Last week the village of Hyères at the French Riviera hosted the 27th International Festival of Fashion & Photography. In the impressive decor of the Villa Noailles young artist pave their way to international succes. It’s a very avant garde festival, a bohemian home where trends are set, where open minds come together to look at the future. No better location than this one, visited by many great names.

Villa Noailles is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, between 1923 and 1927. It is located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, southeastern France.
Charles de Noailles was born in 1891, and his wife Marie-Laure was born in 1902. They were married in 1923. Before their marriage, they became friends of artist-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Noailles commissioned a portrait of his wife by Pablo Picasso in 1923.

 
In 1923, they signed a contract with the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the hills above the city of Hyères. Construction was underway for three years, and eventually also included a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the couple were important patrons of modern art, particularly surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel; and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuşi, Miró, and Dora Maar. Villa Noailles features prominently in Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.

 
Source: The Red List
Post by Coco Pastis

These pictures were taken in “The Stork” villa in Ostend, Belgium. Architect and furniture designer Joseph De Bruycker from Roeselare, Belgium was influenced by the cubist style of the Dutch architect Willem Dudok.

The house he designed for Dr. Camiel Depuydt is typical of the interwar progressive architecture that reflected the international “modern style”. The architect designed a concept that incorporated the doctor office and living quarters. The whole is a combination of geometric volumes.

The external design continues in the interior (also designed by The Bruycker) and in the garden. “The Stork” is the result of of an extraordinary cooperation and interaction between the client and the architect. This protected monument is currently on the market.

source: Architecten Woningen

Post by Coco Pastis

This project has been realized in a neighborhood, Antony in Paris, France that is an example of the belief that architecture, whether heterogeneous and homogeneous, is shaped by outdated zoning regulations. The delays in securing permits, along with conditions of the urban situation and our desire to continue and refine our own research on wood constructions, led us to propose a type of construction system.

This type is still not released in urban areas and rather reserved for detached houses in less dense sites. The urban rules and the site context, which is very typical, have suggested the template, which has proved a real asset to the project.

Completely built in wood panels placed on a pedestal (the ground here is very bad), the house is completely prefabricated in a workshop and delivered to the site to be finally assembled in just two weeks. This is a building system in Finnish wood panels that come from sustainably managed cooperatives of small private forest owners.

The pre-cut panels, supplemented by wood fiber insulation and non-treated siding, arrived at the site almost finished, reducing pollution to a minimum (the site being located in a dense suburb). The façades, in wood panels too, were mounted along the floor. With a very efficient exterior insulation system which completely allows the elimination of thermal bridges, wood construction has the advantage to make the building very powerful.

The under-floor gas-fired heating with low temperature becomes almost superfluous. The double-glazed + argon windows of the patios and the South façades, deliberately oversized, capture the sun in winter and are sheltered by a canopy and a pergola in summer. This allows together with their performance and surface, an easy control of the solar gain and air flow as needed, without necessitating an intensive use of air conditioning or heating.

The main facade on the street, lodging the rooms in the North, is a composition of large glazed openings and single opening shutters designed in stainless steel mirror with no glazing. The reflections of the vegetation and the movement of these shutters in stainless steel mirrors make the façade changing.

The ventilation of the rooms is regulated by the openings of the shutters, and the penetration of light through the windows. The recovery of rainwater can water the garden and planters allow homeowners to cultivate aromatic plants and garden without water over-consumption.

Architects: Djuric Tardio Architectes

Location: Paris, France

Completion: 2012
Surface: 246 sqm SHAB

Photographs: Clément Guillaume

Source: Archdaily

Post by Coco Pastis

Celebrating the homes, studios, and workshops of the famed art colony as well as their builders’ lifestyles. Captured in stunning color and warm available light are the plain and poetic, the exotic and beautiful, the funky and rustic shelters and workplaces of generations of creative residents of that unique Catskill mountain village. Its main thesis: great homes can be built cheaply by anyone with the vision and determination to go outside conformist architectural concepts and the usual straitjacket economics.

The Woodstock house, which is many houses, is almost always owner designed and built, using local materials from the surrounding woods and quarries as well as salvage from old farms, logging yards, dumps, and mills. Here is recycling, self-sufficiency, and communal “pitching in” before they were fashionable.

The gorgeous photos were selected out of thousands to permanently record the ingenuity and craftsmanship of these builders, and one can marvel at the varied ways found to keep the elements off easels, kilns, looms, computers, stained glass, table saws, and word processors.

In its original printings a best seller (150,000 copies), “Woodstock Handmade Houses” is a cult classic that was excerpted in major magazines and museum shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Now with computer enhanced photos, this new edition is timed to the renascence of the Woodstock Generation values

Source: Hope Farm
Post by Coco Pastis

Philosopher Alain de Botton had the idea for Living Architecture while writing a book about architecture, and feels passionately about the educational mission behind Living Architecture. His mission is to share his love of beauty, his role to select the architects ‘Living Architecture’ works with. He takes escapism to a whole new level. Every detail is perfection.

But there’s more, Alain de Botton’s School of Life offers tailor made Reading Retreats. You stay in some of the most beautiful contemporary houses in the UK and at the same time read specially-curated of relevant and useful books.

A Reading Retreat begins with a session (by phone or email) with one of the bibliotherapists. These experts will carefully consider your reading habits, your current ambitions, desires and stage of life – and then draw up a reading prescription for you, directing you to a highly inspirational, provocative and eye-opening set of books (be they novels, poems, essays or biographies) to read while you are away.

Armed with your reading prescription, you can then take off on holiday to one of the five extraordinary houses of Living Architecture, built by some of the world’s greatest architects on sites in Devon, Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk. In these tranquil beautiful houses (all additionally armed with their own intelligent libraries), you will be able to make your way through your list of books in surroundings utterly congenial to rest and reflection.

Sources: The School of Life / Living Architecture

from Building an Igloo by Ulli Steltzer (text and photos), Douglas & McIntyre, Toronto, 1981
Tookillkee Kiguktak and his son Jopee demonstrate building an igloo. They live in Griese Fiord, on Ellesmere Island (Canadian arctic).

source : stoppingoffplace.blogspot.com

Le Corbusier loved Manhattan. He loved its newness, he loved its Cartesian regularity, above all he loved its tall buildings. He had only one reservation, which he revealed on landing in New York City in 1935. The next day, a headline in the Herald Tribune informed its readers that the celebrated architect FINDS AMERICAN SKYSCRAPERS MUCH TOO SMALL. Le Corbusier always thought big. He once proposed replacing a large part of the center of Paris with 18 sixty-story towers; that made headlines too.
He was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887. When he was 29, he went to Paris, where he soon after adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, Le Corbusier, as his pseudonym. Jeanneret had been a small-town architect; Le Corbusier was a visionary. He believed that architecture had lost its way. Art Nouveau, all curves and sinuous decorations, had burned itself out in a brilliant burst of exuberance; the seductive Art Deco style promised to do the same. The Arts and Crafts movement had adherents all over Europe, but as the name implies, it was hardly representative of an industrial age. Le Corbusier maintained that this new age deserved a brand-new architecture. “We must start again from zero,” he proclaimed.
 
The new architecture came to be known as the International Style. Of its many partisans–among them Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany, Theo van Doesburg in Holland–none was better known than Le Corbusier. He was a tireless proselytizer, addressing the public in manifestos, pamphlets, exhibitions and his own magazine. He wrote books–dozens of them–on interior decoration, painting and architecture. They resembled instruction manuals. An example is his recipe for the International Style: raise the building on stilts, mix in a free-flowing floor plan, make the walls independent of the structure, add horizontal strip windows and top it off with a roof garden. But this makes him sound like a technician, and he was anything but. Although he dressed like a bureaucrat, in dark suits, bow ties and round horn-rimmed glasses, he was really an artist (he was an accomplished painter and sculptor). What is most memorable about the austere, white-walled villas that he built after World War I in and around Paris is their cool beauty and their airy sense of space. “A house is a machine for living in,” he wrote. The machines he admired most were ocean liners, and his architecture spoke of sun and wind and the sea.
 
By 1950 he had changed course, abandoning Purism, as he called it, for something more robust and sculptural. His spartan, lightweight architecture turned rustic, with heavy walls of brick and fieldstone and splashes of bright color. He discovered the potential of reinforced concrete and made it his own, leaving the material crudely unfinished, inside and out, the marks of wooden formwork plainly visible. Concrete allowed Le Corbusier to explore unusual shapes. The billowing roof of the chapel at Ronchamp, France, resembles a nun’s wimple; the studios of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard push out of the building like huge cellos. For the state capital of Chandigarh in India, he created a temple precinct of heroic structures that appear prehistoric.

Le Corbusier was the most important architect of the 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright was more prolific–Le Corbusier’s built oeuvre comprises about 60 buildings–and many would argue he was more gifted. But Wright was a maverick; Le Corbusier dominated the architectural world, from that halcyon year of 1920, when he started publishing his magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, until his death in 1965. He inspired several generations of architects–including this author–not only in Europe but around the world. He was more than a mercurial innovator. Irascible, caustic, Calvinistic, Corbu was modern architecture’s conscience.
 
He was also a city planner. “Modern town planning comes to birth with a new architecture,” he wrote in a book titled simply Urbanisme. “By this immense step in evolution, so brutal and so overwhelming, we burn our bridges and break with the past.” He meant it. There were to be no more congested streets and sidewalks, no more bustling public squares, no more untidy neighborhoods. People would live in hygienic, regimented high-rise towers, set far apart in a parklike landscape. This rational city would be separated into discrete zones for working, living and leisure. Above all, everything should be done on a big scale–big buildings, big open spaces, big urban highways.
 
He called it La Ville Radieuse, the Radiant City. Despite the poetic title, his urban vision was authoritarian, inflexible and simplistic. Wherever it was tried–in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier himself or in Brasilia by his followers–it failed. Standardization proved inhuman and disorienting. The open spaces were inhospitable; the bureaucratically imposed plan, socially destructive. In the U.S., the Radiant City took the form of vast urban-renewal schemes and regimented public housing projects that damaged the urban fabric beyond repair. Today these megaprojects are being dismantled, as superblocks give way to rows of houses fronting streets and sidewalks. Downtowns have discovered that combining, not separating, different activities is the key to success. So is the presence of lively residential neighborhoods, old as well as new. Cities have learned that preserving history makes a lot more sense than starting from zero. It has been an expensive lesson, and not one that Le Corbusier intended, but it too is part of his legacy.

source : time.com
 

De Yturbe Arquitectos is a Mexican architecture firm with a powerful aesthetic and a practice committed to social, economical and environmental sustainability. Once you have seen some of their work it is almost unmistakable. The buildings emphasize a use of natural light in the spaces they illuminate, as well as how the light interacts with colours, textures and forms within the buildings themselves. I love how the light interacts with the forms to cast shadow and enhance the architecture throughout different times of the day. I could see how they are possibly influenced by Impressionism with their use of water reflecting surfaces and emphasis on light. Spatial, emotional and even spiritual, their work is nothing but timeless.
 
All images copyright of de Yturbe Arquitectos
 
source : nychukdesign.com
 

Above is the most literal, architectural interpretation of crystals that I could find. It’s a theater, the Kinémax, at an amusement park in France that revolves around the future. The park,Futuroscope, opened nearly 25 years ago and the Kinémax has been an emblem of the park ever since. It’s kind of amazing. The theater, like most of the structures around the park, was designed by Denis Laming. “Denis Laming was only 34 years old when he submitted his design proposals for Futuroscope in early 1984.” He could not have known that he would spend much of his future in the park, adding new pavilions. Many are clever, but none of his pavilions after the Kinémax are as immaginative or surprising.

source :thefoxisblack.com

“It’s that wonderful ability of 3 great designers, to work together, almost at the peak of their careers. You have Saarinen building his most important domestic commission, you have Girard doing probably his most beautiful interiors, and then you have Kiley’s gardens which have been regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th Century landscape architecture.”

- R. Craig Miller, Senior Curator of Design Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art

“It’s at the summit of the experience of Modernism.”

- Maxwell Anderson, CEO Indianapolis Museum of Art

Behold the Miller House, completed in 1957 for industrialist and philanthropist J. Irwin Miller, and created by a holy trinity of 20th Century design masters: Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard, and Dan Kiley. Featuring amazing custom furnishings by both Saarinen and Girard, including an illuminated Tulip dining table, and a modified Eames Sofa Compact in polished brass. Girard continued to worked as the home’s interior designer for the next 15 years, modifying the interiors in accordance to the changing needs of the Miller family.

This is the ultimate modernist home.

Photos by Leslie Williamson for Dwell, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Garden Visit. See more photos and read more project details at the links.

source : thenorthelevation.blogspot.com