A core group of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ray Kappe embraced the West Coast from Vancouver to LA with its particular geography and values and left behind a legacy of inspired dwellings. Today, architects celebrate the influence established by their predecessors.
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16 Comments
Loved this presentation!
Wonderful, a beautiful presentation of human spaces.
Some of it looks nice, but most is worthy of demolition. I don’t find modernist architecture awe inspiring like classical architecture or its successor styles.
There hasn't been a great style of home since the Victorians. I can't think of anything more cold than living in the house equivalent of a public park where there is no trace of you because it would look funny to have evidence of an actual person living there. Windows are great and these are definitely nice, but I like privacy. Do rich people NOT like privacy? And finally these ar too easy. Alll the same geopmetric bases without my=uch variation. Even FL Wright experimented more than these people do as shown here. I can certainly understand why no one wants to live in these homes – they aren't for living at all they are for looking at or thru, but not to be lved in. Those poor kids reduced to playing with a freaking pillow because toys would be clutter. Wow. Give me a sign a house is lived in not used as a corporate loaner house.
Frank Lloyd Wright ❤🔥❤🔥❤🔥and Ray Kappe❣💋
🐝
These are very expensive caves. Because of the expense the owners must seek greater and greater ways to make profit from "work" (which is generally some kind of system degrading society through self-interest). Buy a simple place and relax more of the time in or outside of it. Hike, go to parks, visit streams, and do less to degrade the environment for all. Society is full of BS about how "beautiful" human creations are.
I believe that the biggest challenge of modernism homes was-as the one gentleman mentioned, that Contractors couldn’t read the plans and that it took one with a craftsman’s way of thinking. I imagine that they all understood the plans but knowing that they can just keep pounding out the same old styles of homes and let some other contractor tackle the absurdity of these styles. Forcing the one’s that did not want to take on the project simply bid sky high. Like anything else, I’m sure that some contractors and their crews became very talented at building these styles but in limited areas of our beautiful country.
Modernism : if you throw enough money at a bad idea you can make it work.
From a technical aspect, the surface area determines the cost to heat. I've stayed in one of these from 1960 in Spain. They still get cold in winter but the bulk and being semi submerged helps in summer. The freedom for internal garden spaces and such is something calming. There's one in Suffolk UK. Solar gain needs sun. UK too cloudy.
All preamble and not much of what it said on the label. There's only so much smug owner blended with bland manifesto speak architect I can tolerate. If ever there was a doco that said ARCHITECTURE IS FOR THE WEALTHY this is it.
The home pictured is Falling Water in Pennsylvania. Frank Lloyd Wright was from Chicago.
Why do modernist houses feel so spacious – answer, they're big !
You first have to start off with a lot of square footage and then have residents with the above average income for the upkeep of the building. Modernists tried creating 'homes for the masses' in the 60's and 70's and utterly failed. They couldn't use large swathes of glass because a 100 people were walking past the front door every day, so they created concrete boxes in the sky with rat runs to move about in, without consideration of the limitations of the building materials in the climate. The more you shrink down modernist buildings the more they resemble shipping containers.
The answer to good homes for all human beings is to have enough space inside and out for a 'family' to live in; the style of architecture is almost irrelevant.
Hell if I win lotto I'm building me a modernist house. In NZ native forest with a view it would be magically idyllic
I visited Fallingwater a couple handfuls of Augusts ago. It was a quasi-pilgrimage – I had always understood that Frank Lloyd Wright was the demigod of American architects and to actually go to see one of the crown jewels was A Big Deal.
Until I got there and went inside.
Instead of feeling organic and in tune with nature, the interior was cramped, hot and dark. Claustrophobic, almost. My observation actually shocked me. I was not prepared to dislike the magnificent Fallingwater, but so help me, I did. And still do.
A few years later I got to visit some of Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona, and his interiors were everything that FLW's were supposed to be.
I was never a fan of modernism until the flood of McMansions started ruining local neighborhoods and I started appreciating the elegant simplicity of mid century homes.