have a lot of money but we know how to live well.” Later, when both men have grown successful in wealth and circumstances, they sit and drink wine at the same table, again. This time the client says, “We may have a lot of money, but we [still] know how to live well.” Stein believes in a quality of life — and architecture — that’s dependent on a thoughtful, frugal consumption of natural resources.

He also believes that the quality of architecture was lost when Modernism got de-railed and forgot its original philosophy. Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier, he writes, would be “appalled at the notion that their work was connected by style rather than philosophy.” Modernism, after all, originally revolved around such ideas a Corbusier’s claim that a house should be a machine for living in — like an airplane, free of extraneous materials or parts. Stein believes that if Modernism had stayed with its philosophical tenets through the years, it would have landed firmly in sustainable, ecologically-aware design. Read more…

Design activism is on the rise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.

Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.

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