Design Public

Just a quick note to let modern architecture fans in Atanta that the Modern Atlanta Home Tour is this weekend. I am told that most of the homes are within 6 miles of Midtown (except for the Serenbe houses in Palmetto, GA). This is good news for those of us who don’t like to use up gas going O.T.P.* I am really excited that the house pictured above is down my street.** I pass by it all the time and I’ve always wanted to check out the interior.

The tours will take place tomorrow and Sunday, from 11a.m.-4 p.m.. Tickets are $10 for students, $30 for a one-day pass and $50 for a two-day pass. You can purchase your tickets online, at the DWR store, and a few other places; click here for more information. Do note that if you purchase online, you still need to pick up your wristband and map beforehand, which is a bit of a pain for those of us who are spoiled by getting everything we want online all the time! However, just based on the three homes shown in this post, it seems worth the trip.

P.S. Buying a ticket also enters you to win this amazing Nais Chair by Alfredo Häberli, courtesy of Domus. Alright, I have to go buy my ticket and then use “The Secret” for the rest of the afternoon to make sure I win.

*O.T.P. - “Outside the Perimeter”: Those of us who live in the city fear going beyond the perimeter created by I-285, due to fear of traffic, endless stoplights, gated communities, and the proliferation of big box stores, among other things. I also fear going to Buckhead to get my ticket for fear of the extreme road rage that takes over my soul somewhere around the intersection of Piedmont and Sidney Marcus.

**Now if we could only get that Mockbee house two streets over on the tour next year, all of my nosy neighbor curiosities would be fully satisfied!

All photos from Modern Atlanta

Well, postage may be going up a penny soon, but it seems worth it just to be able to have this stamp. USPS is releasing an Eames stamp on June 17th. I haven’t been this giddy since the Frederick Law Olmsted stamps. I still have sheets and sheets of those somewhere that I can’t bear to use, along with the folk art stamps and the Noguchi stamps. It’s a good thing I do most of my mailing via the internet, since I can’t bear to use any of my stamps.

As you can see, each sheet has 16 different Eames images on it with the logo enlarged and in the middle. The composition is genius; I love the way they played with the rectangles and squares and how they relate to one another the way Charles and Ray would have done it (IMHO). I’m going to have to keep a sheet just to put in a frame.

It’s funny how I wind up trying to track down images online. I first caught wind of this in Metropolis, so I then tried to find the image at usps.com, but it’s too small and it sucked, so I Googled “Eames Stamp” and found that several other bloggers were hip to this news way before I was. I wound up checking out Happy Mundane and seeing their image, and from there linking over to flickr member eamesd’s image. By the way, eamesd’s flickr account is definitely worth spending some time perusing. So thanks to all of the above, and thanks to Metropolis, where I first heard the good news.

Thanks to Rhea for leaving the following information in the comments section of the post about Samuel Mockbee:

There is an exhibition called Southern Exposure: Contemporary Regional Architecture which features the work of the Rural Studio at the Virginia Center for Architecture through June 8. It features the Yancey Chapel as well as several other projects. The exhibition also highlights the work of other contemporary architects practicing in the Regional style, including Marlon Blackwell, Frank Harmon, W.G. Clark, and the firms of Lake|Flato and Mack Scogin Merril Elam Architects

On Thursday, May 1, 2008, Jason Coomes, a faculty member of the Rural Studio, discusses the ongoing work of the studio.

The Virginia Center for Architecture is located in Richmond, Virginia. If you’d like more information, please visit www.virginiaarchitecture.org.

Also, I found that Rural Studio has fantastic blogs that feature current projects.  Check them out here.

photos are from the Rural Studio blogs 

I’ve been meaning to tell you about this great book my Mom brought me as a hostess gift about a year ago. It’s a monograph of the work of Samuel ‘Sambo’ Mockbee, appropriately titled Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. I kept putting it off, because frankly, scanning stuff is a boring chore, plus, it’s really hard to pick just a few projects from this book. I doubt I can summarize it better than the book jacket:

For almost ten years, Samuel Mockbee, a recent MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, and his architecture students at Auburn University have been designing and building striking houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama’s Hale County. Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings in a style Mockbee describes as ‘contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture.’”

This is the first project from Sambo I remember seeing back in architecture school. It’s The Cardboard Pod and is made from baled sheets of corrugated wax-impregnated boards:This is the incredible Yancey Chapel, built around an existing rusted trough and constructed from 1000 dirt-filled used tires:This property near The Yancey Chapel is called The Goat House, a former shed for animals that Rural Studio originally planned as part of an artists’ colony. The colony never, um, colonized, and the building is now a residence. You see the Chapel aesthetic influence on the structure: (more…)

I just read about this project in Good Magazine. It’s called Re:Construction, and it’s a public art project spearheaded by the Alliance for Downtown NY in collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Here is the idea:

“Re:Construction channels the energy of Downtown’s rebuilding process by recasting construction sites as ‘canvases’ for innovative public art and architecture. This initiative comes at a time when Lower Manhattan is experiencing one of the largest public and private construction undertakings in the nation’s history. In response, Re:Construction bridges the efforts of multiple public partners and the creative community to both highlight and enliven the process of rebuilding while improving the quality of life in Lower Manhattan through the creation of places of attraction, curiosity and anticipation.”

Some of the pilot projects include Best Pedestrian Route by GRO Architects:

photo by Adam Kleinman

Tattfoo Tan’s Concrete Jungle, where the orange construction safety paint on jersey barriers has gone Dior:

(before)

(after)

photo by Tattfoo Tan

It’s interesting, obviously lots of graffiti and guerrilla artists have been taking advantage of these types of sites for a long time, and doing a great job. It will be interesting to see if the organized version can compete. Any time there is a chance to create art, I say go for it, whether through a bunch of red tape or illegally.

http://www.downtownny.com/news?nid=98

http://www.reconstructionnyc.org/

I received this notice from Flavorpill today and first of all I just LOVE Shana’s writing. What an clever paragraph. It’s so much better than the standard event announcement:

Steve Martin famously said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture; tonight at the Hammer, audiences finally get to see that idea (almost) in action, as unpredictable architect Frank Gehry has it out with Bard College president and renowned classical-music scholar/conductor Leon Botstein, who commissioned Gehry to design Bard’s performing-arts center in 1996. Expect an entertaining chat about the progressive relationship between architects and cultural institutions, how to deal with large-room acoustics, and what they really think of the new LACMA down the street. - Shana Nys Dambrot

This will be a free lecture this Sunday at 2:00 p.m. at The Hammer Museum in L.A and it should be fantastic. While in hot demand all over the world now, Frank Gehry has had his longest and most significant design relationship with L.A. over any other city. Furthermore, he has been crafting relationships between music and architecture for many years. He redesigned The Hollywood Bowl shell in 1970 and again in 1980, The Walt Disney Concert Hall in 1989, and The Experience Music Project in 1999. I’d love to know what he was listening to while designing each project. (more…)

 Who doesn’t love a firehouse? It seems they are truly en fuego right now as a trend.  Perhaps it started with this house, where the Ghostbusters had their headquarters:

Then there was The Real World: Boston, where a charming firehouse was renovated to house seven self-important, immature  strangers.  This was one cool renovation:

(more…)

A DP weekend tip for Bay Area folks: tour the 2008 Dwell Home in Mountain View! This is a great opportunity to check out an amazing prefab home and see numerous DP products firsthand.

If you are a member of the Trade (urban planners, landscape architects, interior designers, builders, developers, real estate professionals, etc), Thursday the 27th is reserved for you. To register, check out the Dwell NextHouse information.

Saturday, March 29th, and Sunday, March 30th, the home is open to the public (kids included!). Registration is required to attend the event. Tickets are $8 if you purchase tickets online or $10 the day of. (more…)

I was thinking about how famous Ken Smith has become in the years since I heard him speak at my school. I think I missed his visiting professorship with the fashion and landscape studio by about a year or two, which will always haunt me. However, my class was lucky enough to visit his office and take a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge with him in 1999. I remember the walls of his office were covered in bubble wrap and there was this strange gong music playing. We were drinking beers while Ken presented some of his work to us when my hilarious friend Lucia leaned over and whispered “this is my favorite song” to me and I about died trying not to bust out laughing. Anyway, I pulled out my Ken Smith book yesterday and his P.S. 19 dumpster planters brought a smile to my face. He is always coming up with creative ways to think about gardens, whether they are vertical, blooming from the pubic area (no, I am not kidding), involve chandeliers hanging over famous avenues, made out of light cones, providing specific aural and other sensory experiences, or are blooming from unexpected receptacles.

P.S. If anyone can find Ken Smith’s website, let me know so that I can provide a link. I can’t seem to find one anywhere, not even over on ASLA’s website. Thanks.

Photoshop by the offices of Ken Smith, Landscape Architect.

Photographs by Albert Vecerka. Both are from the book Ken Smith Landscape Architect Urban Projects.

Both sides of the Teardown Story: Tom and Gina talk to the owner of Philip Johnson’s Alice Ball House in New Canaan Connecticut.

Learn about Art2Heart via Leah over at More Ways to Waste Time. This is a fantastic art exchange program with underpriveleged children.

Nicole’s gettin’ ziggy with it over at the new site for Making it Lovely.

The Peak of Chic is giving us a peak peek into Diana Vreeland’s apartment. Is she the one who said to always take one thing off before leaving the house? I know I once heard the quote attributed to Ashley Judd, which I think is hilarious.

Judge Presidential Candidates by their Homes. Thanks Apartment Therapy L.A.! Huckabee (A) definitely wins the ugliest McMansion primary. To see who owns what, click here.

all photos go with sites linked to in the text.  I have no idea why everything is center-justified.  I keep clicking on left-justify, but it’s just not working out.  Sorry for the bad layout!