I was sad to hear of Lawrence Halprin’s passing on Sunday night. He was one of my favorite landscape architects. For eleven years, I lived in Charlottesville Virginia and was able to enjoy the Halprin-designed Downtown Mall. I could go on about his best-known projects, like Ghiradelli Square or the FDR Memorial, but my very favorite design of his is Lovejoy Plaza in Portland, OR, and a glance at his sketchbook pages tell you all you need to know about why his designs work so well. Without weighing us down with a bunch of archispeak gibberish, we can follow the idea from it’s initial contextual inspirations to the final product:

I should have known when I went to find a picture of Lovejoy Plaza on flickr that my favorite one would have been taken by Ken McCowen. To see more beautiful images of Halprin’s work taken by Ken, click here.

Halprin was that perfect combination of conscientious urban problem solver who understood natural processes. He did such an artful job of understanding the greater context of a place and bringing his interpretations of ecology into cities in an artful way. Lovejoy Park is a perfect example of this. He contributed so much to the American landscape; whether helping to heal the gash a freeway cut through a neighborhood in Seattle or protecting the land by leaving a soft footprint at Sea Ranch. He will be missed.

For more information on the Halprin Landscape Conservancy, click here.

• Sketches by Lawrence Halprin, via The Halprin Landscape Conservatory site.Click over there to see the rest of the project. P
• Photo by flickr member Ken McCowen

It got me thinking about my favorite vernacular architecture in the USA – our barns. As small farmers become scarcer and scarcer, these beautiful structures that dot the rural landscape are falling into ruin as well. If you are interested in helping to preserve America’s barns, check out The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Barn Again! effort.

photograph by flickr member im pastor rick

The funniest thing I read all week, well at first it was a guy saying he had ten cigarettes and coffee before this dance class, but then even funnier and so perfectly put was Douglas Coupland (you know, the artist who wrote Generation X) calling the current tear down house replacements in his neighborhood “Carmela Soprano meets Arts and Crafts.” That describes almost every new house in my historic neighborhood to a T.

Check out the full slideshow of Coupland’s home: The man has got an eye for primary colors and shapes like none I have ever seen. The pictures are much more clear and there are a few bonus ones online that were not in the print edition.

To learn more about spandex Sweaty Sunday dance class, click here.

To see great photos of Coupland’s interiors, click here.

photos by Martin Tessler for The New York Times.

I was so excited to see that New Canaan Connecticut is making great strides in preserving its inventory of modern homes (think The Ice Storm, The Harvard Five, modernhousenotes). The New York Times reports today that “Modern Homes Survey: New Canaan Connecticut” is now available online. Lose yourself in this site for hours, and hope that it will help with the McMansionizing of this iconic NYC bedroom community will cease.

I’ve mentioned them before, but my blogging friends Tom Anderson and Gina Frederico do a great job of keeping us up to date on the modern preservation movement in New Canaan at their blog, modernhousenotes. I’ve even seen their stories cribbed in major newspapers. Also, there will be an exhibition of New Canaan Architects and their work in the Town House all summer, put on by The New Canaan Historical Society.

photo above is The Smallen House by Hugh Smallen, one of my favorites, and was swiped from modernhomesurvey.org.

As many of you know, The Farnsworth House has suffered great damage from the latest round of flooding in September 2008. The house was built in a floodplain, but Mies thought the water would only reach the floor in the most severe of circumstances. Apparently, he was wrong. The Farnsworth House site asks for flood mitigation ideas, but they also include a “heard it” list, which had me in stitches. I just had to share it with you:

Before you get started though…

We have, over the course of our five years managing this property, continually investigated solutions to the threat posed by the river.  To that end, we begin this discussion with a list of previously proposed ideas:

1. Placement of a pontoons under the building
2. Longer column extensions that slide out of their footings
3. Szikorsky Helicopter to lift the 300 ton house
4. Hydraulic jacks to raise it in place
5. Building up the site flood plain by 12 ft.
6. Move the house to high ground
7. Retractable flood walls surrounding the house.
8. Waterproofing everything inside the house (vinyl upholstery, plastic laminate wood?)
9. Inflatable raft under the house
10. Internal sandbags around furniture and core
11. Dikes and dams
12. Moats
13. Fixed Moment Frame below the soil
14. Sandbags
15. Temporary flood walls
16. Reverse aquarium designed to rise out of the ground
17. Giant Zip lock bag
18. Steel waterproof shutters

When considering these ideas we evaluate them against the following criteria:
• Cost
• Sensitivity to Preservation Initiatives
• Practicality

These are the same criteria the experts will use in considering your ideas.

The problem for me in finding a solution is that the house is so connected to the site. Moving it changes everything; the planned vistas, the way it relates to the topography, the idea of the floating house in the floodplain. Then again, I’m trained as a landscape architect so I am very biased towards the relationship of built work to site. If you have any bright ideas that do not involve a Sikorsky helicopter or the world’s largest Zip-Lock bag (hey Zip-Lock, have I got a marketing idea for you…), click here to submit it. For some reason, “Rollin’ on a River” is going through my head and I’m picturing some sort of Transformer action happening with the house and a tall stacks riverboat…and now casinos are now entering my mind. Not good.

• All photos from farnsworthhouse.org. The photos on that site are stunning, go check out the gallery if you need some inspiration today.
• Second photo by Jon miller, Hedrich Blessing
• Third photo by Tigerhill Studio
• Fourth photo by LPCI

Here are a few articles/websites that caught my attention today I thought I would share with you:

1st Dibs is getting some Competition via Fyndes.com. Thanks to Decorno for the tipoff. Love this yellow vintage Steelcase sofa:

Historic Preservation is in jeopardy.

The Civil Rights Center in Atlanta will be green. Why it is downtown and not in the Old Fourth Ward baffles me – there seems to be enough room where they have torn down the projects. I think I’d rather pair my visit with The King Center than The World of Coke.

Some jerk stole Mr. Monster from a preschool.

Katie Brown is a thrifty and resourceful decorator. Here’s another fun interview with her from the Berkshire Eagle. Her website is chock full of how-to projects. I want to go to there…and move in:

Hop over to The New York Times for the full glorious slideshow, photographed by Phil Mansfield. I want to go to the Berkshires so badly right now after looking through his gorgeous shots of her enviable views and light and cozy house!

It’s rainy and gross here in Atlanta, which is good, since we’ve been a drought, but it’s the perfect day for looking through these

and to get some scanning done. I thought I’d share a few whacked out organic houses I spied in an old issue of H&G. The top one is my favorite. I think it’s in France, but now I’ve lost the page in a scanning frenzy:

This house seems like it’s for someone on ’shrooms who wants to live in a ’shroom:

These images brought to you by Blenko Glass:

Happy Weekend Everybody!

We already knew that the set directors of AMC’s Mad Men are geniuses. On this week’s episode called “Jet Set,” we find Don Draper in California in an amazing modern house in Palm Springs. Does anyone know which house this is? It was decorated to perfection – a white background, warm wood accents, colorful glass bottles and lamps, red womb chairs, a Saarinen tulip table, red foo dogs, modern paintings, funky screen walls, striped glassware, perfectly styled bookshelves, wall sculptures and light fixtures, an amazing pool area and even a light blue telephone. Here I sit late on a Sunday night taking pictures of my television set because the AMC.com gallery does not have any good shots of the locations and sets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hmmm, I was looking up an exhibit that looks cool so that I could link you over to it, and then I spied a picture of the redesigned Museum of Art and Design. I thought it was either (a) a really ugly building or (b) that I just wasn’t getting it, so I decided I’d do a blog post about it and see what you all thought. As I started digging around some more, I thought “how did I miss this???” In my defense, I live in Atlanta, but still! Turns out, the original building, built in 1964, was designed by Edward Durell Stone, and the new one has completely desecrated it. YIKES! How does a museum of design ruin a classic marble building in order to construct a structure that looks like an ugly plastic building blocks set? I just don’t get it. Can anyone help me see why anyone would do this? Is it uber-sustainable? Do the form and the facade fit into the context like a puzzle piece? Is the redesigned interior a million more times more stunning than the exterior? Does it spell out the world “Heil,” or is there an “EFH” which makes me think it’s E.F. Hutton’s headquarters?

It should be stated that one should not critique a building without experiencing it in person. There is no way to feel your own body in the space, truly understand the context of the site and the site itself without actually visiting. But one can tsk tsk a museum of design for not valuing an historic building, and sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. The redesign’s facade is fugly as hell, and my usually high regard for Manhattan’s dedication to preservation and for its architecture in general just went down a small notch. Oh well, at least it’s not a Trump building.

By the way, the upcoming exhibition called Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary looks really cool. It opens September 27.

Check out the transformation process here.

• photo 1 by David Heald via madmuseum.org.

• photo 2 by Eddie Hausner for The New York Times

Erik Johnson tipped me off to another unbelievable modern dream house that is currently on the market. It’s the Slayton house in Northwest D.C., and it is one of only three known stand-alone residences designed by I.M. Pei (apparently, he also designed an apartment for Steve Jobs in the early 1980s). If you have a heap of extra money lying around, or really really good credit, you can live in a house designed by the same person who designed The Pyramids of The Louvre and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.*

The house received landmark status from the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board, and is currently nominated for designation as an historic landmark from the National Register of Historic Places. For more information on the house, it has its very own website here.

*It’s funny, as I looked through Pritzker Prize winning Pei’s C.V., I was struck by how some of his big projects demonstrate exactly what went wrong with the whole bad idea of urban renewal, which was a big trend during a lot of his career (see Boston Government Center and then read some Jane Jacobs). Regardless, Pei remains one of the most revered architects of our time.

Is that Kate Moss on the wall? What’s the story with that rocket strainer thing on the kitchen counter? I’ve never seen that before, I totally dig it!

photos 1,3,4 from slaytonhouse.com

all other photos from Erik Johnson