(Photo by flickr member wahlmic.)

If you live in the Southeastern United States and you’d like a good dose of Frank Lloyd Wright, The Rosenbaum House in Florence, Alabama is awaiting your visit. Designed by FLW and built in 1939 on a budget of $14,000, the house was in a terribly dilapidated state after Mrs. Rosenbaum, moved to a retirement home in 1999. The City of Florence stepped in, bought the property, and spent over $700,000 and several years painstakingly restoring it. Almost all of the furnishings are the original Wright-designed pieces that the Rosenbaums used for decades, and the house is now open to the public for tours. For information about visiting the only FLW Usonian house open to the public in the southeast, or to learn how to become a volunteer there, please visit wrightinalabama.com. There is also a great article about the history of the house and the restoration in Preservation.

Speaking of Preservation, if you are looking for worthy causes to donate to as the year comes to an end, consider donating to The National Trust for Historic Preservation. When you become a member, a subscription to Preservation is included and it’s a great magazine.

photo from flickr member alabama tourism department

photo from flickr member alabama tourism department

from flickr member Parker Anderson

Hmmm, Clearly I’m spending a lot of time on Apartment Therapy house tours this week. Basically, I pull up their site and go straight to the House Tours tab on the left. They have their their best tour ever up right now. It’s Alvar Aalto’s studio in Helsinki (it’s now the home of the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the Alvar Aalto Academy and the Alvar Aalto Museum Architectural Heritage). Way to go AT.

To see the full tour, click here. I highly recommend it!

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.