PERSONALITIES IN ARCHITECTURE

AR 266B – History of Architecture 2

Arch. Eduardo B. LLedo

PERSONALITIES IN ARCHITECTURE

Bruce Alonzo Goff (June 8, 1904 – August 4, 1982) was an American architect.

Personal information

Name: Bruce Alonzo GoffNationality: AmericanBirth date : June 8, 1904(1904-06-08)Birth place : Alton, Kansas, U.S.Date of death : September 4, 1982 (aged 78)Place of death: Tyler, Texas, U.S.Work:Buildings Bavinger House Pavilion for Japanese Art

Ledbetter House

Born in Alton, Kansas, Goff was a child prodigy who apprenticed at the age of twelve to Rush, Endacott and Rush of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Goff became a partner with the firm in 1930. He is credited, along with his high-school art teacher Adah Robinson, with the design of Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in the United States.

Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (February 20, 1901 or 1902 – March 17, 1974)

Personal information

Nationality AmericanBirth date February 20, 1901(1901-02-20)Birth place Arensburg, Governorate of Estonia, Russian EmpireDate of death March 17, 1974 (aged 73)Place of death New York City, New YorkWorkBuildings Yale University Art Gallery Salk Institute

was a world-renowned architect of Estonian Jewish origin, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957. From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by ancient ruins, Kahn's

style tends to the monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled.

Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-Leib (Leiser-Itze) Schmuilowsky (Schmalowski), was born into a poor Jewish family in Kuressaare on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire. At age 3, he was badly burned on his face and hands in an accident involving a coal fire, while jumping over the bonfire on St John's Day; he carried these scars for the rest of his life.

In 1905, his family immigrated to the United States, fearing that his father would be recalled into the military during the Russo-Japanese War. His actual birth year may have been inaccurately recorded in the process of immigration. According to his son's documentary film in 2003 the family couldn't afford pencils but made their own charcoal sticks from burnt twigs so that Louis could earn a little money from drawings and later by playing piano to accompany silent movies. He became a naturalized citizen on May 15, 1914. His father changed their name in 1915.

Richard Buckminster Fuller, c. 1917. Born: July 12, 1895 Milton, Massachusetts, United States Died: July 1, 1983 (aged 87) Los Angeles, California, United States Occupation: Visionary, designer, architect, author, inventor Spouse(s): Anne Fuller Children: 2 Allegra Fuller Snyder and Alexandra who died in childbirth

Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome.

Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.

Works : GEODESIC DOMES

Paolo Soleri

Paolo Soleri (born June 21, 1919[1] ) is an Italian-American architect. He established Arcosanti and the educational Cosanti Foundation. Soleri is a lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National Design Award recipient in 2006.

Personal informationName: Paolo SoleriNationality: ItalianBirth date: June 21, 1919 (1919-06-21) (age 90)[1]Birth place: Turin, Italy[1]WorkBuildings: Cosanti

Projects : Arcosanti

Awards 2006 - Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for lifetime achievement

2000 - Leone d'oro at the Mostra di Architettura di Venezia (Venice Biennale of Architecture) for his lifelong achievement

1984 - Silver Medal of the Academie d' Architecture in Paris1981 - Gold Medal from the World Biennieal of Architecture in Sofia, Bulgaria

1963 - American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for Craftmanship

Frank Lloyd Wright

Nationality : AmericanBirth date: June 8, 1867(1867-06-08)Birth place: Date of death: April 9, 1959 (aged 91)Place of death: Phoenix, ArizonaWorkBuildings: Robie House Fallingwater

Johnson Wax BuildingSolomon R. Guggenheim MuseumTaliesin

Projects : Florida Southern College

Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 projects, which resulted in more than 500 completed works. Wright promoted organic architecture (exemplified by Fallingwater), was a leader of the Prairie School

movement of architecture (exemplified by the Robie House and the Westcott House), and developed the concept of the Usonian home (exemplified by the Rosenbaum

House). His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright

also often designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass.

Wright authored 20 books and many articles, and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for

the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio.

Already well-known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time".

Falling Water Robie House

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

FRANK GEHRY

Personal informationName: Frank Owen Gehry CC LLD (hc) PhD (hc) DEng (hc) DArch (hc) DA (CIA, hc) DA (RISD, hc) DA (OAI, hc)Nationality : Canadian, AmericanBirth date : February 28, 1929 (1929-02-28) (age 81)Birth place : Toronto, Ontario, CanadaWorkPractice: Gehry Partners, LLPBuildings : Guggenheim Museum, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry Residence,

Weisman Art Museum, Dancing House, Art Gallery of OntarioAwards : AIA Gold Medal

National Medal of ArtsOrder of CanadaPritzker Prize

Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry's services as a badge of distinction, beyond the product he delivers.

His best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spanish Basque Country, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Experience Music Project in Seattle, Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic and the MARTa Museum in Herford, Germany. However, it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture," a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years.

WORKS:

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain Walt Disney Concert Hall

Weisman Art Museum Dancing House

SIR NORMAN FOSTER

Personal informationName: The Lord Foster of Thames BankNationality: BritishBirth date: 1 June 1935 (1935-06-01) (age 74)Birth place: Stockport, Greater Manchester, EnglandWork:Practice: Foster + PartnersBuildings: 30 St Mary Axe, LondonWillis Faber and Dumas Headquarters, Ipswich

Wembley StadiumProjects: American Air Museum at the Imperial War Museum DuxfordAwards: Stirling Prize, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Minerva Medal, Prince of

Asturias Award

Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, OM, FRIBA, FCSD, RDI (born 1 June 1935) is a British architect whose company maintains an international design practice. He is Britain's most prolific builder of landmark office buildings. In 2009 Foster was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in the Arts category.

Foster was born in Reddish, Stockport, England, to a working-class family. He was naturally gifted and performed well at school and took an interest in architecture, particularly in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

Leaving school at 16, he worked in the Manchester City Treasurer's office before joining National Service in the Royal Air Force. After he was discharged, in 1956 Foster attended the University of Manchester's School of Architecture and City Planning (graduating in 1961). Later, he won the Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture, where he met former business partner Richard Rogers and earned his Master's degree. He then travelled in America for a year, returning to the UK in 1963 where he set up an architectural practice as Team 4 with Rogers and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Georgie (later Wolton) was the only one of the team that had passed her RIBA exams allowing them to set up in practice on their own. Team 4 quickly earned a reputation for high-tech industrial design.

WORKS:

30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) WembleyStadium

Torre Caja Madrid Reichstag dome GERMANY at night

Louis Henry Sullivan

Louis Henri Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called the "father of modernism." He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School.

WORKS: Wainwright Building

Biography

Louis Sullivan was born to an Irish-born father and a Swiss-born mother, both of whom had imigrated to the United States in the late 1840s. He grew up living with his grandmother in South Reading (now Wakefield), Massachusetts. Louis spent most of his childhood learning about nature while on his grandparent’s farm. In the later years of his primary education, his experiences varied quite a bit. He would spend a lot of time by himself wandering around Boston. He explored every street looking at the surrounding buildings. This was around the time when he developed his fascination with buildings and he decided he would one day become a structural engineer/architect. While attending high school Sullivan met Moses Woolson, whose teachings made a lasting impression on him, and nurtured him until his death. After graduating from high school, Sullivan studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan entered MIT at the age of sixteen. After one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go. At that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year. Renaissance art inspired Sullivan’s mind, and he was influenced to direct his architecture to emulating Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicating the styles of earlier periods. He returned to Chicago and began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for interior design of the Moody Tabernacle, which was completed by Sullivan.[2] In 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan; a year later, he became a partner in the firm. This marked the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years. And it was at this firm that Sullivan would deeply influence a young designer named Frank Lloyd Wright, who came to embrace Sullivan's designs and principles as the inspiration for his own work.

Prudential Building, also known as the Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894

Adler and Sullivan initially achieved fame as theater architects. While most of their theaters were in Chicago, their fame won commissions as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington (unbuilt). The culminating project of this phase of the firm's history was the 1889 Auditorium Building in Chicago, an extraordinary mixed-use building which included not only a 3000-seat theater, but also a hotel and office building. Adler and Sullivan reserved the top floor of the tower for their own office. After 1889 the

firm became known for their office buildings, particularly the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the 1899 Carson Pirie Scott Department Store on State Street in Chicago, Louis Sullivan is considered by many to be the first architect to fully imagine and realize a rich architectural vocabulary for a revolutionary new kind of building: the steel high-rise.

Sullivan and the steel high-rise

Prior to the late 19th century, the weight of a multistory building had to be supported principally by the strength of its walls. The taller the building, the more strain this placed on the lower sections of the building; since there were clear engineering limits to the weight such "load-bearing" walls could sustain, large designs meant massively thick walls on the ground floors, and definite limits on the building's height.

The development of cheap, versatile steel in the second half of the 19th century changed those rules. America was in the midst of rapid social and economic growth that made for great opportunities in architectural design. A much more urbanized society was forming and the society called out for new, larger buildings. The mass production of steel was the main driving force behind the ability to build skyscrapers during the mid 1880s. As seen with the data below the prices dropped significantly during this period.

Price of Steel at Bessemer Steel Rails from 1867-1895 ($/ton)

1867- $166; 1870- $107; 1875- $69; 1880- $68; 1885- $29; 1890- $32; 1895- $32

The people in Midwestern America felt less social pressure to conform to the ways and styles of the architectural past. By assembling a framework of steel girders, architects and builders could suddenly create tall, slender buildings with a strong and relatively delicate steel skeleton. The rest of the building's elements — the walls, floors, ceilings, and windows — were suspended from the steel, which carried the weight. This new way of constructing buildings, so-called "column-frame" construction, pushed them up rather than out. The steel weight-bearing frame allowed not just taller buildings, but permitted much larger windows, which meant more daylight reaching interior spaces. Interior walls became thinner, which created more usable floor space.

Chicago's Monadnock Building (which was not designed by Sullivan) straddles this remarkable moment of transition: the northern half of the building, finished in 1891, is of load-bearing construction, while the southern half, finished only two years later, is column-frame. (While experiments in this new technology were taking place in many cities, Chicago was the crucial laboratory. Industrial capital and civic pride drove a surge of new construction throughout the city's downtown in the wake of the 1871 fire.)

The technical limits of weight-bearing masonry had always imposed formal as well as structural constraints; those constraints were suddenly gone. None of the historical precedents were any help, and this new freedom created a kind of technical and stylistic crisis.

Sullivan was the first to cope with that crisis. He addressed it by embracing the changes that came with the steel frame, creating a grammar of form for the high rise (base, shaft, and pediment), simplifying the appearance of the building by breaking away from historical styles, using his own intricate flora designs, in vertical bands, to draw the eye upwards and emphasize the building's vertical form, and relating the shape of the building to its specific purpose. All this was revolutionary, appealingly honest, and commercially successful.

Louis Sullivan coined the phrase "form ever follows function," which, shortened to "form follows function," would become the great battle-cry of modernist architects. This credo, which placed the demands of practical use above aesthetics, would later be taken by influential designers to imply that decorative elements, which architects call "ornament," were superfluous in modern buildings. But Sullivan himself neither thought nor designed along such dogmatic lines during the peak of his career. Indeed, while his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and something like Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terra cotta, and ranging from organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage. Terra cotta is lighter and easier to work with than stone masonry. Sullivan used it in his architecture because it had a malleability that was appropriate for his ornament. Probably the most famous example is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson Pirie Scott store on South State Street. These ornaments, often executed by the talented younger draftsman in Sullivan's employ, would eventually become Sullivan's trademark; to students of architecture, they are his instantly-recognizable signature.

Another signature element of Sullivan's work is the massive, semi-circular arch. Sullivan employed such arches throughout his career — in shaping entrances, in framing windows, or as interior design.

All of these elements can be found in Sullivan's widely-admired Guaranty Building, which he designed while partnered with Adler. Completed in 1895, this office building in Buffalo, New York was visibly divided into three "zones" of design: a plain, wide-windowed base for the ground-level shops; the main office block, with vertical ribbons of masonry rising unimpeded across nine upper floors to emphasize the building's height; and an ornamented cornice perforated by round windows at the roof level, where the building's mechanical units (like the elevator motors) were housed. The cornice crawls with Sullivan's trademark Art Nouveau vines; each ground-floor entrance is topped by a semi-circular arch.

Because of Sullivan's remarkable accomplishments in design and construction at such a critical point in architectural history, he has sometimes been described as the "father" of the American skyscraper. In truth, many architects had been building skyscrapers before or contemporarily with Sullivan. Chicago itself was replete with extraordinary designers and builders in the late years of the 19th century, including Sullivan's partner Dankmar Adler, as well as Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root. Root was one of the builders of the Monadnock Building (see above). That and another Root design, the Masonic Temple Tower (both in Chicago), are cited by many as the originators of skyscraper aesthetics of bearing wall and column-frame construction respectively.

It may be that Sullivan's prominence in skyscraper history can be credited not only to his brilliance, but in some degree to the myth-making skills of his disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright, and to the impact of Sullivan's own book, The Autobiography of an Idea. He may also owe some of his legend to the tragic tint of his later years, which lend this great innovator's story a poignancy which has captured the imagination of student and historian alike.

Later career and declineIn 1890 Sullivan was one of the ten architects, five from the Eastern U.S. and five from the Western U.S., chosen to build a major structure for the "White City", the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Sullivan's massive Transportation Building and huge arched "Golden Door" stood out as the only forward-looking design in a sea of Beaux-Arts historical copies, and the only gorgeously multicolored facade in the White City. Sullivan and fair director Daniel Burnham were vocal about their displeasure with each other. Sullivan was later (1922) to claim that the fair set the course of American architecture back "for half a century from its date, if not longer."[3] His was the only building to receive extensive recognition outside America, receiving three medals from the Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs the following year.

Like all American architects, Adler and Sullivan saw a precipitous decline in their practice with the onset of the Panic of 1893. According to Charles Bebb, who was working in the office at that time, Adler borrowed money to try to keep employees on the payroll.[4] By 1894, however, in the face of continuing financial distress with no relief in sight, Adler and Sullivan dissolved their partnership. The Guaranty Building was considered the last major project of the firm.

By both temperament and connections, Adler had always been the one who brought in new business to the partnership, and after the rupture Sullivan received few large commissions after the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store. He went into a twenty-year-long financial and emotional decline, beset by a shortage of commissions, chronic financial problems and alcoholism. He obtained a few commissions for small-town Midwestern banks (see below), wrote books, and in 1922 appeared as a critic of Raymond Hood's winning entry for the Tribune Tower competition, a steel-frame tower dressed in Gothic stonework that Sullivan found a shameful piece of historicism. He and his former understudy Frank Lloyd Wright reconciled in time for Wright to help fund Sullivan's funeral after he died, poor and alone, in a Chicago hotel room on April 14, 1924. He left a wife and four children. A modest headstone marks his final resting spot in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. Only yards away from his resting-place, some of Chicago's lesser-known but much wealthier dead are entombed in handsome and distinctive tombs designed by Sullivan himself. A monument (shown) was later erected in Sullivan'sonor, a few feet from his headstone.

Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Sullivan's legacy is contradictory. Some consider him the first modernist. His forward-looking designs clearly anticipate some issues and solutions of Modernism. However, his embrace of ornament makes his contribution distinct from the Modern Movement that coalesced in the 1920s and became known as the "International Style." To experience Sullivan's built work is to experience the irresistible appeal of his incredible designs, the vertical bands on the Wainwright Building, the burst of welcoming Art Nouveau ironwork on the corner entrance of the Carson Pirie Scott store, the (lost) terra cotta griffins and porthole windows on the Union Trust building, the white angels of the Bayard Building. Except for some designs by his long time draftsman George Grant Elmslie, and the occasional tribute to Sullivan such as Schmidt, Garden & Martin's First National Bank in Pueblo, Colorado (built across the street from Adler and Sullivan's Pueblo Opera House), his style is unique. A visit to the preserved Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, now at The Art Institute of Chicago, is proof of the immediate and visceral power of the ornament that he used so selectively. Original drawings and other archival materials from Sullivan are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries in the Art Institute of Chicago and by the Drawings and Archives Department in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. Fragments of Sullivan buildings are also held in many fine art and design museums around the world.

Ludwig Mies van der RoheFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Personal informationName Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Nationality German 1886-1944/American 1944-1969Birth date March 27, 1886Birth place Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Date of death August 17, 1969 (aged 83)Place of death Chicago, Illinois, USA

Work

Buildings

Barcelona PavilionTugendhat HouseCrown HallFarnsworth House860-880 Lake Shore DriveSeagram BuildingNew National Gallery

Awards

Order Pour le Mérite (1959)Royal Gold Medal (1959)AIA Gold Medal (1960)Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to and addressed by his surname, Mies, by his colleagues, students, writers, and others.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of Modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential 20th century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones"

architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms "less is more" and "God is in the details".

Early Career

Mies worked in his father's stone-carving shop and at several local design firms before he moved to Berlin joining the office of interior designer Bruno Paul. He began his architectural career as an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1912, where he was exposed to the current design theories and to progressive German culture, working alongside Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Mies served as construction manager of the Embassy of the German Empire in Saint Petersburg under Behrens. His talent was quickly recognized and he soon began independent commissions, despite his lack of a formal college-level education. A physically imposing, deliberative, and reticent man, Ludwig Mies renamed himself as part of his rapid transformation from a tradesman's son to an architect working with Berlin's cultural elite, adding his mother's more impressive surname "van der Rohe". He began his independent professional career designing upper class homes in traditional Germanic domestic styles. He admired the broad proportions, regularity of rhythmic elements, attention to the relationship of the manmade to nature, and compositions using simple cubic volumes of the early 19th century Prussian Neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, while dismissing the eclectic and cluttered classical so common at the turn of the century as irrelevant to the modern zeitgeist.

Traditionalism to Modernism

Villa Tugendhat built in 1930 in Brno, in today's Czech Republic, for Fritz Tugendhat.

After World War I, Mies began, while still designing traditional neoclassical homes, a parallel experimental effort in. He joined his avant-garde peers in the long-running search for a new style for a new industrial age. The weak points of traditional styles had been under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for the application of historical styles to modern building types. Their mounting criticism of the historical styles gained substantial cultural credibility after the disaster of World War I, widely seen as a failure of the old order of imperial leadership of Europe. The classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited aristocratic system. Progressive thinkers called for a completely new architectural design process guided by rational problem-solving using modern materials, rather than the application of classical facades onto predetermined forms.

While continuing his traditional neoclassical design practice Mies began to develop visionary projects that, though mostly unbuilt, rocketed him to fame as a progressive architect. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic modernist debut with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstraße skyscraper in 1921, followed by a taller curved version in 1922 named the Glass Skyscraper. He continued with a series of pioneering projects, culminating in his two European masterworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition (often called the Barcelona Pavilion) in 1929 (a 1986 reconstruction is now built on the original site) and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, completed in 1930.

He worked with the progressive design magazine G which started in July 1923. He developed prominence as architectural director of the Werkbund, organizing the influential Weissenhof Estate prototype modernist housing exhibition. He was also one of the founders of the architectural association Der Ring. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus design school as their director of architecture, adopting and developing their functionalist application of simple geometric forms in the design of useful objects.

Like many other avant garde architects of the day, Mies based his own architectural theories and principles on his own personal re-combination of ideas developed by many other thinkers and designers who had pondered the the flaws of the traditional design styles.

Mies' modernist thinking was influenced by many of the design and art movements of the day. He selectively adopted theoretical ideas such as the aesthetic credos of Russian Constructivism with their ideology of "efficient" sculptural constructions using modern industrial materials. Mies found appeal in the use of simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space around and beyond interior walls expounded by the Dutch De Stijl group. In particular, the layering of functional sub-spaces within an overall space and the distinct articulation of parts as expressed by Gerrit Rietveld appealed to Mies.

The design theories of Adolf Loos found resonance with Mies, particularly the ideas of eradication of the superficial and unnecessary, substituting elaborate applied ornament with the straightforward display of rich materials and forms. Loos had famously declared, in the tongue-in-cheek humor of the day, that "ornament is a crime". Mies also admired his ideas about the nobility that could be found in the anonymity of modern life.

The bold work of American architects was greatly admired by European architects. Like other architects who viewed the Wasmuth Portfolio and its associated exhibit, Mies was enthralled with the free-flowing spaces of inter-connected rooms which encompass their outdoor surroundings as demonstrated by the open floor plans of the American Prairie Style work of Frank Lloyd Wright. American engineering structures were also held up to be exemplary of the beauty possible in functional construction.

Significance and meaning

Mies pursued an ambitious, lifelong mission to create not only a new architectural style, but also a new architectural language that could be used to represent the new era of technology and

production. He saw a need for an architecture expressive of and in harmony with his epoch, just as Gothic architecture was for an era of spiritualism. He applied a disciplined design process using rational thought to achieve his spiritual goals. He believed that the configuration and arrangement of every architectural element must contribute to a unified expression. The self-educated Mies painstakingly studied the great philosophers and thinkers of the past and of the day to enhance his own understanding of the character and essential qualities of the technological times he lived in. More than perhaps any other practising pioneer of modernism, Mies used philosophy as a basis for his work. Mies' architecture was created at a high level of abstraction, and his own generalized descriptions of his work intentionally leave much room for interpretation. Yet his buildings also seem very direct and simple when viewed in person.

Migration to the United States

Opportunities for commissions dwindled with the worldwide depression after 1929. In the early 1930s, Mies served briefly as the last Director of the faltering Bauhaus, at the request of his colleague and competitor Walter Gropius. After 1933, Nazi political pressure soon forced Mies to close the government-financed school. He built very little in these years (one built commission was Philip Johnson's New York apartment); his style was rejected by the Nazis as not "German" in character. Frustrated and unhappy, he left his homeland reluctantly in 1937 as he saw his opportunity for any future building commissions vanish, accepting a residential commission in Wyoming and then an offer to head an architectural school in Chicago.

Career in the United States

IBM Plaza, Chicago, Illinois

Mies settled in Chicago, Illinois where he was appointed as head of the architecture school at Chicago's Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology - IIT). One of the benefits of taking this position was that he would be commissioned to design the new

buildings and master plan for the campus. All his buildings still stand there, including Alumni Hall, the Chapel, and his masterpiece the S.R. Crown Hall, built as the home of IIT's School of Architecture. Crown Hall is widely regarded as Mies' finest work, the definition of Miesian architecture. In 1944, he became an American citizen, completing his severance from his native Germany. His 30 years as an American architect reflect a more structural, pure approach towards achieving his goal of a new architecture for the 20th Century. He focused his efforts on the idea of enclosing open and adaptable "universal" spaces with clearly arranged structural frameworks, featuring pre-manufactured steel shapes infilled with large sheets of glass. His early projects at the IIT campus and for developer Herb Greenwald opened the eyes of Americans to a style that seemed a natural progression of the almost forgotten 19th century Chicago School style. His architecture, with origins in the German Bauhaus and western European International Style became an accepted mode of building for American cultural and educational institutions, developers, public agencies, and large corporations.

The American Work

860–880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois.

Mies worked from his studio in downtown Chicago for his entire 31-year period in America. His significant projects in the U.S. include the residential towers of 860-880 Lake Shore Dr, the Federal Center, the Farnsworth House, Crown Hall and other structures at IIT, all in and around Chicago, and the Seagram Building in New York. These iconic works became the prototypes for his other projects.

The Farnsworth House

Main article: Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois)

Between 1946 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat outside Chicago for an independent professional woman, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Here, Mies explored the relationship between ourselves, our shelter, and nature. This small masterpiece showed the world that exposed industrial steel and glass were materials capable of creating architecture of great emotional impact. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies. The highly crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, letting nature and light envelop the interior space. A wood-panelled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art. The Farnsworth House and its 60-acre (240,000 m2) wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now operated by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois as a public museum. The influential building spawned hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The iconic Farnsworth House is considered among Mies's greatest works. The house is an embodiment of Mies' mature vision of modern architecture for the new technological age: a single unencumbered space within a minimal "skin and bones" framework, a clearly understandable arrangement of architectural parts. His ideas are stated with clarity and simplicity, using materials that are allowed to express their own individual character.

860-880 Lake Shore Drive

Main article: 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments

Mies then designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herb Greenwald (and his successor firms after his untimely death in a plane crash), the 860/880 and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with façades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Interestingly, Mies found their unit sizes too small for himself, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass enclosed lobby. The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired.

Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building

projects. The architecture of his towers appears to be similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other. He created, just as he did in his interiors, free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. Nature was included by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as they would in their pre-settlement environment.

The Seagram Building

Main article: Seagram Building

In 1958, Mies van der Rohe designed what is often regarded as the pinnacle of the modernist high-rise architecture, the Seagram Building in New York City. Mies was chosen by the daughter of the client, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, who has become a noted architectural figure and patron in her own right. The Seagram Building has become an icon of the growing power of that defining institution of the 20th century, the corporation. In a bold and innovative move, the architect chose to set the tower back from the property line to create a forecourt plaza and fountain on Park Avenue. Although now acclaimed and widely influential as an urban design feature, Mies had to convince Bronfman's bankers that a taller tower with significant "unused" open space at ground level would enhance the presence and prestige of the building. Mies' design included a bronze curtain wall with external H-shaped mullions that were exaggerated in depth beyond what is structurally necessary, touching off criticism by his detractors that Mies had committed Adolf Loos's "crime of ornamentation". Philip Johnson had a role in interior materials selections and he designed the sumptuous Four Seasons Restaurant which has endured un-remodeled to today. The Seagram Building is said to be an early example of the innovative "fast-track" construction process, where design documentation and construction are done concurrently.

Using the Seagram as a prototype, Mies' office designed a number of modern high-rise office towers, notably the Chicago Federal Center, which includes the Dirksen and Kluczynski Federal Buildings and Post Office (1959) and the IBM Plaza in Chicago, the Westmount Square in Montreal and the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967. Each project applies the prototype rectangular form on stilts and ever-more refined enclosure wall systems, but each creates a unique set of exterior spaces that are an essential aspect of his creative efforts.

TD Centre towers frame CN Tower in Toronto.

During 1951-1952, Mies' designed the steel, glass and brick McCormick House, located in Elmhurst, Illinois (15 miles west of the Chicago Loop), for real-estate developer Robert Hall McCormick, Jr. A one story adaptation of the exterior curtain wall of his famous 860-880 Lake Shore Drive towers, it served as a prototype for an unbuilt series of speculative houses to be constructed in Melrose Park, Illinois. The house has been moved and reconfigured as a part of the public Elmhurst Art Museum.

The National Gallery

Mies's last work was the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum, the New National Gallery, in Berlin. Considered one of the most perfect statements of his architectural approach, the upper pavilion is a precise composition of monumental steel columns and a cantilevered (overhanging) roof plane with a glass enclosure. The simple square glass pavilion is a powerful expression of his ideas about flexible interior space, defined by transparent walls and supported by an external structural frame. The glass pavilion is a relatively small portion of the overall building, serving as a symbolic architectural entry point and monumental gallery for larger scale art. A large podium building below the pavilion accommodates most of the buildings actual built area in more functional spaces for galleries, support and utilitarian rooms.

The campus of Whitney Young High School and the adjacent Chicago Police Academy are two examples of the influence van der Rohe had on Chicago architecture.

Furniture

Mies designed modern furniture pieces using new industrial technologies that have become popular classics, such as the Barcelona chair and table, the Brno chair, and the Tugendhat chair. His furniture is known for fine craftsmanship, a mix of traditional luxurious fabrics like leather combined with modern chrome frames, and a distinct separation of the supporting structure and the supported surfaces, often employing cantilevers to enhance the feeling of lightness created by delicate structural frames. During this period, he collaborated closely with interior designer and companion Lilly Reich.

Mies as Educator

Mies played a significant role as an educator, believing his architectural language could be learned, then applied to design any type of modern building. He worked personally and intensively on prototype solutions, and then allowed his students, both in school and his office, to develop derivative solutions for specific projects under his guidance. Some of Mies' curriculum is still put in practice in the first and second year programs at IIT, for example the excruciating drafting of bricks in second year. But when none was able to match the genius and poetic quality of his own work, he agonized about where his educational method had gone wrong.

Mies placed great importance on education of architects who could carry on his design principles. He devoted a great deal of time and effort leading the architecture program at IIT. Mies served on the initial Advisory Board of the Graham Foundation in Chicago. His own practice was based on intensive personal involvement in design efforts to create prototype solutions for building types (860 Lake Shore Dr, the Farnsworth, Seagram, S.R. Crown Hall, The New National Gallery), then allowing his studio designers to develop derivative buildings under his supervision. Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan and two partners led the firm after he died in 1969. Lohan, who had collaborated with Mies on the New National Gallery, continued with existing projects but soon led the firm on his own independent path. Other disciples continued his teachings for a few years, notably Gene Summers, David Haid, Myron Goldsmith, Jacques Brownson, and other architects at the firms of C.F. Murphy and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

But while Mies' work had enormous influence and critical recognition, his approach failed to sustain a creative force as a style after his death and was eclipsed by the new wave of Post Modernism by the 1980s. He had hoped his architecture would serve as a universal model that could be easily imitated, but the aesthetic power of his best buildings proved impossible to match, instead resulting mostly in drab and uninspired structures. The failure of his followers to meet his high standard may have contributed to demise of Modernism and the rise of new competing design theories, notably Postmodernism.

Death

Mies van der Rohe's grave marker in Graceland Cemetery

German commemorative stamp marking 100 years since Mies's birth

Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies developed and built his vision of a monumental "skin and bones" architecture that reflected his goal to provide the individual a place to fulfil himself in the modern era. Mies sought to create free and open spaces, enclosed within a structural order with minimal presence. Mies van der Rohe died on August 17, 1969. After cremation,[citation needed] his ashes were buried near Chicago's other famous architects in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. His grave is marked by a simple black slab of granite and a large Honey locust tree.

Archives

The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive, an administratively independent section of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design, was established in 1968 by the Museum's trustees. It was founded in response to the architect's desire to bequeath his entire work to the Museum. The Archive consists of about nineteen thousand drawings and prints, one thousand of which are by the designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885–1947), Mies van der Rohe's close collaborator from 1927 to 1937; of written documents (primarily, the business correspondence) covering nearly the entire career of the architect; of photographs of buildings, models, and furniture; and of audiotapes, books, and periodicals.

Archival materials are also held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Collection, 1929-1969 (bulk 1948-1960) includes correspondence, articles, and materials related to his association with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe/Metropolitan Structures Collection, 1961–1969, includes scrapbooks and photographs documenting Chicago projects.

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius (circa 1920). Photo by Louis Held.

Personal informationName Walter Adolph Gropius

Nationality German / AmericanBirth date May 18, 1883Birth place Berlin, Germany

Date of death July 5, 1969 (aged 86)

Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts

Work

Practice

Peter Behrens (1908–1910)

The Architects' Collaborative (1945–1969)

Buildings

Fagus Factory

Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition (1914)BauhausVillage CollegeGropius HouseHarvard Graduate CenterUniversity of BaghdadJohn F. Kennedy Federal Office BuildingPan Am BuildingInterbauWayland High SchoolEmbassy of the United States in Athens

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Early life

Bauhaus (built 1925–1926) in Dessau, Germany.

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise (Ilse) Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.

Early career

Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.

In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period: the Faguswerk in Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe last factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade, the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted Gropius's grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930.[ Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed.

Bauhaus period

Gropius's career advanced in the postwar period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation for Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty that included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. One example was the armchair F 51, designed for the Bauhaus's directors room in 1920 - nowadays a re-edition in the market, manufactured by the German company TECTA/Lauenfoerde.

1921, Walter Gropius's Monument to the March Dead

In 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym "Mass." Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead," designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.

In 1923, Gropius, aided by Gareth Steele, designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th-century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from Bauhaus. He also designed large-scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau in 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement, including a contribution to the Siemensstadt project in Berlin.

After Bauhaus

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States.

The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US but Gropius disliked the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate".

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.

In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.

Important buildings

Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts

1910–1911 the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany 1914 Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany 1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition 1925–1932 Bauhaus School and Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany 1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England 1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA 1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania,

USA

1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative)[5]

1945–1959 Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA - Master planned 37-acre site and led the design for at least 8 of the approx. 28 buildings.[citation needed]

1957–1960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq 1963–1966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School, 1958–1963 Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), New York, with Pietro

Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons 1957 Interbau Apartment blocks, Hansaviertel, Berlin, Germany, with The Architects'

Collaborative and Wils Ebert 1960 Temple Oheb Shalom (Baltimore, Maryland) 1960 the Gropiusstadt building complex, Berlin, Germany 1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA 1959–1961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative

and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios) 1967– 69 Tower East Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius' last major project.

The building in Niederkirchnerstraße, Berlin, known as the Gropius-Haus is named for Gropius' great-uncle, Martin Gropius, and is not associated with Bauhaus.

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-GrisLe Corbusier

Personal information

NameCharles-Édouard Jeanneret-GrisLe Corbusier

Nationality Swiss / FrenchBirth date October 6, 1887Birth place La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland

Date of death August 27, 1965 (aged 77)Place of death Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

Work

BuildingsVilla Savoye, FranceNotre Dame du Haut, FranceBuildings in Chandigarh, India

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International style. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in his 30s.

He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. Later commentators have criticized Le Corbusier's monoliths as soulless and expressive of his arrogance in pioneering his form of architecture.

His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, and one each in North and South America. He was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer, and modern furniture designer.

Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s, deriving it in part from the name of a distant ancestor, "Lecorbésier." In the absence of a first name, some have suggested it suggests "a physical force as much as a human being," and brings to mind the French verb courber, to bend.

He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1961.

WORKS:

Sweet House Le Corbusier Chapel

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto with wife Aino

Personal informationName Alvar Aalto

Nationality FinnishBirth date February 3, 1898Birth place Kuortane, Finland

Date of death May 11, 1976 (aged 78)Place of death Helsinki, Finland

Work

Buildings

Paimio SanatoriumViipuri LibraryVilla MaireaBaker HouseFinlandia Hall

Projects Helsinki City Centre

DesignSavoy VasePaimio Chair

Awards RIBA Gold Medal

AIA Gold Medal

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (February 3 1898, Kuortane – May 11 1976, Helsinki) was a Finnish architect and designer, sometimes called the "Father of Modernism" in the nordic countries. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware. Aalto's early career runs in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the twentieth century and many of his clients were industrialists; among these were the Ahlström-Gullichsen family.

Biography

Life

Alvar Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland. His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land-surveyor and his mother, Selly (Selma) Matilda (née Hackstedt) was a post-mistress. When Aalto was 5 years old, the family moved to Alajärvi, and from there to Jyväskylä in Central Finland. Aalto studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum school, completing his basic education in 1916. In 1916 he then enrolled to study architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology, graduating in 1921.

In 1923 he returned to Jyväskylä, where he opened his first architectural office. The following year he married architect Aino Marsio. Their honeymoon journey to Italy sealed an intellectual bond with the culture of the Mediterranean region that was to remain important to Aalto for the rest of his life. Aalto moved his office to Turku in 1927, and started collaborating with architect Erik Bryggman. The office moved again in 1933 to Helsinki.

Alvar Aalto Studio, Helsinki (1954–56)

The Aaltos designed and built a joint house-office (1935–36) for themselves in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, but later (1954-56) had a purpose-built office built in the same neighbourhood. Aino and Alvar Aalto had 2 children, a daughter Johanna "Hanni" Alanen, born Aalto, 1925, and a son Hamilkar Aalto, 1928. In 1926 the young Aaltos designed and had built a summer cottage in Alajärvi, Villa Flora. Aino Aalto died of cancer in 1949. In 1952 Aalto married architect Elissa Mäkiniemi (died 1994), who had been working as an assistant in his office. In 1952 Aalto designed and had built a summer cottage, the so-called Experimental House, for himself and his

new wife in Muuratsalo in Central Finland. Alvar Aalto died on May 11, 1976, in Helsinki.

Auditorium of the Viipuri Municipal Library in the 1930s.

Career

Although he is sometimes regarded as among the first and most influential architects of Nordic modernism, a closer examination of the historical facts reveals that Aalto (while a pioneer in Finland) closely followed and had personal contacts with other pioneers in Sweden, in particular Gunnar Asplund and Sven Markelius. What they and many others of that generation in the Nordic countries had in common was that they started off from a classical education and were first designing in the so-called Nordic Classicism style –a style that had been a reaction to the previous dominant style of National Romanticism– before moving, in the late 1920s, towards Modernism.

Villa Mairea in Noormarkku.

In Aalto's case this shift is epitomised by the Viipuri Library (1927–35), which went through a transformation from an originally classical competition entry proposal to the completed high-modernist building. Yet his humanistic approach is in full evidence in the library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours, and undulating lines. Due to problems over financing and a change of site, the Viipuri Library project lasted eight years, and during that same time he also designed the Turun Sanomat Building (1929–30) and Paimio Sanatorium (1929–33). Thus, the Turun Sanomat Building first heralded Aalto's move towards modernism, and this was then carried forward both in the Paimio Sanatorium and in the on-going design for the library. Although the Turun Sanomat Building and Paimio Sanatorium are comparatively pure modernist

works, they too carried the seeds of his questioning of such an orthodox modernist approach and a move to a more daring, synthetic attitude.

Detail of Baker House facade on the Charles River.

Aalto was a member of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), attending the second congress in Frankfurt in 1929 and the fourth congress in Athens in 1933, where he established a close friendship with László Moholy-Nagy and Sigfried Giedion. It was during this time that he followed closely the work of the main driving force behind the new modernism, Le Corbusier.

Auditorium of the University of Technology, Helsinki, Finland (1949-66).

It was not until the completion of the Paimio Sanatorium (1929) and Viipuri Library (1935) that Aalto first achieved world attention in architecture. His reputation grew in the USA following the critical reception of his design for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, described by Frank Lloyd Wright as a "work of genius". It could be said that Aalto's international reputation was sealed with his inclusion in the second edition of Sigfried Giedion's influential book on Modernist architecture, Space, Time and Architecture: The growth of a new tradition (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other Modernist architect, including Le Corbusier. In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion gave primacy to qualities that depart from direct functionality, such as mood, atmosphere, intensity of life and even 'national characteristics', declaring that "Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes".

House of Culture, Helsinki.

Aalto's early experiments with wood and his move away from a purist modernism would be tested in built form with the commission to design Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, the luxury home of the young industrialist couple Harry and Maire Gullichsen. It was Maire Gullichsen who acted as the main client, and she worked closely not only with Alvar but also Aino Aalto on the design, inspiring them to be more daring in their work. The original design was to include a private art gallery, but this was never built. The building forms a U-shape around a central inner "garden" the central feature of which is a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Adjacent to te pool is a sauna, executed in a rustic style, alluding to both Finnish and Japanese precedents. The design of the house is a synthesis of numerous stylistic influences, from traditional Finnish vernacular to purist modernism, as well as influences from English and Japanese architecture. While the house is clearly intended for a wealthy family, Aalto nevertheless argued that it was also an experiment that would prove useful in the design of mass housing.

Finlandia Hall (1962-71)

His increased fame led to offers and commissions outside Finland. In 1941 he accepted an invitation as a visiting professor to MIT, in USA. This was during the Second World War, and he involved his students in designing low-cost, small-scale housing for the reconstruction of war-torn Finland. While teaching at MIT, Aalto also designed the student dormitory, Baker House, completed in 1948. This building was the first building of Aalto's redbrick period. Originally used in Baker House to signify the Ivy league university tradition, on his return to Finland Aalto used it in a number of key buildings, in particular several of the buildings in the new Helsinki University of Technology campus, which began from 1950, Säynatsalo Town Hall (1952),

Helsinki Pensions Institute (1954), Helsinki House of Culture (1958), as well as his own summer house, the so-called Experimental House in Muuratsalo (1957).

Enso-Gutzeit HQ, Helsinki (1959-62).

The early 1960s and 1970s (up until his death in 1976) was marked by key works in Helsinki, in particular the huge town plan for the void in centre of Helsinki adjacent to Töölö Bay and the vast railway yards, and marked on the edges by significant buildings such as the National Museum and the main railway station, both by Eliel Saarinen. In his town plan Aalto proposed a line of separate marble-clad buildings fronting the bay which would house various cultural institutes including a concert hall, opera, museum of architecture and headquarters for the Finnish Academy. The scheme also extended into the Kamppi district with a series of tall office blocks. Aalto first presented his scheme in 1961, but it went through various modifications during the early 1960s. Only two fragements of the overall plan were ever realised, the Finlandia Hall concert hall (1976) fronting Töölö Bay and an office building in the Kamppi district for the Helsinki Electricity Company (1975). The Miesian form language of geometric grids employed in the buildings was also used by Aalto for other sites in Helsinki, including the Enso-Gutzeit building (1962), the Academic Bookstore (1962) and the SYP Bank building (1969).

The Aalto-Theater opera house in Essen, Germany.

Following Aalto's death in 1976 his office continued to operate, under the direction of his widow, Elissa. The office was involved in completing works already to some extent designed. These works include the Jyväskylä City Theatre and Essen Opera House.

Awards

Aalto's awards included the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects (1957) and the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (1963).

Works

Aalto's career spans the changes in style from (Nordic Classicism) to purist International Style Modernism to a more personal, synthetic and idiosyncratic Modernism. Aalto's wide field of design activity ranges from the large scale of city planning and architecture to interior design, furniture and glassware design and painting. It has been estimated that during his entire career Aalto designed over 500 individual buildings, approximately 300 of which were built, the vast majority of which are in Finland. He also has a few buildings in the USA, Germany, Italy, and France.

Aalto claimed that his paintings were not made as individual artworks but as part of his process of architectural design, and many of his small-scale "sculptural" experiments with wood led to later larger architectural details and forms. These experiments also led to a number of patents: for example, he invented a new form of laminated bent-plywood furniture in 1932. His experimental method had been influenced by his meetings with various members of the Bauhaus design school, especially László Moholy-Nagy, whom he first met in 1930. Aalto's furniture was exhibited in London in 1935, to great critical acclaim, and to cope with the consumer demand Aalto, together with his wife Aino, Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl founded the company Artek that same year. Aalto glassware (Aino as well as Alvar) is manufactured by Iittala.

Significant buildings

1921 – 1923: Bell tower of Kauhajärvi Church, Lapua, Finland 1924 – 1928: Municipal hospital, Alajärvi, Finland 1926 – 1929: Defence Corps Building, Jyväskylä, Finland 1927 – 1935: Municipal library, Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia) 1928 – 1929, 1930: Turun Sanomat newspaper offices, Turku, Finland 1928 – 1929: Paimio Sanatorium, Tuberculosis sanatorium and staff housing, Paimio,

Finland 1931: Central University Hospital, Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia) 1932: – Villa Tammekann, Tartu, Estonia 1934: Corso theatre, restaurant interior, Zürich, Switzerland 1936 – 1938: Ahlstrom Sunila Pulp Mill, Housing, and Town Plan, Kotka 1937 – 1939: Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland 1939: Finnish Pavilion, at the 1939 World's Fair 1947 – 1948: Baker House, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,

Massachusetts, USA 1949 – 1966: Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland 1949 – 1952: Säynätsalo Town Hall, 1949 competition, built 1952, Säynätsalo (now part

of Jyväskylä), Finland 1950 – 1957: Kansaneläkelaitos (National Pension Institution) office building, Helsinki,

Finland 1952 – 1958: House of Culture, Helsinki, Finland 1953: The Experimental House, Muuratsalo, Finland 1958 – 1987: Town centre, Seinäjoki, Finland 1958 – 1972: North Jutland Art Museum, Aalborg, Denmark 1959 – 1962: Enso-Gutzeit Headquarters, Helsinki, Finland

1962: Aalto-Hochhaus, Bremen, Germany 1965: Regional Library of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland 1962 – 1971: Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, Finland 1963 – 1965: Building for Västmanland-Dala nation, Uppsala, Sweden 1965 – 1968: Nordic House, Reykjavík, Iceland 1970: Mount Angel Abbey Library, Mt. Angel, Oregon, USA 1959 – 1988: Essen opera house, Essen, Germany

Furniture and glassware

Tea cart

Savoy Vase, 1936-1937.Chairs

1932: Paimio Chair 1933: Three-legged stacking Stool 60 1933: Four-legged Stool E60 1935-6: Armchair 404 (a/k/a/ Zebra Tank Chair) 1939: Armchair 406 Lamps

1954: Floor lamp A805 1959: Floor lamp A810

Vases

1936: Aalto Vase

Quotes

"God created paper for the

Santiago Calatrava Valls

Santiago Calatrava in the Auditorio de Tenerife.

Personal information

Nationality Spanish

Birth date 28 July 1951 (age 58)

Birth place Valencia, Spain

Education

Valencia Arts School

Valencia Architecture School

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Work

Engineering Discipline Structural engineer, Architect, Sculptor

Institution memberships Institution of Structural Engineers

Practice name Santiago Calatrava

Significant projects

Athens Olympic Sports Complex

Auditorio de Tenerife

Alamillo bridge

Chords Bridge

Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències

Significant Awards

AIA Gold Medal

IStructE Gold Medal

Eugene McDermott Award

Prince of Asturias Award

purpose of drawing architecture on it. Everything else is at least for me an abuse of paper." Alvar Aalto, Sketches, 1978, 104.

"We should work for simple, good, undecorated things" and he continues, "but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street." Alvar Aalto, speech in London 1957.

Memorials

Alvar Aalto portrayed on a stamp published in 1976.

Aalto has been commemorated in a number of ways:

Alvar Aalto is the eponym of the Alvar Aalto Medal, now considered one of world architecture’s most prestigious awards.

Aalto was featured in the 50 mk note in the last series of the Finnish markka (before its replacement by the Euro in 2002).

1998 marked the centenary anniversary of Aalto's birth. The occasion was marked in Finland not only by several books and exhibitions but also by the promotion of specially-bottled red and white Aalto Wine, and a specially-designed cup-cake.

In the year of his death, 1976, Aalto was commomorated on a Finnish postage stamp. Aalto University , a new Finnish university (an amalgamation of Helsinki University of

Technology, Helsinki School of Economics and TaiK) will be established in 2010, is named after Alvar Aalto.

Santiago Calatrava Valls (born 28 July 1951) is an internationally recognized and award-winning Valencian Spanish architect, sculptor and structural engineer whose principal office is in Zürich, Switzerland. Classed now among the elite designers of the world, he has offices in Zürich, Paris and Valencia.

Early life and education

Calatrava was born in Benimámet, an old municipality now integrated as an urban part of Valencia, Spain, where he pursued undergraduate studies at the Architecture School and Arts and Crafts School. Following graduation in 1975, he enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, for graduate work in civil engineering. In 1981, after completing his doctoral thesis, "On the Foldability of Space Frames", he started his architecture and engineering practice.

Career

Calatrava's early career was dedicated largely to bridges and train stations, whose designs elevated the status of civil engineering projects to new heights. His Montjuic Communications Tower in Barcelona, Spain (1991) in the heart of the 1992 Olympic site was a turning point in his career, leading to a wide range of commissions. The Quadracci Pavilion (2001) of the Milwaukee Art Museum was his first building in the US. Calatrava’s entry into high-rise design began with an innovative 54-story-high twisting tower called Turning Torso (2005), located in Malmö, Sweden.

Calatrava is currently designing the future train station - World Trade Center Transportation Hub - at the rebuilt World Trade Center in New York City.

Calatrava’s style has been heralded as bridging the division between structural engineering and architecture. In the projects, he continues a tradition of Spanish modernist engineering that includes Félix Candela and Antonio Gaudí. Nonetheless, his style is also very personal and derives from numerous studies of the human body and the natural world.

The Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

Recent projects

Puente del Alamillo at night, made for the Expo 92, Seville, (1992)

Auditorio de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

TGV train station in Liège, Belgium

Bahnhof Stadelhofen in Zürich.

One of his newest projects is a residential skyscraper named 80 South Street after its own address, composed of 10 townhouses in the shape of cubes stacked on top of one another. The townhouses move up a main beam and follow a ladder-like pattern, providing each townhouse with its own roof. The "townhouse in the sky" design has attracted a high profile clientele, willing to pay the hefty US$30 million for each cube. It is planned to be built in New York City's financial district facing the East River. As of 2008 this project had been canceled; the Manhattan real estate market had gone soft, and none of the ten multi-million dollar townhouses had been sold.

He has also designed the approved skyscraper, the Chicago Spire, in Chicago. Originally commissioned by Chicagoan Christopher Carley, Irish developer Garrett Kelleher purchased the building site for the project in July 2006 when Carley's financing plans fell through. Construction of the building began in August 2007 for completion in 2011. When completed, the Chicago Spire, at 2,000 feet tall, will be the tallest building in North America.

Calatrava has also designed three bridges that will eventually span the Trinity River in Dallas. Construction of the first bridge, named after donor Margaret Hunt Hill, has been repeatedly delayed due to high costs, a fact that has sparked much controversy and criticism. If and when completed, Dallas will join the Dutch county of Haarlemmermeer in having three Calatrava bridges.

Santiago Calatrava was also recently hired to design Peace Bridge, a 130m pedestrian bridge to span the Bow River in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The bridge will cost approximately $24.5 million. The project was approved by city council in early January 2009 and is scheduled for completion in fall 2010. Public disclosure of Peace Bridge was made on 28 July 2009 to the public and praised as a sleek, elegant contribution to downtown Calgary. The design showed a sleek, tubular, single span red and white trestle, offering separate pathways for cyclists and pedestrians. The bridge is expected to serve 5,000 pedestrians and cyclists daily.

On 16 June 2009, it was announced that Calatrava would be designing the first building of the new University of South Florida Polytechnic campus in Lakeland Florida. This will be his first work in the southeastern United States.

Calatrava as sculptor

Calatrava is also a prolific sculptor and painter, claiming that the practice of architecture combines all the arts into one. In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held an exhibition of his artistic work, entitled "Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture Into Architecture." Exhibitions of his work have also taken place in Germany, England, Spain, Italy and elsewhere.

Notable works

Completed

Trinity Bridge , footbridge over River Irwell, Salford, England 1995 Oberbaumbrücke , Berlin, Germany (1896) rebuilt and opened on 9 November 1994 Alameda Bridge and metro station, Valencia, Spain 1983-1984, Jakem Steel Warehouse, Munchwilen, Switzerland 1983-1985, Ernsting Warehouse, Coesfeld, Germany 1983-1988, Wohlen High School, Wohlen, Switzerland 1983-1990, Stadelhofen Railway Station, Zürich, Switzerland 1983-1989, Lucerne Station Hall, Lucerne, Switzerland 1984-1987, Bac de Roda Bridge, Barcelona, Spain 1984-1988, Barenmatte Community Center, Suhr, Switzerland, 1986-1987, Tabourettli Theater, Basel, Switzerland,

1987-1992, BCE Place (atrium), Toronto, Canada, 1989-1994, TGV Station , Lyon, France 1992, Puente del Alamillo, Seville, Spain 1992, Puente de Lusitania, Mérida, Spain 1992, Montjuic Communications Tower at the Olympic Ring, Barcelona, Spain 1992, World's Fair, Kuwaiti Pavilion, Seville, Spain 1994, Mimico Creek Bridge, Humber Bay Parks, Toronto, Ontario 1994-1997, Campo Volantin Footbridge, Bilbao, Spain 1996-2009, Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, Valencia, [Spain] View on the map 1996, Centro Internacional de Ferias y Congresos de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife

(Santa Cruz de Tenerife (province), Tenerife, Canary island, Spain) 1998, Gare do Oriente, Lisbon, Portugal 2000, New terminal at Bilbao Airport, Bilbao, Spain 2001, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. View on the map 2001, Puente de la Mujer, in the Puerto Madero barrio of Buenos Aires, Argentina 2003, James Joyce Bridge, bridge over River Liffey, Dublin, Ireland 2003, Auditorio de Tenerife, the architect’s first performing arts facility, Santa Cruz de

Tenerife, Spain 2004, redesign of Athens Olympic Sports Complex, Athens, Greece 2004, Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, Redding, California, USA 2004, Three bridges (called Harp, Cittern and Lute) spanning the main canal of the

Haarlemmermeer, Netherlands 2004, University of Zurich, "Bibliothekseinbau" library remodelling, Zürich, Switzerland 2005, The bridge connecting the Ovnat shopping mall and the Rabin Medical Center

(Beilinson) in Petah Tikva, Israel 2005, Turning Torso, Malmö, Sweden 2007, 3 Bridges on the A1 Motorway and TAV Railway, Reggio Emilia, Italy 2008, Chords Bridge at the entrance to Jerusalem, Israel, a light rail bridge 2008, Ponte della Costituzione footbridge from Piazzale Roma over the Grand Canal,

Venice, Italy 2009, Liège-Guillemins TGV Railway Station, Liège, Belgium 2009, Samuel Beckett Bridge, bridge over River Liffey, Dublin, Ireland

Auditorio de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

The interior of the BCE Place Galleria, Toronto, Canada (1992).

L'Umbracle at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia, Spain (1996).

Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, Valencia, Spain (1996).

Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (2001)

Gare do Oriente, Lisbon, Portugal (1998)

Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden (2005)

Chords Bridge for pedestrians and train in Jerusalem, Israel (2008)

Under construction/proposed

Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay in Redding, California.

World Trade Center Transportation Hub , New York City, U.S. Atlanta Symphony Center , Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos, Oviedo, Spain Chicago Spire , Chicago, U.S. Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge , Dallas, Texas, U.S. Medio Padana TAV Station, Reggio Emilia, Italy Maastricht University Campus, Maastricht, Netherlands Palma de Mallorca 's Opera, Spain High-rise buildings on stilts on the River Liffey in Dublin [1] Caja Madrid Obelisk , Madrid, Spain Peace Bridge , Calgary, Canada New railway station in Mons, Belgium Train Station and Two Bridges at Denver International Airport

Calatrava has also submitted designs for a number of notable projects which were eventually awarded to other designers, including the Reichstag in Berlin and the East London River Crossing.

Never built

1991 Collserola communications tower in Barcelona. A tower shaped like a big white spaceship was proposed, but Norman Foster ultimately designed the tower.

A campus building for Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His design was dropped for a less expensive design.[2]

New cathedral for the Diocese of Oakland, California, USA. Preliminary design dropped in favor of that by local architect Craig Hartman (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco).

New bridge across Cávado River, Barcelos, Portugal. It was dropped due to lack of funds. Substitute bridge (Wettstein Bridge) across Rhine River, Basel, Switzerland. It did not

pass the cantonal referendum. A less expensive (and arguably less innovative) bridge was built instead.

80 South Street , 835 foot tall stack of 10 condominium units on New York City's East River, starting at $27 Million each.

Recognition

Calatrava has received numerous recognitions. In 1988, he was awarded with the Fazlur Khan International Fellowship by the SOM Foundation.[4] In 1990, he received the "Médaille d´Argent de la Recherche et de la Technique", Paris. In 1992 he received the prestigious Gold Medal from the Institution of Structural Engineers. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major exhibition of his work called “Structure and Expression." In 1998 he was elected to become a member of "Les Arts et Lettres," in Paris. In 2004, he received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

In 2005, Calatrava was awarded the Eugene McDermott Award by the Council for the Arts of MIT. The Award is among the most esteemed arts awards in the US.

Awards

1979 August Perret Award 1992 London Institution of Structural Engineers Gold Medal 1993 Toronto Municipality Urban Design Award 1996 Gold Medal for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Granada Ministry of Culture 1999 Prince of Asturias Award in Arts 2000 Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Meadows School of

the Arts, Southern Methodist University 2005 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal 2006 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from the Council for the Arts at MIT,

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 2006 Honorary Engineering Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Designation as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos 2007 Honorary Engineering Degree from Columbia University 2007 Awarded with the Spanish National Architecture Award

Criticism

Calatrava's work in Bilbao has been criticized for impracticality. The airport lacks facilities and the bridge's glass tiles are prone to break and get slippery under the local weather.[6] In 2007, Calatrava sued Bilbao[7] for allowing Arata Isozaki to remove a bar from the bridge to connect it to the Isozaki Atea towers. The judge ruled against Calatrava, on the ground that, although the building design is protected by the intellectual property law, public safety is more important than intellectual property. In a 2009 appeal he received €30,000 in compensation. The Isozaki joint has been cited as bold and destructive.

Calatrava gifted the Municipality of Venice with the project of a new bridge on the "Canal Grande" in 1996. As of 2007, the project was still under construction. and has gone through numerous structural changes, because of the mechanical instability of the structure and the excessive weight of the bridge, which would cause the bank of the canal to fail. In 10 years the project has been inspected by more than 8 different consultants and the cost has raised up to three times the original expectations;. The work was completed in August 2008.

Exhibits

A special exhibition has been presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through 5 March 2006 .

Personal life

His nephew Alex Calatrava is a professional tennis player. His two sons have or are in the process of getting advanced degrees in Engineering from the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University in New York City.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (June 7, 1868 – December 10, 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, and watercolourist. He was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main exponent of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had a considerable influence on European design.

Life

The Willow Tearooms in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born at 70 Parson Street Glasgow on 7 June 1868 as the fourth out of five children and the second son to William Mackintosh and Margaret Rennie. The young Charles attended Reid's Public School and the Allan Glen's Institution. In 1890 Mackintosh was the second winner of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship, set up for the "furtherance of the study of ancient classic architecture, with special reference to the principles illustrated in Mr. Thomson’s works."Upon his return, he resumed with the Honeyman and Keppie architectural practice where he commenced his first grand architectural project, the Glasgow Herald Building, in 1899.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh met fellow artist Margaret MacDonald at the Glasgow School of Art. Members of the collaborative group known as “The Four”, the two married in 1902. After several successful building designs, Mackintosh became a partner of Honeyman and Keppie in 1907. During his time with the firm, Charles Rennie Mackintosh refined his architectural style. In 1909 he designed the Scotland Street School, which would become his last major architectural commission. When economic hardships were causing many architectural practices to close, he resigned from Honeyman and Keppie in 1913 and attempted to open his own practice. Unable to sustain his office, Mackintosh and his wife took an extended holiday in Suffolk where he created many floral watercolors. Upon return a year later, the Mackintoshes moved to London where Charles continued to paint and create textile designs. In 1916, Mackintosh received a commission to redesign the home of W.J. Bassett-Lowke. This undertaking would be his last architectural and interior design project.

Due to financial hardship, the Mackintoshes moved in 1925 to Port-Vendres, a Mediterranean coastal town in southern France with a warm climate that was a comparably cheaper location in which to live. During this peaceful phase of his life, Charles Rennie Mackintosh created a large portfolio of architecture and landscape watercolor paintings. The couple remained in France for five years, before being forced to return to London in 1927 due to illness.

That year, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was diagnosed with throat and tongue cancer. A brief recovery prompted him to leave the hospital and convalesce at home for a few months. Necessity resulted in Mackintosh being admitted to a nursing home where he died on December 10, 1930 at the age of 62.

Design Influences

The Room de Luxe at The Willow Tearooms features furniture and interior design by Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald.

He lived most of his life in the prosperous city of Glasgow. Located by the margins of the River Clyde, during the Industrial Revolution the city had one of the greatest production centres of heavy engineering and shipbuilding in the world. As the city grew and prospered, a faster response to the high demand for consumer goods and arts was necessary. Industrialized, mass-produced items started to gain popularity. Along with the Industrial Revolution, Asian style and emerging modernist ideas also influenced Mackintosh's designs. When the Japanese isolationist regime softened, shipyards building at the River Clyde were exposed to Japanese navy and training engineers; Glasgow’s link with the eastern country became particularly close. Japanese design became more accessible and gained great popularity.

This style was admired by Mackintosh because of: its restraint and economy of means rather than ostentatious accumulation; its simple forms and natural materials rather than elaboration and artifice; the use of texture and light and shadow rather than pattern and ornament. In the old western style furniture was seen as ornament that displayed the wealth of its owner and the value of the piece was established according to the length of time spent creating it. In the Japanese arts furniture and design focused on the quality of the space, which was meant to evoke a calming and organic feeling to the interior.

Scotland Street school in Glasgow.

At the same time a new philosophy concerned with creating functional and practical design was emerging throughout Europe: the so-called "modernist ideas". The main concept of the Modernist movement was to develop innovative ideas and new technology: design concerned with the present and the future, rather than with history and tradition. Heavy ornamentation and inherited styles were discarded. Even though Mackintosh became known as the ‘pioneer’ of the movement, his designs were far removed from the bleak utilitarianism of Modernism. His concern was to build around the needs of people: people seen, not as masses, but as individuals who needed not a machine for living in but a work of art. Mackintosh took his inspiration from his Scottish upbringing and blended them with the flourish of Art Nouveau and the simplicity of Japanese forms.

Mackintosh has been an inspiration to MEDes

While working in architecture, Charles Rennie Mackintosh developed his own style: a contrast between strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves, e.g. the Mackintosh Rose motif, along with some references to traditional Scottish architecture. The project that helped make his international reputation was the Glasgow School of Art (1897–1909). During the early stages of the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh also completed the Queen’s Cross Church project in Maryhill, Glasgow. This is considered to be one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh most mysterious projects. It is the only church by the Glasgow born artist to be built and is now the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society headquarters. Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, Mackintosh's architectural designs often included extensive specifications for the detailing, decoration, and furnishing of his buildings. The majority if not all of this detailing and significant contributions to his architectural drawings were designed and detailed by his wife Margaret Macdonald whom Charles had met when they both attended the Glasgow School of Art. His work was shown at the Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900. Mackintosh’s architectural career was a relatively short one, but of significant quality and impact. All his major commissions were between 1896 and 1906, where he designed private homes, commercial buildings, interior renovations, church, and furniture.

"The Lighthouse", Charles Mackintosh's Glasgow Herald building

Hill House, Helensburgh, near Glasgow

Noted architectural works

Windyhill, Kilmacolm Hill House , Helensburgh (National Trust for Scotland) House for an Art Lover , Glasgow The Mackintosh House (interior design, reconstructed with original furniture and fitments

at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow) Queen's Cross Church, Glasgow Ruchill Church Hall , Glasgow Holy Trinity Church, Bridge of Allan, Stirling Scotland Street School , Glasgow, now Scotland Street School Museum. The Willow Tearooms , Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow; one of Miss Cranston's Tearooms:

see Catherine Cranston for his interior design work on her other tea rooms Hous'hill , interior design of the home of Catherine Cranston and her husband John

Cochrane (demolished, furniture in collections) Glasgow School of Art , Glasgow Craigie Hall, Glasgow Martyrs' Public School, Glasgow The Royal Highland Fusiliers Regimental Museum, Glasgow

Former Daily Record offices, Glasgow Former Glasgow Herald offices in Mitchell Street, now The Lighthouse – Scotland's

Centre for Architecture, Design and the City 78 Derngate, Northampton (interior design and architectural remodelling for Wenman

Joseph Bassett-Lowke, founder of Bassett-Lowke) 5 The Drive, Northampton (for Bassett-Lowke's brother-in-law)

Unbuilt designs

Although moderately popular (for a period) in his native Scotland, most of his more ambitious designs were not built. His designs of various buildings for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition were not constructed, neither was his "Haus eines Kunstfreundes" (Art Lover's House) of the same year. He competed in the 1903 design competition for Liverpool Cathedral, but lost the commission to Giles Gilbert Scott.

The House for An Art Lover was built after his death (1989–1996). However, Mackintosh left many unbuilt designs:

Railway Terminus, Concert Hall, Alternative Concert Hall, Bar and Dining Room, Exhibition Hall Science and Art Museum Chapter House Liverpool Cathedral – Anglican Cathedral competition entry

Although Mackintosh's architectural output was fairly small he had a considerable influence on European design. Especially popular in Austria and Germany, Mackintosh's work was highly acclaimed when it was shown at the Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900. It was also exhibited in Budapest, Munich, Dresden, Venice and Moscow.

Design work and paintings

The Fort, c. 1925–1926. Fort Mailly, a ruined 16th century fortification on the outskirts of Port Vendres

The Four

Charles Rennie Mackintosh attended evening classes in art at the Glasgow School of Art. It was at these classes that he first met his future wife Margaret MacDonald, her sister Frances MacDonald, and Herbert MacNair who was also a fellow apprentice with Mackintosh at Honeyman and Keppie. MacNair and Frances would also marry. These close companions would later be known as the collaborative group “The Four”, prominent members of the "Glasgow School" movement.

This group of artists exhibited in Glasgow, London and Vienna, and these exhibitions helped establish Mackintosh's reputation. The so-called "Glasgow" style was exhibited in Europe and influenced the Viennese Art Nouveau movement known as Sezessionstil (in English, The Secession) around 1900. Mackintosh also worked in interior design, furniture, textiles and metalwork. Much of this work combines Mackintosh's own designs with those of his wife, whose flowing, floral style complemented his more formal, rectilinear work.

Later in life, disillusioned with architecture, Mackintosh worked largely as a watercolourist, painting numerous landscapes and flower studies (often in collaboration with Margaret, with whose style Mackintosh's own gradually converged) in the Suffolk village of Walberswick (to which the pair moved in 1914), and where he was arrested as a possible spy in 1915. By 1923, he had entirely abandoned architecture and design and moved to the south of France with Margaret where he concentrated on watercolour painting. He was interested in the relationships between man-made and naturally occurring landscapes. Many of his paintings depict Port Vendres, a small port near the Spanish border, and the nearby landscapes.

Retrospect

The front (north) CM Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street, Garnethill in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mackintosh's designs gained in popularity in the decades following his death. His House for an Art Lover was finally built in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park in 1996, and the University of Glasgow (which owns the majority of his watercolour work) rebuilt a terraced house Mackintosh had designed, and furnished it with his and Margaret's work (it is part of the University's

Hunterian Museum). The Glasgow School of Art building (now renamed "The Mackintosh Building") is regularly cited by architectural critics as among the very finest buildings in the UK. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society tries to encourage a greater awareness of the work of Mackintosh as an important architect, artist and designer. The rediscovery of Mackintosh as a significant figure in design is attributed by some to the designation of Glasgow as European City of Culture in 1990, and the exhibition of his work which accompanied the year-long festival. His enduring popularity since then has been fuelled by further exhibitions and the many books and other memorabilia which have illustrated various aspects of his life and work. This revival of public interest in Mackintosh has, in turn, led to the refurbishing and opening of further buildings to the public, such as the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow and Derngate, Northampton.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held a major retrospective exhibition of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's works from 21 November 1996 through 16 February 1997. In conjunction with that exhibit, there were lectures and a symposium by major scholars, including Pamela Robertson of the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow art gallery owner Roger Billcliffe, and architect J. Stewart Johnson, and screening of documentary films about Mackintosh.Charles Rennie Mackintosh is to be commemorated on a new series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank in 2009; his image will appear on the new issue of £100 notes.

Paul Rudolph (architect)

Paul Marvin Rudolph (October 23, 1918 in Elkton, Kentucky – August 8, 1997 in New York, New York) was an American architect and the dean of the Yale School of Architecture for six years, known for his cubist building designs and highly complex floor plans. His most famous work is the Yale Art and Architecture Building (A&A Building), a spatially complex Brutalist concrete structure.

Education

Rudolph earned his bachelors's degree in architecture at Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute) in 1940 and then moved on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to study with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. After three years, he left to serve in the Navy for another three years, returning to Harvard to receive his master's in 1947.

Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, designed by Paul Rudolph in 1963, built in 1967

Personal informationName Paul Rudolph

Nationality United StatesBirth date October 23, 1918Birth place Elkton, Kentucky

Date of death August 8, 1997 (aged 78)Place of death New York

WorkBuildings Yale Art and Architecture Building

Work

Wisma Dharmala Sakti office tower, Jakarta

He moved to Sarasota, Florida and partnered with Ralph Twitchell for four years until he started his own practice in 1951. Rudolph's Sarasota time is now part of the period labeled Sarasota Modern in his career.

Notable for its appearance in the 1958 book, Masters of Modern Architecture, the W. R. Healy House, built in 1950, was a one-story Sarasota house built on posts. The roof was concave, in order to allow rainwater to drain off. In addition, Rudolph used jalousie windows, which enabled the characteristic breezes to and from Sarasota Bay to flow into the house. Adaptation to the subtropical climate was central to his designs and Rudolph is considered one of the major architects in what is labeled the Sarasota School of Architecture.

A portion of Riverview High School in 2007

Other Sarasota landmarks by Rudolph include the Sarasota County Riverview High School, built in 1957 as his first large scale project. There was a great deal of controversy in Sarasota, where many members of the community appealed for the retention of the historic building after the decision reached in 2006 by the county school board to demolish the structure. As Charles Gwathmey, the architect overseeing renovation of Art and Architecture Building at Yale, says:

“ Riverview High School is a fantastic prototype of what today we call green architecture. He was so far ahead of his time, experimenting with sun screens and cross-ventilation. If it's torn down, I feel badly for architecture.[1] ”

In June 2009, it was demolished.[2]

Paul Rudolph's Florida houses attracted attention in the architectural community and he started receiving commissions for larger works such as the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley College. He took over the helm of the Yale School of Architecture as its dean in 1958, shortly after designing the Yale Art and Architecture Building. That building often is considered his masterpiece. He stayed on at Yale for six years until he returned to private practice. He designed the Temple Street Parking Garage, also in New Haven, in 1962.

He later designed the Government Service Center in Boston, First Church in Boston, the main campus of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (originally known as Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, and later as the Southeastern Massachusetts University), the Dana Arts Center at Colgate University, and the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in North Carolina.

Early design for The Concourse office tower, Singapore.

The Lippo Centre, 1987, by Paul Rudolph, a landmark building in Hong Kong

While the Brutalist style fell out of favor in the U.S. during the 1970s, Rudolph's work evolved, and became in demand in other countries. Rudolph designed reflective glass office towers in this period, such as the City Center Towers in Fort Worth, which departed from his concrete works. Rudolph continued working on projects in Singapore, where he designed The Concourse office tower with its ribbon windows and interweaving floors, as well as projects in other Asian countries through the last years of his life. His work, the Lippo Centre, completed in 1987, is a landmark in the area near Admiralty Station of MTR in Hong Kong, and a culmination of Rudolph's ideas in reflective glass. In Indonesia Rudolph pieces of art can be found in Jakarta, Wisma Dharmala Sakti, and in Surabaya, Wisma Dharmala Sakti 2.

Death

Rudolph died in 1997 at the age of seventy-eight in New York from mesothelioma, a cancer that almost always originates from exposure to asbestos.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English art critic and social thinker, also remembered as a poet and artist. His essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Ruskin first came to widespread attention for his support for the work of J. M. W. Turner and his defence of naturalism in art. He subsequently put his weight behind the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His later writings turned increasingly to complex and personal explorations of the interconnection of cultural, social and moral issues, and were influential on the development of Christian socialism.

Charles Eames

Charles Ormond Eames, Jr (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978) was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri. Charles was born the nephew of St. Louis architect William S. Eames. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture (and also first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect).

Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university. Many sources claim that he was dismissed for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his interest in modern architects. He was reportedly dismissed from the university because his views were "too modern." Other sources, less frequently cited, note that while a student, Charles Eames also was employed as an architect at the firm of Trueblood and Graf. The demands on his time from this employment and from his classes, led to sleep-deprivation and diminished performance at the university.

While at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia.

In 1930, Charles began his own architectural practice in St. Louis with partner Charles Gray. They were later joined by a third partner, Walter Pauley.

Charles Eames was greatly influenced by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, Charles moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department. In order to apply for the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, Eames defined an area of focus—the St. Louis waterfront. Together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition. Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would further develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy during World War II. In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his

Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.

On June 17, 2008 the US Postal Service released the Eames Stamps. A pane of 16 stamps celebrating the designs of Charles and Ray Eames

Works:

Eames House

John Eisenmann

Looking down the length of The Arcade Interior of The Arcade in downtown Cleveland (1966)

John Eisenmann (born March 26 1851 died January 1924), was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. As part of Eisenmann & Smith he designed the Cleveland Arcade in downtown Cleveland. He also designed Case Western University's Main building and was the school's first professor of civil engineering. He pioneered structural steel construction in the United States and is credited with co-designing Cleveland's Arcade, "the first commercial building in the state designated an historic landmark in architecture."

Arcade

The arcade was erected in 1890, at a cost of $867,000. It opened on Memorial Day (May 31, 1890) and is an example of Victorian architecture, consisting of two nine-story buildings joined by a five-story arcade. It includes a glass skylight spanning 300 feet (91 m) along the four balconies.

The arcade is identified as the first indoor shopping mall in the United States.and was built by Detroit Bridge Co., run by Stephen V. Harkness. It is one of the few remaining arcades of its kind in the United States. Modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II located in Milan, the Arcade comprises two nine-story towers with a skylight, 100 feet (30 m) high, made of 1,800 panes of glass spanning over 300 feet (91 m). The construction was financed by John D. Rockefeller, Marcus Hanna, Charles F. Brush and several other wealthy Clevelanders of the day. The Arcade was modified in 1939, with remodeling doen to the Euclid Avenue entrance and some structural supports added.

The Arcade is a cross between a lighted court and a commercial shopping street, composed of three structures: two nine-story office buildings facing out to Euclid and Superior Avenues, connected via the five-story iron-and-glass enclosed arcade.The Richardsonian arched entrance along Superior Avenue is original but the Euclid Avenue front was remodeled in 1939[2] by the firm of Walker and Weeks.

Vertical lines of the columns rise nearly 100 feet (33 m) to the glass roof and create a spacious domed interior. In 2001, the Hyatt corporation redeveloped the Arcade into Cleveland's first Hyatt Regency hotel. The Hyatt Regency occupies the two towers and the top three floors of the atrium area. The two lower floors of the atrium area remain open to the public with retail merchants and a food court. In addition, the Hyatt's lobby and offices are located near the Superior Avenue entrance.

Projects

Cleveland Arcade with Eisenmann & Smith Cinecraft Building (1898) (Cleveland Public Library West Side Branch), 2515 Franklin

Blvd. Esmond Apartment Building (1898), 4806 Euclid Ave.

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson at age 95 with his model of a 30' by 60' sculpture created for a Qatari collector

Personal informationName Philip Johnson

Nationality AmericanBirth date July 8, 1906Birth place Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Date of death January 25, 2005 (aged 98)Place of death New Canaan, Connecticut, United StatesAlma mater Harvard Graduate School of Design

WorkBuildings IDS Tower, PPG Place, Crystal Cathedral

Design Buildings clad entirely in glassAwards Pritzker Prize (1979)

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades.

In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. When Johnson died in January 2005, he was survived by his long-time life partner, David Whitney, who died only a few months later, on June 12, 2005.

Early life

Chapel of St. Basil on the Academic Mall at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.

Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was descended from the Jansen (a.k.a. Johnson) family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he focused on history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Johnson interrupted his education with several extended trips to Europe.[2] These trips became the pivotal moment of his education; he visited Chartres, the Parthenon, and many other ancient monuments, becoming increasingly fascinated with architecture.

In 1928 Johnson met with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting was a revelation for Johnson and formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition.

Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytizer for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine firsthand recent trends in architecture, the three assembled their discoveries as the landmark show "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922" at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. The show was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public. It introduced such pivotal architects as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.

As critic Peter Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated." In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration. The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.

Puerta de Europa in Madrid

Johnson continued to work as a proponent of modern architecture, using the Museum of Modern Art as a bully pulpit. He arranged for Le Corbusier's first visit to the United States in 1935, then worked to bring Mies and Marcel Breuer to the US as emigres.

In the 1930s Johnson sympathized with Nazism, and expressed antisemitic ideas. Regarding this period in his life, he later said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity... I don't know how you expiate guilt."

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930s. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson's interest in journalism or politics -- he returned to enlist in the US Army. After a couple of self-admittedly undistinguished years in uniform, Johnson returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to finally pursue his ultimate career of architect.

The Glass House

A model of the Glass House on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work. The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.

The house sits at the edge of a crest on Johnson’s estate overlooking a pond. The building's sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel; the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground but sits 10 inches above. The interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

Johnson continued to build structures on his estate as architectural essays. Offset obliquely fifty feet from the Glass House is a guest house, echoing the proportions of the Glass House and completely enclosed in brick (except for small round windows at the rear). It contains a bathroom, library, and single bedroom with a gilt vaulted ceiling and shag carpet. It was built at the same time as the Glass House and can be seen as its formal counterpart. Johnson stated that he deliberately designed it to be less than perfectly comfortable, as "guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most".

Later, Johnson added a painting gallery with an innovative viewing mechanism of rotating walls to hold paintings (influenced by the Hogarth displays at Sir John Soane's house), followed by a sky-lit sculpture gallery. The last structures Johnson built on the estate were a library and a reception building, the latter, red and black in color and of curving walls. Johnson viewed the ensemble of one-room buildings as a total work of art, claiming that it was his best and only "landscape project."

The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours.

The Seagram Building

After completing several houses in the idiom of Mies and Breuer, Johnson joined Mies van der Rohe as the New York associate architect for the 39-story Seagram Building (1956). Johnson

was pivotal in steering the commission towards Mies, working with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. This collaboration of architects and client resulted in the bronze-and-glass tower on Park Avenue.

Completing the Seagram Building with Mies also decisively marked a shift in Johnson's career. After this accomplishment, Johnson's practice grew as projects came in from the public realm, including coordinating the master plan of Lincoln Center and designing that complex's New York State Theater. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow bored with the orthodoxies of the International Style he had championed.

Later buildings

The postmodern AT&T Building, now the Sony Building

Although startling when constructed, the glass and steel tower (indeed many idioms of the modern movement) had by the 1960s become commonplace the world over. He eventually rejected much of the metallic appearance of earlier International Style buildings, and began designing spectacular, crystalline structures uniformly sheathed in glass. Many of these became instant icons, such as PPG Place in Pittsburgh and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.

Crystal Cathedral, Orange County, CA

Johnson's architectural work is a balancing act between two dominant trends in post-war American art: the more "serious" movement of Minimalism, and the more populist movement of Pop Art. His best work has aspects of both movements. Johnson's personal collections reflected this dichotomy, as he introduced artists such as Mark Rothko to the Museum of Modern Art as well as Andy Warhol. Straddling between these two camps, his work was seen by purists of either side as always too contaminated or influenced by the other.

From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee. This was by far Johnson's most productive period — certainly by the measure of scale — he became known at this time as builder of iconic office towers, including Minneapolis's IDS Tower. That building's distinctive stepbacks (called "zogs" by the architect) created an appearance that has since become one of Minneapolis's trademarks and the crown jewel of its skyline. In 1980, the Crystal Cathedral was completed for Rev. Robert H. Schuller's famed megachurch, which became a Southern California landmark.

Atrium of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

The AT&T Building in Manhattan, now the Sony Building, was completed in 1984 and was immediately controversial for its neo-Georgian pediment (Chippendale top). At the time, it was seen as provocation on a grand scale: crowning a Manhattan skyscraper with a shape echoing a historical wardrobe top defied every precept of the modernist aesthetic: historical pattern had been effectively outlawed among architects for years. In retrospect other critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist statement, necessary in the context of modernism's aesthetic cul-de-sac. In 1987, Johnson was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Houston. The institution's Hines College of Architecture is also housed in one of Johnson's buildings.

Johnson's publicly held archive, including architectural drawings, project records, and other papers up until 1964 are held by the Drawings and Archives Department of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Getty, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Notable works

PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston

The Johnson Building at Boston Public Library

Johnson House, "The Glass House", New Canaan, Connecticut, (1949); John de Menil House, Houston (1950); The Rockefeller Guest House for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1950); The Seagram Building, in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe, New York (1956); Four Seasons Restaurant, New York City (1959); Expansion of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C. (1960) The Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York

(1960); The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art;

The Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska (1963); New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, (with Richard Foster, 1964); Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1961, expansion in 2001); The New York State Pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, 1964); The Kreeger Museum in Washington D.C. (with Richard Foster; 1967); The main campus mall at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas ; Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University); John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial in Dallas, Texas (1970)[5]; The IDS Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1972); Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas (1972); Boston Public Library (1973); Fort Worth Water Gardens (1974); The Dorothy and Dexter Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College in Allentown,

Pennsylvania(1976); Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas (1976); The Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase College; Evangelist Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980); Tata Theatre , National Centre for the Performing Arts (India), Mumbai (1980). Metro-Dade Cultural Center in Miami, Florida, 1982; The Chapel of St. Basil and the Academic Mall at the University of St. Thomas in

Houston, Texas; The Republic Bank Center in Houston, Texas now rebranded Bank of America Center; The Transco Tower, now rebranded Williams Tower, Houston, (1983); The Cleveland Playhouse in Cleveland, Ohio (extension) (1983); The Wells Fargo Center (Denver) in Denver, Colorado (1983); PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1984); The Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture , University of Houston (1985); Comerica Bank Tower , Dallas, Texas, 1987; Puerta de Europa , Madrid, Spain) John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant; 190 South LaSalle in Chicago John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant; 191 Peachtree Tower , Atlanta, Georgia John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson

Consultant; 101 California Street , San Francisco, California; Johnson/ Burgee Architects; University of St Thomas St Basil Chapel (with John Manley, Architect) (1992); Science and Engineering Library, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, (1992); AEGON Center in Louisville, Kentucky (1993), John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson

Consultant. Comerica Tower in Detroit, Michigan (1993), John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson

Consultant. Visitor's Pavilion, New Canaan CT (1994). Turning Point, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (1996). Philip-Johnson-Haus , Berlin, Germany (1997). First Union Plaza , Boca Raton, Florida (2000).

Minoru Yamasaki

Minoru YamasakiPersonal information

Name Minoru YamasakiNationality AmericanBirth date December 1, 1912Birth place Seattle, Washington, United States

Date of death February 7, 1986 (aged 73)Place of death

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States

Alma mater New York UniversityWork

Buildings The twin towers of the World Trade CenterProjects World Trade Center

DesignInspiration by Gothic architecture and use of

extremely narrow vertical windowsAwards American Institute of Architects' First Honor Award

Minoru Yamasaki (山崎實 Yamasaki Minoru?, December 1, 1912 – February 7, 1986) was an American architect, best known for his design of the twin towers of the World Trade Center

buildings 1 and 2. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master

practitioners of "romanticized modernism".

Biography

The former World Trade Center

One M & T Plaza, in Buffalo, NY.

Torre Picasso, in Madrid.

Temple Beth El, in Bloomfield Township, Michigan

The Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College, designed by Yamasaki in 1963. The distinctive style is similar to Yamasaki's design of the World Trade Center.

Yamasaki, born in Seattle, Washington, was a second-generation Japanese American. He grew up in Auburn, Washington and attended Auburn Senior High School. He enrolled in the University of Washington program in architecture in 1929, and graduated with a Bachelor of

Architecture (B.Arch.) in 1934. During his college years, he was strongly encouraged by faculty member Lionel Pries. He earned money to pay for his tuition by working at an Alaskan salmon cannery.

After moving to New York City in the 1930s, he enrolled at New York University for a master's degree in architecture and got a job with the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, designers of the Empire State Building. In 1945, Yamasaki moved to Detroit, where he was hired by Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls. The firm helped Yamasaki avoid internment as a Japanese-American during the Second World War, and he himself sheltered his parents in New York City. Yamasaki left the firm in 1949, and started his own partnership. In 1964 Yamasaki received a D.F.A. from Bates College.

Yamasaki was first married in 1941 and had two other wives before marrying his first wife again in 1969. He died of stomach cancer in 1986. His firm, Yamasaki & Associates, closed on December 31, 2009.

Works

His first significant project was the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, 1955. Despite his love of Japanese traditional design, this was a stark, modernist concrete structure. The housing project experienced so many problems that it was demolished in 1972, less than twenty years after its completion. Its destruction is considered by some to be the beginning of postmodern architecture.

He also designed several "sleek" international airport buildings and was responsible for the innovative design of the 1,360 foot (415 m) towers of the World Trade Center, for which design began in 1965, and construction in 1972. Many of his buildings are loosely inspired by Gothic architecture and make use of extremely narrow vertical windows. This narrow-windowed style arose from his own personal fear of heights.

Yamasaki was an original member of the Pennsylvania Avenue Commission, which was tasked with restoring the grand avenue in Washington, D.C., but resigned after disagreements and disillusionment with the design by committee approach.

After teaming up with Emery Roth and Sons on the design of the World Trade Center, they teamed up again on other projects including new defense buildings at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Structures designed by Minoru Yamasaki

100 Washington Square , Minneapolis, MN, 1981 Bank of Oklahoma , Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1977[8]

Behavioral Sciences Building - Harvard University [1] Birmingham Unitarian Church , Bloomfield Hills, MI

Carleton College buildings: Olin Hall of Science 1961, Goodhue Dormitory 1962, West Gym 1964, Cowling Rec Center 1965, Watson Hall 1966 and 1961 4th Floor addition to Myers Hall.[9]

Century Plaza Hotel , Los Angeles, 1966 Century Plaza Towers , Los Angeles, 1975[8]

Columbia Center , Troy, Michigan College for Creative Studies Yamasaki Building, Detroit, Michigan Daniell Heights married student housing, Michigan Technological University, Houghton,

Michigan Dhahran International Airport - Civil Air Terminal[1]

Eastern Airlines Terminal, (Logan Airport Terminal A) Boston, Massachusetts [8] , 1969 (Demolished 2002)[10].

Eastern Province International Airport, Saudi Arabia, 1985[8]

Education Building , Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond , Richmond, Virginia [8] Founder's Hall, Shinji Shumeikai, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, 1982[8]

Gratiot Urban Redevelopment Project, Detroit, Michigan, 1954[8]

Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan Horace Mann Educators Insurance Co., Springfield, Illinois, 1979[8]

IBM Building , Seattle, Washington Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana [11] Japan Center , San Francisco, California, 1968 John Marshall Middle School, Westland, Michigan King Building , Oberlin College, 1966 Lambert-St. Louis International Airport , 1956[8]

Lincoln Elementary School, Livonia, Michigan (Demolished mid-1980s) M&T Bank Center, Buffalo , 1967[8]

McGregor Memorial Conference Center , Wayne State University, Detroit Medical College of Ohio Hospital and Medical College of Ohio, now University of

Toledo Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. , Detroit, Michigan, 1963[8] (Now known as One

Woodward Avenue) Michigan State Medical Society building, East Lansing, Michigan, 1959[12]

Military Personnel Records Center , St. Louis, Missouri Montgomery Ward Corporate Headquarters Tower (built 1972), Chicago, Illinois

(converted into high-rise residential condominiums in 2005) North Shore Congregation Israel , Glencoe, Illinois, 1964 Northwestern National Life Insurance Co., Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1964[8]

Oberlin Conservatory of Music (photo)Oberlin College, 1963 Pacific Science Center [1] [8] (formerly known as the Federal Science Pavilion for Seattle's

Century 21 World's Fair), Seattle, 1962 Pahlavi University in Shiraz, Iran [1] Performing Arts Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1976[8]

Pruitt-Igoe housing project, St. Louis, Missouri [8] (demolished in 1972) Queen Emma Gardens, Honolulu, 1964[8]

Quo Vadis Entertainment Center , Westland, Michigan 1966

Rainier Bank Tower , Seattle, Washington, 1977[8]

Reliastar Building (now ING), Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1964 Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office, Southfield, Michigan, 1959 Robertson Hall, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton

University, 1965 Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Head Office, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1981 Steinman College Center, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1976 Temple Beth El , Bloomfield Township, Michigan 1974 Torre Picasso , Madrid, Spain, 1988 One Government Center, Toledo, Ohio, 1976 United States Consulate in Kobe, Japan 1955 United States Pavilion, World Agricultural Fair, New Delhi, India, 1959 University School , Grosse Pointe, Michigan, 1954 Wascana Centre and the University of Regina World Trade Center Tower 1 and Tower 2, New York City, New York (destroyed on

September 11, 2001 by terrorist attack)

Honors

Yamasaki was elected as a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects in 1960.

Yamasaki won the American Institute of Architects' First Honor Award three times.

John Graham & Company

John Graham & Company, or John Graham & Associates is the name of an architectural firm, founded by John Graham, which originated in Seattle, Washington, in 1900. The firm was merged into the DLR Group on May 19, 1986, and the name saw full deletion in 1998.[1]

John Graham & Company is responsible for the architecture of over 30 metropolitan structures, including two complexes. Included are The Space Needle, the Chase Tower of Rochester, New York, and the South Tower of The Westin Seattle.

John Graham

John Graham was born in Liverpool, England. First visiting Seattle in 1896, he immigrated to the United States in 1900, starting an architectural practice in Seattle. As architect for the Ford Motor Company, he designed more than 30 of Ford's assembly plants. In 1902 he designed Trinity Parish Church on First Hill in Seattle. He designed Seattle's Frederick & Nelson store (now Nordstrom's) in 1916.

John Graham Jr.

John Graham's son graduated from Yale University and joined his father's firm in New York in 1937. Renaming the firm to John Graham & Company after World War II, he designed Seattle's Northgate Shopping Center in 1947.

Structures

First listed is the name, then the floor count, then the year construction was completed. Feel free to format this into a table.

Chase Tower (Rochester) 27 1973 Space Needle 1962 Southern Union Tower 20 1980 ABC Building 33 1976 Holiday Park Plaza 16 1967 AIA Building 12 1958

1. Sheraton Seattle Hotel 34 1982 2. Lloyd Center Tower 20 1981 3. US Federal Building & Courthouse 6 1981 4. Qwest Plaza 33 1976 5. One Capital Center 14 1975 6. State Office Building 11 1975 7. Henry M. Jackson Federal Building 37 1974 8. 901 Fifth Ave 42 1973 9. Ala Moana Hotel 38 1970 10. Westin Seattle South Tower 40 1969 - Part of the Westin Seattle Complex 11. 44 Montgomery 43 1967 12. Space Needle 6 1962

13. Ala Moana Building 23 1960 14. Amazon.com Building 16 1932 15. Tacoma Municipal Building 17 1931 16. Exchange Building 23 1930 17. The Roosevelt 20 1929 18. Joseph Vance Building 14 1929 19. Hartford Building 2 1929 20. Macy's 7 1928 21. Hotel Georgia 12 1927 22. Montague & McHugh Building 5 1927 23. Washington Building 17 1925 24. Dexter Horton Building 14 1924 25. Nordstrom 10 1918 26. Securities Building 10 1918 27. Joshua Green Building 10 1910

Complexes

The Ilikai Hotel, Waikiki The Westin Seattle

Works:

Space Needle Chase Tower Rochester, New York

Washington Plaza Hotel (John Graham Associates, 1969), with monorail, Seattle, 1969

Postcard

MICHAEL GRAVES

Michael Graves (born July 9, 1934) is an American architect. Identified as one of The New York Five, Graves has become a household name with his designs for domestic products sold at Target stores in the United States.

Graves was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He attended Broad Ripple High School, receiving his diploma in 1950. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati where he also became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, and a master's degree from Harvard University.

An architect in public practice in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1964, Graves is also the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at Princeton University. He directs the firm Michael Graves & Associates, which has offices in Princeton and in New York City. In addition to his popular line of household items, Graves and his firm have earned acclaim for a wide variety of commercial and residential buildings and interior design. Graves was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1979. In 1999 Graves was awarded the National Medal of Arts and in 2001 the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.

In 2003, an infection of unknown origin (possible bacterial meningitis) left Graves paralyzed from the waist down. He is still active in his practice, which is currently involved in a number of projects; including an addition to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a large Integrated Resort in Singapore.

Important buildings

Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky

Portland Public Service Building in Oregon

The Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida

NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Steigenberger Hotel in El Gouna, Egypt, in association with architect Ahmed Hamdy

The International Finance Corporation Building in Washington, D.C.

Hanselmann House, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1968

Benacerraf House, Princeton, New Jersey, 1969 Snyderman House , Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1972 Wageman House, Princeton, New Jersey, 1974 Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge, Fargo, North Dakota, 1977 Plocek Residence, Warren, New Jersey, 1977 Roma Interrotta Exhibition, Rome, Italy, 1978 Humana Building , Louisville, Kentucky, 1982 Michael C. Carlos Museum , Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1982 Newark Museum expansion, Newark, New Jersey, 1982 Portland Public Service Building , Portland, Oregon, 1982 San Juan Capistrano Library, San Juan Capistrano, California, 1982 Riverbend Music Center , Cincinnati, Ohio, 1984 Aventine Mixed Use Development, La Jolla, California, 1985 Crown American Building, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1986 Team Disney Building , Burbank, California, 1986 Graves Residence "The Warehouse," Princeton, New Jersey, 1986 Shiseido Health Club, Tokyo, Japan, 1986 Clos Pegase Winery, Calistoga, California, 1987 University Of Virginia , Bryan Hall, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1987 Dolphin Resort , Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, 1987 Swan Resort , Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, 1987 Metropolis Master Plan, Los Angeles, California, 1988 Tajima Office Building, Tokyo, Japan, 1988 Disney's Hotel New York , Euro Disney Resort (now Disneyland Paris), Marne-la-Vallée,

France, 1989 Clark County Library and Theater, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1990 Dairy Barn renovation, Harbourton, New Jersey, 1990 Denver Public Library , Denver, Colorado, 1990 Detroit Institute of Arts master plan, Detroit, Michigan, 1990 Fukuoka Hyatt Hotel and Office Building, Fukuoka,Japan, 1990 Kasumi Research and Training Center, Tsukaba, Japan, 1990 Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics , University of California, Santa Barbara,

California, 1990 Malibu House (private residence), Malibu, California, 1990 Michael C. Carlos Museum , Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1990 Onjuku Town Hall, Onjuku, Japan, 1990 University of Cincinnati College of Engineering , Engineering Center, Cincinnati, Ohio,

1990 Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor , Youngstown, Ohio, 1990 Richard Stockton College of New Jersey , Arts and Sciences Building, Pomona, New

Jersey, 1991 Thomson Consumer Electronics Americas headquarters, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1992 United States Courthouse Renovation, Trenton, New Jersey, 1992 Astrid Park Plaza Hotel and Business Center, Antwerp, Belgium, 1993 International Finance Corporation Headquarters of the World Bank, Washington, DC,

1993

Ministry Of Health, Welfare and Sport , The Hague, Holland, 1993 Nexus Momochi Residential Tower, Fukuoka, Japan, 1993 Archdiocesan Center, Newark, New Jersey, 1993 Rome Reborn Exhibition, Washington, DC, 1993 United States Post Office, Celebration, Florida, 1993 1500 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, 1994 Ocean Steps Retail Center with 1500 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, 1994 One Port Center (Delaware River Port Authority headquarters), Camden, New Jersey,

1994 Pura-Wiilliams House, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, 1994 Miramar Resort Hotel, El Gouna, Egypt, 1995 Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library , Topeka, Kansas, 1995 American Academy in Rome Rare Books Library, Rome, Italy, 1996 Charles E. Beatley, Jr. Central Library, Alexandria, Virginia, 1996 House At Indian Hill, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1996 Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1996 Lake Hills Country Club, Seoul, Korea, 1996 Miele Americas Headquarters, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996 O'Reilly Theater , Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1996 French Institute⁄Alliance Française Library, New York, New York, 1997 De Luwte House, River Vecht, Netherlands, 1997 Drexel University North Hall Residence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1997 El Gouna Golf Club, El Gouna, Egypt, 1997 El Gouna Golf Hotel, El Gouna, Egypt, 1997 El Gouna Golf Villas, El Gouna, Egypt, 1997 Fortis⁄AG Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, 1997 Fukuoka Office Building, Fukuoka, Japan, 1997 Hyatt Hotel Taba Heights , Taba Heights, Egypt, 1997 Intercontinental Hotel , Taba Heights, Egypt, 1997 Laurel Hall, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, 1997 NCAA Hall of Champions and headquarters, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1997 United States Federal Courthouse, Washington, DC, 1997 Bristol⁄Savoy Towers (Ten Good City), Fukuoka, Japan, 1998 Cedar Gables House, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998 Impala Building, New York, New York, 1998 Saint Martin’s College Library, Lacey, Washington, 1998 Detroit Institute of Arts Expansion and Renovation, Detroit, Michigan, 1999 New Jersey Institute of Technology Master Plan, Newark, New Jersey, 1999 New Jersey Institute of Technology , Laurel Hall Expansion, Newark, New Jersey, 1999 Philadelphia Eagles ⁄Novacare Training Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1999 Pittsburgh Cultural District Service Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1999 Private Residence, Harbourton, New Jersey, 1999 Rice University , Martel, Brown & Jones Colleges, Houston,Texas, 1999 Singapore National Library Competition, Singapore, 1999 Target House Fountain, Memphis, Tennessee, 1999 Washington Monument restoration and scaffolding Washington, DC, 1999

Watch Technicum, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1999 425 Fifth Ave, New York, New York, 2000 Capital Regional Medical Center , Tallahassee Community Hospital, Tallahassee, Florida,

2000 Famille Tsukishima Apartment Building, Tokyo, Japan, 2000 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , Houston Branch, Texas, 2000 Hart Production Studios, San Francisco, California, 2000 Newark Museum Science Gallery, Newark, New Jersey, 2000 Perseus Office, Washington, DC, 2000 Private Residence, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 2000 United States Embassy Compound - Embassy & Housing, Seoul , Korea, 2000 Children's Theatre Company , Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2001 Fukuoka Office Building, Fukuoka, Japan, 2001 Kasteel Holterveste, De Haverleij, Netherlands, 2001 Mahler 4, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2001 Michael C. Carlos Museum Renovation, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2001 Three On The Bund, Shanghai, China, 2001 Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton, New Jersey, 2002 Department of Transportation Headquarters, Washington, DC, 2002 Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Kohn Hall, University of California, Santa

Barbara, California, 2002 National Museum of Prehistory , Taitung, Taiwan, 2002 New Jersey City University Arts and Science Building, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2002 New Jersey State Police Training Center & Headquarters, Trenton, New Jersey, 2002 Resort Master Plan - Canary Islands, Canary Islands, Spain, 2002 Rice University South Campus Master Plan, Houston, Texas, 2002 St. Coletta School, Washington, DC, 2002 St. Mary's Catholic Church, Rockledge, Florida, 2002. Target Club Wedd House contest prize, 2002 Florida Institute of Technology Master Plan, Melbourne, Florida, 2003 George Washington University Sigma Chi Fraternity House , Washington, DC, 2003 Housing For Martin House, Trenton, New Jersey, 2003 The Pinnacle And 260 Main Street, White Plains, New York, 2003 United States Courthouse, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003 Fox School of Business Alter Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004 Indianapolis Art Center Master Plan, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2004 Maxwell Place On The Hudson, Interiors Block A, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2004 National Automobile Museum, The Hague, Netherlands, 2004 Princeton University Chancellor Green Interiors, Princeton, New Jersey, 2004 Riverwalk 2, Nishinippon University Design School, Kitakyushu, Japan, 2004 Trump International Hotel , Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2004 University of Miami School Of Business, Miami, Florida, 2004 701 E. Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, 2005 Azulera Resort, Hotel and Residences, Brasilito Bay Guanacaste, Costa Rica, 2005 Burj Dubai Towers, Dubai, UAE, 2005 The Enclave Residential Condominiums, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 2005

Florida Institute of Technology College Of Psychology & Autism , Melbourne, Florida, 2005

Hyatt Hotel, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005 Luxury Condominium Towers, Beirut, Lebanon, 2005 Maxwell Place On The Hudson, Interiors Block B, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2005 Museum of the Shenandoah Valley , Winchester, Virginia, 2005 Paterson Public Schools complex, Patterson, New Jersey, 2005 Riverside Park Residential Development master plan, Fairfax County, Virginia, 2005 Springhill Lake master plan, Greenbelt, Maryland, 2005 Storehouse prototype retail store, West Palm Beach, Florida, 2005 Allegna Residence, 6th of October City, Egypt, 2006 The Falls at Lake Travis Community Master Plan, Austin, Texas, 2006 Four Seasons Residence at Town Lake, Austin, Texas, 2006 Minneapolis Institute of Arts Expansion, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2006 Notre Dame Club, Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana, 2006 Princeton University Wu-Wilcox Halls Additions & Interiors, Princeton, New Jersey,

2006 Private Residence, Sentosa, Singapore, 2006 Resorts World at Sentosa , Singapore, 2006 St. Regis Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, 2006 Shake-a-Leg Residences, Miami, Florida, 2006 Wyndham Hotels Prototypes, 2006 Columbia University School of Nursing , New York, New York, 2007 Community Master Plan, New Cairo, Egypt, 2007 Detroit Institute of Arts , major remodel, Detroit, 2007. MarketFair Retail Center, Princeton, New Jersey, 2007 Equestrian City Tower, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2008 PS/IS 42, Arverne, New York, 2008 Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics & Astronomy and Department of Physics

Building, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 2009

Hans Hollein

Haas-Haus in Vienna, 1985-1990

Hans Hollein, (born March 30, 1934 in Vienna) is an Austrian architect and designer.

Hollein achieved a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1956, then attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1959 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. He has worked for various agencies in Sweden and in America before returning to Vienna, founding his own agency in 1964.

In 1985 Hollein was awarded the Pritzker Prize.

In 1963/64 and 1966 Hollein was a guest professor in the Washington University in St. Louis. In 1967-76 he was professor in the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. Since 1976 he was professor of the "Universität für angewandte Kunst" in Vienna.

Hollein works mainly as an architect, but has also established himself as a designer for the Memphis Group and Alessi.

He also staged exhibitions, e. g. for the Biennale in Venice. In 1980 he designed the stage for a production of Arthur Schnitzler's drama Komödie der Verführung (Comedy of Seduction) at Vienna's Burgtheater.

Main works/galleries

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 1983-1991

Abteiberg Museum, Moenchengladbach, Germany

1964-1965 : Retti candle shop, Vienna Photo 1972 : Schullin Jewellery shop, Vienna 1972-1982 : Abteiberg Museum Mönchengladbach 1983 : Rauchstrasse in Berlin 1987-1991 : Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main 1990 : Haas-Haus in Vienna 1992-2002 : Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum, St. Pölten (Austria) 1996-2001 : Austrian Embassy in Berlin Photos 1997-2002 : Centrum Bank in Valduz (Austria) in collaboration with Bargetze+Partner 1997-2002 : Vulcania - European Centre of Vulcanology in Auvergne (France) Photos

Albertina (Vienna) Hilton hotel, Vienna Interbank Headquarters in Lima Office blocks at the Donaukanal, Vienna Guggenheim Ganztagsschule , Vienna Glass and Ceramics house, Teheran, Iran Feigen Gallery , New York

Prizes

Reynolds Memorial Award 1966 and 1984 Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis 1983 Pritzker Prize 1985 Österreichisches Ehrenzeichen für Wissenschaft und Kunst 1990 Ehrenmedaille der Bundeshauptstadt Wien in Gold

Albert Kahn (architect)

Albert Kahn

BornMarch 21, 1869

Rhaunen, Rhineland-Palatinate Germany

DiedDecember 8, 1942 (aged 73)

Detroit, Michigan, USA

Nationality American

Occupation architect

Known for Detroit

Relatives Albert E. Kahn, nephew

Albert Kahn (March 21, 1869 in Rhaunen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany – December 8, 1942 in Detroit, Michigan, USA) was the foremost American industrial architect of his day. He is sometimes called the architect of Detroit.

Biography

Kahn was born on March 21, 1869 in Rhaunen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Kahn came to Detroit in 1880 at the age of 11. His father Joseph was trained as a rabbi. His mother Rosalie had a talent for the visual arts and music. As a teenager he got a job at the architectural firm of Mason and Rice. Kahn won a year's scholarship to study abroad in Europe, where he toured with another young architecture student, Henry Bacon, who would later design the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Albert Kahn designed Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien.

The architectural firm Albert Kahn Associates was founded in 1895. He developed a new style of construction where reinforced concrete replaced wood in factory walls, roofs, and supports. This gave better fire protection and allowed large volumes of unobstructed interior. Packard Motor Car Company's factory built in 1907 was the first development of this principle.

The success of the Packard plant interested Henry Ford in Kahn's designs. Kahn designed Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant, begun in 1909 where Ford consolidated production of the Ford Model T and perfected the assembly line. On Bob-Lo Island, Henry Ford had a dance hall designed and built by Albert Kahn, which in 1903 was billed as the world's second largest.[1]

Kahn later designed, in 1917, the massive half-mile-long Ford River Rouge Plant. The Rouge grew into the largest manufacturing complex in the U.S., with a force that peaked at 120,000 workers. According to the company website, "By 1938, Kahn's firm was responsible for 20 percent of all architect-designed factories in the U.S."

Kahn was responsible for many of the buildings and houses in Walkerville, Ontario built under direction of Walker family including Willistead Manor. Kahn's interest in historically styled buildings is also seen in his houses in Indian Village, Detroit, Cranbrook House, the Edsel Ford House and the Dearborn Inn, the world's first airport hotel.

Kahn's Conservatory on Belle Isle in Detroit, Michigan

Kahn also designed the landmark 28-story Art Deco Fisher Building in Detroit, considered one of the most beautiful elements of the Detroit skyline. In 1928, the Fisher building was honored by the Architectural League of New York as the year's most beautiful commercial structure.

Kahn's firm's Moscow office built 521 factories between 1930 and 1932. [2]

Kahn also designed many of the classic buildings at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. These include the Burton Tower, Hill Auditorium, the Hatcher Graduate Library, and Clements Library.

A frequent collaborator with Kahn was architectural sculptor Corrado Parducci. In all Parducci worked on about 50 Kahn commissions including banks, office buildings, newspaper buildings, mausoleums, hospitals and private residences.

Kahn's firm designed a large number of the army airfield and naval bases for the United States government during World War I. By World War II, Kahn's 600-person office was involved in making Detroit the Arsenal of Democracy. Among others, the office designed the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant, and the Willow Run Bomber Plant, Kahn's last building, located in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where Ford Motor Company mass produced B-24 Liberator bombers. Albert Kahn worked on more than 1,000 commissions from Henry Ford and hundreds for other automakers.

As of 2006, Kahn had around 60 buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Not all of Kahn's works have been preserved. The Donovan Building, later occupied by Motown Records, abandoned for decades, was demolished as part of Detroit's beautification plan before the Super Bowl in 2006.

Ten Albert Kahn buildings are recognized by official Michigan historical markers.[3]

Battle Creek Post Office The Dearborn Inn Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant in Warren, Michigan Edsel & Eleanor Ford House in St. Clair Shores, Michigan Fisher Building Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1331 Hill St., Ann Arbor Packard Motor Car Company The Detroit News The Detroit Free Press Willow Run

He is not related to American architect Louis Kahn.

Kahn-designed buildings

Temple Beth-El (currently home to the Bonstelle Theatre), c. 1905

Dexter M. Ferry summer residence in Unadilla Center, New York; early 19th century stone farmhouse remodeled in 1890. Extant today. Known as Milfer Farm, held by Ferry heirs today. Kahn also designed the "Honeymoon Cottage" on the estate, one of the earliest prefabricated houses built.

William Livingstone House (1892-93), at 294 Elliot, Detroit. The French Renaissance house was demolished on September 15, 2007. The Livingstone house in Detroit's Brush Park was Kahn's first commission. Livingstone founded the Dime Savings Bank. The William Livingstone House was commemorated in a painting by Lowell Bioleau entitled Open House which was unveiled the day of its demolition.[4]

Hiram Walker offices, 1892, in Windsor, Ontario Bernard Ginsburg House , 1898 Detroit Racquet Club, 1902 (Kahn designed but was not allowed membership at the time,

being Jewish) Temple Beth El , 1903, Kahn's home synagogue, now the Bonstelle Theatre of Wayne

State University Brandeis-Millard House , 1904, located in the Country Club Historic District of Midtown

Omaha, Nebraska is the only known work by Kahn in the state. Palms Apartments , 1903, on Jefferson Avenue, Detroit Belle Isle Aquarium and Conservatory, 1904, and Casino, 1907 on Belle Isle, Detroit Albert Kahn House , 1906, Detroit, Michigan (his personal residence)

Albert Kahn's house on Mack Ave in Detroit, MI, where he lived from 1906-1942.

Addison Hotel , 1905 Frederick Stearns Building addition, 1906 George N. Pierce Plant, 1906, in Buffalo, New York Willistead Manor , 1906, home of the son of Hiram Walker Battle Creek Post Office, 1907, concrete construction method used again later that year in

Kahn's Packard plant Packard Plant, 1907, Kahn's tenth factory for Packard but first concrete one Cranbrook House, 1907, at Cranbrook Educational Community Highland Park Ford Plant , 1908, Highland Park, Michigan Edwin S. George Building , 1908 Kaufman Footwear Building, 1908, Kitchener Ontario, recently renovated into lofts Mahoning National Bank, 1909, Youngstown, Ohio National Theatre , 1911 Bates Mill Building Number 5, 1914, in Lewiston, Maine Kales Building , 1914, 18-story white building at Adams and Park on Grand Circus Park

in Detroit built for Kresge Corporation [5] Garden Court Apartments , 1915 Vinton Building , 1916 Detroit News building, 1917 NY Headquarters, Ford Motor Company, 1917, in New York, New York, now home of

Sean John and Bad Boy Worldwide Motor Wheel Factory, Lansing, Michigan, 1918. Currently being renovated into

residential lofts. General Motors Building , 1919, largest office building in the world at that time, GM

world headquarters, now State of Michigan offices

Albert Kahn's General Motors Building (now Cadillac Place, 3044 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, MI

Fisher Body Plant 21 , 1921 First Congregational Church addition, 1921 First National Building , Detroit, 1922 Detroit Police Headquarters, 1923 Temple Beth El , 1923 (a different building than the 1903 version), now the Lighthouse

Cathedral.

Walker Power Plant, 1923, in Windsor Ford Motor Company Lamp Factory , 1921-1925, in Flat Rock, Michigan Detroit Free Press Building , 1925 1001 Covington , 1925 Ford Hanger at The Lansing Municipal Airport, Lansing, Illinois (South Suburban

Chicago Area), 1926 S. S. Kresge World Headquarters , 1927, 5-1/2 story horizontally massed Art Deco

structure Edsel and Eleanor Ford House , 1927, Henry Ford's son's home, built as an English manor

house in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan. Fisher Building , 1927, major skyscraper of Detroit for decades Argonaut Building 1928, General Motors laboratory, now owned by the College for

Creative Studies Griswold Building , 1929 New Center Building , 1930, office building in the New Center River Rouge Glass Plant , 1930 The Dearborn Inn 1931, world's first airport hotel, built and decorated in the Georgian

style Shaarey Zedek 1932 Ford Rotunda, designed for Chicago World's Fair, 1934 (burned, 1963) Dodge Truck Plant, 1938, Warren, Michigan Burroughs Adding Machine Plant, 1938, Plymouth, Michigan Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant , 1941, produced 1/4 of American WWII tanks, continued tank

production until 1997 Willow Run Bomber Plant, 1941, used by Ford for bombers during the war, then by

Kaiser for cars, then by GM for transmissions Ford Assembly Building , California

BUILDINGS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Campus Buildings Built During His Career (Source of this list: Schreiber, Penny. “Albert Kahn’s Campus.” The Ann Arbor Observer, January, 2002, pp. 27-33):

o Engineering Building (now West Hall) 1904o Psychopathic Hospital (demolished) 1906o Hill Auditorium 1913o Helen Newberry Residence Hall 1915o Natural Science Building 1915o Betsy Barbour Residence Hall 1920o General Library (now Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library) 1920o William L. Clements Library 1923o Angell Hall 1924o Physical Science Building (now Randall Laboratory) 1924o University Hospital (demolished) 1925

o Couzens Hall 1925o East Medical Building (now C. C. Little) 1925o Thomas H. Simpson Memorial Institute 1927o University Museums Building 1928o Burton Memorial Tower 1936o Neuropsychiatric Institute (demolished) 1938

Greek Organization Buildings:

o Sigma Phi House (1900), 426 North Ingalls Street (demolished)o Delta Upsilon House (1903), 1331 Hill Streeto Collegiate Sorosis House (1905-06), 1501 Washtenaw Avenueo Delta Gamma House (1912), 1205 Hill Streeto Psi Upsilon House (1925), 1000 Hill Street

Pierre Charles L'Enfant

Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant

Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant

BornAugust 9, 1754

Anet

Died June 14, 1825 (aged 70)

Nationality French American

Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant (August 9, 1754 – June 14, 1825) was a French-born American architect and civil engineer.

Early life

L'Enfant was born at the Anet, Eure et Loire, the third child and second son of Marie Charlotte L'Enfant (aged 25 and the daughter of a minor marine official at court) and Pierre L'Enfant (1704–1787), a painter with a good reputation in the service of King Louis XV. In 1758, his brother Pierre Joseph died at the age of six, leaving him the eldest son. He studied at the Royal Academy in the Louvre before enrolling to fight in the American Revolution.

Military service

L'Enfant was recruited by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais to join in the American Revolutionary War in the American colonies. L'Enfant arrived in 1777 at the age of 23 years, serving as a military engineer in the Continental Army with Major General Lafayette.[1] Despite his aristocratic origins, L'Enfant closely identified with the United States, adopting the name Peter.[2][3]. He was wounded at the Siege of Savannah in 1779, but recovered and served in General George Washington's staff as a Captain of Engineers for the remainder of the Revolutionary War. During the war, L'Enfant was with George Washington at Valley Forge. While there, Marquis de Lafayette commissioned L'Enfant to paint a portrait of Washington. L'Enfant was promoted by brevet to Major of Engineers on May 2, 1783 in recognition of his service to American liberty. After the war, L'Enfant designed the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati, shaped as an eagle, at the request of Washington, and was sent to France to give the badges to French officers who fought in the war.

Architect and planner

Following the war, L'Enfant established a successful and highly profitable civil engineering firm in New York City. He achieved some fame as an architect by redesigning the City Hall in New York for the First Congress in Federal Hall. He also designed coins, medals, furniture and houses of the wealthy, and he was a friend of Alexander Hamilton.

In 1789, when discussions were underway regarding a new federal capital city for the United States, L'Enfant wrote to President Washington asking to be commissioned to plan the city. However, any decision on the capital was put on hold until July 1790 when Congress passed the Residence Act. The legislation, which was the result of a compromise brokered by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, specified the new capital be situated on the Potomac River, at some location between the Eastern Branch (the Anacostia River) and the Connogochegue, near Hagerstown, Maryland. The Residence Act gave authority to President Washington to appoint three commissioners to oversee the survey of the federal district and "according to such Plans, as the President shall approve," provide public buildings to accommodate the Federal government in 1800.

President George Washington appointed L'Enfant in 1791 to design the new capital city (later named the City of Washington) under the supervision of three Commissioners, whom

Washington had appointed to oversee the planning and development of the ten-mile square of federal territory that would later become the District of Columbia. Thomas Jefferson, who worked alongside President Washington in overseeing the plans for the capital, sent L'Enfant a letter outlining his task, which was to provide a drawing of suitable sites for the federal city and the public buildings. Though Jefferson had modest ideas for the Capital, L'Enfant saw the task as far more grandiose, believing he was not only locating the capital, but also included devising the city plan and designing the buildings.

L'Enfant arrived in Georgetown on March 9, 1791, and began his work, from Suter's Fountain Inn. Washington arrived on March 28, to meet with L'Enfant and the Commissioners for several days. On June 22, L'Enfant presented his first plan for the federal city to President Washington. On August 19, he appended a new map to a letter that he sent to the President.

President Washington retained one of L'Enfant's plans, showed it to Congress, and later gave it to the three Commissioners. The U.S. Library of Congress now holds both the plan that Washington apparently gave to the Commissioners and an undated anonymous survey map that the Library considers L'Enfant to have drawn before August 19, 1791. The survey map may be one that L'Enfant appended to his August 19 letter to the President.

L'Enfant's "Plan of the city intended for the permanent seat of the government of the United States..." specified locations for the "Congress house" (the Capitol), which would be built on Jenkins Hill, and the "President's house" (the White House), which would be situated on a ridge parallel to the Potomac River. L'Enfant envisioned the President's house to have public gardens and monumental architecture. Reflecting his grandiose visions, he specified that the President's house would be five times the size of the building that was actually constructed. Emphasizing the importance of the new nation's legislature, the Congress house would be located on a longitude designated as 0:0.

The plan specified that most streets would be laid out in a grid. To form the grid, some streets would travel in an east-west direction, while others would travel in a north-south direction. Diagonal avenues later named after the states of the union crossed the grid. The diagonal avenues intersected with the north-south and east-west streets at circles and rectangular plazas that would later honor notable Americans and provide open space.

L'Enfant laid out a 400 feet (122 m)-wide garden-lined "grand avenue", which he expected to travel for about 1 mile (1.6 km) along an east-west axis in the center of an area that would later become the National Mall. He also laid out a narrower avenue (Pennsylvania Avenue) which would connect the Congress house with the President's house.[20][24] In time, Pennsylvania Avenue developed into the capital city's present "grand avenue".

L'Enfant's plan additionally laid out a system of canals (later designated as the Washington City Canal) that would pass the Congress house and the President's house. One branch of the canal would empty into the Potomac River south of the "President's house" at the mouth of Tiber Creek, which would be channelized and straightened.

L'Enfant secured the lease of quarries at Wigginton Island and along Aquia Creek in Virginia to supply stone for the foundation of the Congress house in November 1791. However, his temperament and his insistence that his city design be realized as a whole, brought him into conflict with the Commissioners, who wanted to direct the limited funds available into construction of the federal buildings. In this, they had the support of Thomas Jefferson.

Andrew Ellicott's 1792 revision of L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C.

During a contentious period in February 1792, Andrew Ellicott, who had been conducting the original boundary survey of the future District of Columbia (see: Boundary Stones (District of Columbia)) and the survey of the federal city under the direction of the Commissioners, informed the Commissioners that L'Enfant had not been able to have the city plan engraved and had refused to provide him with the original plan (of which L'Enfant had prepared several versions). Ellicott, with the aid of his brother, Benjamin Ellicott, then revised the plan, despite L'Enfant's protests. Shortly thereafter, Washington dismissed L'Enfant. After L'Enfant departed, Andrew Ellicott continued the city survey in accordance with the revised plan, several versions of which were engraved, published and distributed. As a result, Ellicott's revisions subsequently became the basis for the capital city's development.

L'Enfant was initially not paid for his work on his plan for the federal city. He fell into disgrace, spending much of the rest of his life trying to persuade Congress to pay him the tens of thousands of dollars that he claimed he was owed. After a number of years, Congress finally paid him a small sum, nearly all of which went to his creditors. In 1812, he was offered a position as a Professor of Engineering at United States Military Academy, but he declined that post. In 1814, L'Enfant worked briefly on the construction of Fort Washington on the Potomac River southeast of Washington, D.C., but others soon replaced him.

L'Enfant died in poverty. He was buried at the Green Hill farm in Chillum, Prince George's County, Maryland. He left behind three watches, three compasses, some books, some maps, and surveying instruments, whose total value was about forty-six dollars.

Later recognition

Grave of Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant, overlooking the city he partially designed

In 1901 and 1902, the McMillan Commission used L'Enfant's plan as the cornerstone of a report that recommended a partial redesign of the capital city. Among other things, the Commission's report laid out a plan for a sweeping mall in the area of L'Enfant's widest "grand avenue", which had not been constructed.

At the instigation of a French ambassador to the United States, Jean Jules Jusserand, L'Enfant's adopted nation then recognized his contributions. In 1909, after lying in state at the Capitol rotunda, L'Enfant's remains were re-interred in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, on a hill overlooking the city that he had partially designed. In 1911, he was honored with a monument placed on top of his grave. Engraved on the monument is a portion of L'Enfant's own plan, which Andrew Ellicott's revision and the McMillan Commission's plan had superseded.

Honors

In 1942, a United States Liberty ship named the SS Pierre L'Enfant was launched. In 1970, she was shipwrecked and abandoned.

L'Enfant Plaza , a complex of office buildings, a hotel, and an underground shopping center centered around an esplanade (L'Enfant Promenade) in southwest Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 1968. Meeting rooms in the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel bear the names of French artists, military leaders, and explorers. The central portion of the plaza contains a map of the city. Within the city map is a smaller map that shows the plaza's location.

Beneath the L'Enfant Plaza is one of the central rapid transit Metro stops in Washington, D.C., the L'Enfant Plaza station.

In 1980, Western Plaza (subsequenty renamed to Freedom Plaza) in northwest Washington, D.C., was designed. An inlay in the Plaza depicts parts of L'Enfant's plan for the City of Washington.[38]

In 2003, L'Enfant's plan for Washington was commemorated on a USPS postage stamp [39]. The diamond shape of the stamp reflects the original 100 square miles (259 km2) tract of land selected for the District. Shown is a view along the National Mall, including the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. Also portrayed are cherry blossoms around the tidal basin and row houses from the Shaw neighborhood.

Antoni Gaudí

  Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí by Pau Audouard

Personal informationName Antoni Gaudí

Birth date 25 June 1852Birth place Reus, or Riudoms (Catalonia, Spain)[1][2]

Date of death 10 June 1926 (aged 73)Place of death Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

WorkBuildings Sagrada Família, Casa Milà, Casa BatllóProjects Parc Güell, Colònia Güell

Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet (Catalan pronunciation: [ənˈtoni gowˈði]; 25 June 1852–10 June 1926)—in English, often referred to by the Spanish translation of his name, Antonio Gaudí

was a Spanish Catalan architect who operated in the same time period as the Modernist style (Art Nouveau) movement but was famous for his unique and highly individualistic designs and thus is not categorized as such.

Life

Childhood

Antoni Gaudí was born in the province of Tarragona in southern Catalonia on 25 June 1852.. While there is some dispute as to his birthplace – official documents state that he was born in the town of Reus, whereas others claim he was born in Riudoms, a small village 3 miles (5 km) from Reus, – it is certain that he was baptized in Reus a day after his birth. The artist's parents, Francesc Gaudí Serra and Antònia Cornet Bertran, both came from families of coppersmiths. During his youth, Gaudí suffered many times from the rheumatic fevers that were common at the time. This illness caused him to spend much time in isolation, and it also allowed him to spend lots of time alone with nature.

It was this exposure to nature at an early age which is thought to have inspired him to incorporate natural shapes and themes into his later work.

Early career

1878–1879: Lampposts for the Plaça Reial at Barcelona; 1878: Showcase for glove manufacturer Comella. Via this work, used at the World's Fair

in Paris, Eusebi Güell came to know the architect.[10]

1878–1882: Several designs for the Obrera Mataronense at Mataró. Only a very small part of these plans was built, but it shows Gaudí's first use of parabolic arches, here in a wooden structure.

1883–1885: Casa Vicens; 1883–1885: Villa "El Capricho" at Comillas (Santander); 1884: Finca Güell: Entrance pavilion and stables for the palace at Pedralbes (first

completed building for Eusebi Güell); 1884–1891: Completion of the crypt of the Sagrada Família (the crypt had been started

by the architect Francisco del Villar in 1882, who had to abandon the project in 1883); 1885–1889: Palau Güell; 1887–1893: Episcopal palace at Astorga; 1892-1893: Casa de los Botines at León;

Later years

The Casa Milà, in the Eixample, Barcelona.

Gaudí was a devout Catholic, to the point that in his later years he abandoned secular work and devoted his life to Catholicism and his Sagrada Família. He designed it to have 18 towers, 12 for the 12 apostles, 4 for the 4 evangelists, one for Mary and one for Jesus. Soon after, his closest family and friends began to die. His works slowed to a halt, and his attitude changed. One of his closest family members – his niece Rosa Egea – died in 1912, only to be followed by a "faithful collaborator", Francesc Berenguer Mestres, two years later. After these tragedies, Barcelona fell on hard times economically. The construction of La Sagrada Família slowed; the construction of La Colonia Güell ceased altogether. Four years later in 1918, Eusebi Güell, his patron, died.

Perhaps it was because of this unfortunate sequence of events that Gaudí changed. He became reluctant to talk with reporters or have his picture taken and solely concentrated on his masterpiece, La Sagrada Família. He spent the last few years of his life living in the crypt of the "Sagrada Familia".

On 7 June 1926 Gaudí was hit by a tram. Because of his ragged attire and empty pockets, many cab drivers refused to pick him up for fear that he would be unable to pay the fare. He was eventually taken to a paupers' hospital in Barcelona. Nobody recognized the injured artist until his friends found him the next day. When they tried to move him into a nicer hospital, Gaudí refused, reportedly saying "I belong here among the poor." He died three days later on 10 June 1926, at age 73, with half of Barcelona mourning his death. He was buried in the midst of La Sagrada Família.

Although Gaudí was constantly changing his mind and recreating his blueprints, the only existing copy of his last recorded blue prints was destroyed by the anarchists in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War. This has made it very difficult for his workers to complete the church in the fashion Gaudí most likely would have wished. It is for this that Gaudí is known to many as "God's Architect". La Sagrada Família is now being completed, but differences between his work and the new additions can be seen.

As of 2007, completion of the Sagrada Familía is planned for 2026, which would be the 100th anniversary of Gaudí's death. It is currently at the center of a row over the proposed route of a high-speed rail tunnel that would pass nearby the house, approximately thirty meters below. Supporters of the tunnel point to many successful tunneling projects under city centers. Detractors cite a metro tunnel in Barcelona’s Carmel district that collapsed and destroyed an entire city block on the February 1, 2005. The route passes nearby to some of Gaudí's other works, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà, although deep underground.

Artistic style

Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece, Sagrada Família, under construction since 1882.

Gaudí's first works were designed in the style of gothic architecture and traditional Catalan architectural modes, but he soon developed his own distinct sculptural style. French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who promoted an evolved form of gothic architecture, proved a major influence on Gaudí. The student went on to contrive highly original designs – irregular and fantastically intricate. Some of his greatest works, most notably La Sagrada Família, have an almost hallucinatory power.

He once said on the subject of gothic architecture:

Gothic art is imperfect, it means to solve; it is the style of the compass, the formula of industrial repetition. Its stability is based on the permanent propping of abutments: it is a defective body that holds with support... gothic works produce maximum emotion when they are mutilated, covered with ivy and illuminated by the moon.

Gaudí spent ten years working on studies for the design of La Sagrada Família and developing a new method of structural calculation based on a model built with cords and small sacks of lead shot. The outline of the church was traced on a wooden board (1:10 scale), which was then placed on the ceiling of a small house next to the work site. Cords were hung from the points where columns were to be placed. The sacks of pellets, weighing one ten-thousandth part of the

weight the arches would to support, were hung from each catenaric arch formed by the cords. Photographs were then taken of the resulting model from various angles. When the photographs were turned upside-down, the lines of tension formed by the cords and weights revealed the lines of pressure of the compressed structure. This is one of the ways that Gaudí obtained natural forms in his work.

The same expressive power of Gaudí's monumental works exists in his oddly graceful chairs and tables. Gaudí's architecture is a total integration of materials, processes and poetics. His approach to furniture design exceeded structural expression and continued with the overall architectural idea.

Interests

Gaudí, throughout his life, studied nature's angles and curves and incorporated them into his designs and mosaics. Instead of relying on geometric shapes, he mimicked the way men stand upright. The hyperboloids and paraboloids he borrowed from nature were easily reinforced by steel rods and allowed his designs to resemble elements from the environment.

Gaudí was so inspired by nature, he says, because:

Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.

Because of his rheumatism, the artist observed a strict vegetarian diet, used homeopathic drug therapy, underwent water therapy, and hiked regularly. Long walks, besides suppressing his rheumatism, further allowed him to experience nature.

Popularity

Gaudí's originality was at first ridiculed by his peers. Indeed, he was first only supported by the rich industrialist Eusebi Güell. His fellow citizens referred to the Casa Milà as La Pedrera ("the quarry"), and George Orwell, who stayed in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, admittedly loathed his work. As time passed, though, his work became more famous. He stands as one of history's most original architects.

Social and political influences

The opportunities afforded by Catalonia's socioeconomic and political influences were endless. Catalans such as Antoni Gaudí often showcased the country's diverse art techniques in their works. By mimicking nature, such artists symbolically pushed back the ever-increasing industrial society.

Gaudí, among others, promoted the Catalan movement for regaining sovereignty from Spain by incorporating elements of Catalan culture in his designs. Gaudí was involved in politics since he supported the Catalanist political party Regionalist League. For example, in 1924 Spanish authorities (ruled by the dictator Primo de Rivera) closed Barcelona's churches in order to

prevent a nationalist celebration (11 September, National Day of Catalonia), Gaudí attended to Saints Justus and Pastor's church and was arrested by the Spanish police for answering in Catalan.

In popular culture

Gaudí's influence appeared in the Pokémon film The Rise of Darkrai. Gaudí himself inspired the architect Godey, designer of the Space-Time Towers, which are based on the Sagrada Família.

The Alan Parsons Project released Gaudi, an album based on the life of Antoni Gaudí, in 1987. Eric Woolfson in 1993 reengineered the album as a musical, Gaudi.

U.S. ambient musician Robert Rich released an album, also named Gaudí, in 1991.

Major works

View of the Park Güell, El Carmel, Barcelona.

Casa Vicens (1884–1885) Palau Güell (1885–1889) College of the Teresianas (1888–1890) Crypt of the Church of Colònia Güell (1898–1916) Casa Calvet (1899–1904) Casa Batlló (1905–1907) Casa Milà (La Pedrera) (1905–1907) Park Güell (1900–1914) Sagrada Família Nativity façade and Crypt of the Sagrada Família church (1884 until his

death in 1926, although still under construction as of 2010)

Auguste Perret

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, 1913

Auguste Perret (12 February 1874 - 25 February 1954) was a French architect and a world leader and specialist in reinforced concrete construction. In 2005 his post-WWII reconstruction of Le Havre was declared by UNESCO one of the World Heritage Sites.

He was born in Ixelles, Belgium. He was the brother of the architect Gustave Perret.

He worked on a new interpretation of the neo-classical style. He continued to carry the banner of nineteenth century rationalism after Viollet-le-Duc. His efforts to utilize historical typologies executed in new materials were largely eclipsed by the younger media-savvy architect Le Corbusier, Perret's one-time employee, and his ilk.

From 1940 Perret taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He won the Royal Gold Medal in 1948 and the AIA Gold Medal in 1952.

Work

Rue Franklin apartments, Paris, 1902-1904 Garage Ponthieu, Paris, 1905 the Art Nouveau landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, 1913 the Concert Hall of the École Normale de Musique de Paris concrete cathedral in Le Raincy, France, Église Notre-Dame du Raincy, 1923, with

stained-glass work by Marie-Alain Couturier extensions to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1945 the City Hall, St. Joseph's Church and further reconstruction of the French city of Le

Havre after more than 80,000 inhabitants of that city were left homeless following World War II, 1949-1956

the Gare d'Amiens, 1955 the villa Aghion, in Alexandria (destroyed 28 August 2009)