The famous house built in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1930 (now the Czech Republic) for textile manufacturer Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Grete and designed by architect Mies van der Rohe, opens for tours in March after restoration (photo courtesy Great Buildings.com).

The Tugendhats fled the Nazis in 1938 and after a complex history it is now owned by the city of Brno. I want to visit someday! Until then, let’s look at how this icon of modernism treated house design not as a box but as a series of

interpenetrating and overlapping spaces and planes. What a departure it was

and is! Here’s a view of the neighborhood. In the upper aerial photo see how the floors appear carved out of a large rectangular volume; sections even seem to  float. The street level entry with bedrooms is at the top; living, dining, study, kitchen occupy the middle; utility spaces are at ground level. Roof decks, window walls, even the terrace stair read as voids in, or extensions of, the elemental geometry. Views of the living room from the 1930s show how Mies treated walls,

whether sold or transparent, not as fixed boundaries but as shifting planes (though they are in fact fixed) that give shape and character to what is essentially an infinite extension of space from inside to outside.  The living room window wall takes the idea of uniting interior and exterior a step further: an electric motor allows it to disappear into the floor. (These elegant panels are the precursors to the sliding partitions of countless modern homes and, less nobly, convention hotels.) Here ornament is no longer something applied but must be inherent in the luxurious materials used — onyx, Macassar ebony, rosewood,

polished metal — as shown in a recent photograph of part of the living area and the curving dining room wall (courtesy Great Buildings.com). According to the villa’s website the Tugendhats were decidedly forward-thinking and must have been perfect clients for Mies. Grete recalled: “I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear and simple shapes. My husband was horrified by the idea of having rooms full of objects and cloths as he had known from childhood.” The Mies-designed Brno chairs, seen in the dining room above, and armchairs,

like the one above, added to the spacious uncluttered effect. These chairs remain popular today and even spark further inventiveness, as in the recent art piece by

Fernanda Fragateiro, which cleverly comments on the creative relationship between Mies and his interior designer collaborator and erstwhile mistress Lilly Reich: sort of a love seat with stretch marks! (photo courtesy Frieze magazine.) For more on the house and its restoration see Architectural Record.

Today many architects and designers continue to interpret and expand upon aspects of a Misian esthetic, as Braxton Werner and Paul Field do in Plan 491-6,

with the stone wall that extends through glass to shape a patio, and in Plan 491-5

where the headboard becomes the storage wall. Here the element that defines the room is what one might call a multi-functional accent wall.

The Tugendhat house remains a remarkable symbol of the 20th century. Bravo to Brno for bringing it back to life. In a recent novel — The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer (Other Press, 2009), which uses the Tugendhat house and its glass living room as the key setting, architect-protagonist Rainer von Abt says: “Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose space within.” I’ll let you know how everything turns out.

Brad Pitt has long been interested in landmark residential architecture, having co-authored a book on the Blacker house of 1907 designed by Greene & Greene, as well as having founded the Make It Right Foundation for housing in the Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New Orleans. According to Celebuzz, he’s also a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, at Bear Run, Pennsylvania,

which he visited in 2006 (photo of Brad and Angelina by Cara Armstrong, courtesy Celebuzz). All of which brings to mind the starring roles of architectural elements like the cantilever — which Wright made so famous in his waterfall -lunging design. This is evidently partly why Brad is interested — he’d like to build on a similar site some day. (Maybe we can provide a plan!) Indeed, the cantilever, defined as a projecting beam or member supported only at one end, is very seductive. Alvar Aalto’s cantilever chair for Artek of the early

1930s is a perfect example (photo courtesy Kissthedesign).  So

is one of Marcel Breuer’s famous metal chairs (photo courtesy Factoidz) designed in the late 1920s. The trick is to provide enough counterweight or balance to support the projection. The idea was quickly adopted by the most progressive architects of the 20th century for its expressive quality as a form of  abstract space-shaping sculpture, as Marcel Breauer did in the first

house he designed for his family in New Canaan, Connecticut of 1947 (photo courtesy Archives of American Art). Architect and Breuer biographer Robert F. Gatje, who worked in the Breuer office for many years, told me that the “floating” portion of this house worked well — no posts to get in the way of the carport below it — but that it always had a certain “bounce” to it, especially on the deck. No doubt it gave Mrs. Breuer an extra spring to her step. The cantilever is in fact a space-saver and architects often use it where there is a desire to minimize site disturbance or to take dramatic advantage of a view, as the architectural firm

Anderson Anderson did with this house in the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle (photos above and below courtesy Anderson Anderson).

The architects give a good rationale for this design: “The small ground floor building footprint/foundation reduces the cost of this expensive area of the house, and allows the points of attachment to adapt to varying slope and soil conditions with minimal disruption of the natural topography.” In other words they can use this or similar designs on a variety of rugged sites. With cantilevers, things can get dramatic very fast, as in the “Ribbon House” by the Perth, Australia firm H + AA.

Not only is the  glass-walled living room projecting into the landscape but the roof appears to be rippling into the sky as if caught by a sudden gust of wind.

I think a cantilever is most useful for a house if it can be used in a way to maximize the appreciation of a beautiful landscape feature, the way a great bridge does. So Brad, I hope you find a good site, first!

A Good Idea

With football bowl season upon us — not to mention the second series of Downton Abbey — it’s time to look around for the correct TV remote — now where did you see it last? So here’s an idea that my wife Mary dreamed up: the Multiple Pocket Remote Holster!

Straightforward sewing around a long dowel, from which it hangs. Fabric and pattern up to you. There. Now it’s easier to find the clicker so you can watch the latest Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie film!

Now, during the holiday week, is a good time to dream about rest and relaxation in your own rural getaway. So here’s a short list of architecturally suggestive cabins.

One. The prefab in the trees by Swedish firm Cyrén & Cyrén gives new meaning

to lodging, not to mention lodge-pole pines. It’s a bedroom unit in the Tree Hotel, located in Harrads, near Sweden’s Lule River, and looks like it came from a galaxy far far away (photo above courtesy Inhabitat, photo below courtesy Dezeen). A catwalk leads to the

rooftop entrance (one of the other suspended rooms is a mirror cube). Improbable and delightful — I want to go there! Presumably a gentle breeze will rock you to sleep, but if you hear a chain saw it may be time to check out.

Two. Continuing the rustic theme, here’s a cabin designed by Hans Linberg (of Swedish cleantech start-up EcoSpark) that uses tree trunks as a way of

playing with geometry: more of a log box than a log cabin. In full camouflage mode (the wood covers a prefab plastic and steel frame) with the shutters down, the

logs pile up and the hut disappears — well, almost. “Ceci n’est pas un woodpile,” as Duchamp might say. I like the way the design takes the idea of the duck blind and runs with it (quite far away!). Images courtesy Dornob.

Three. Architect David Coleman describes his Hill House in Winthrop, Washington as a “20 ‘ wide x 115′

long stepped platform… sited on a long, narrow, rocky hillside…it reads as a habitable landscape” (photos courtesy David Coleman). I like the way it culminates in the deck with the round fire

pit defined by gabion (rock filled cages) walls on the master suite end, and with another deck and more gabions on the living room end, as if the structure is growing out of or into the land itself (photo courtesy Mocoloco.) This simple serene progression from public to private and vice versa is evocative: home as a short architectural hike…

Four. This urbane floating home on Seattle’s Lake Union by Vandeventer & Carlander Architects puts the main entertaining spaces — organized as a series of framed openings within an elegant

box — on the upper level. The living room veranda is carved out of the rectangular volume to sharpen sight lines across the water. It also cantilevers over the lower floor to shelter the deck off the master bedroom. The design shows how to swim with geometry (photo courtesy Karmatrendz).

Five. “Packed But Never Shipped” might be a good name for this clever cabin by Olson Kundig Architects.

When the window flaps — resembling warehouse pallets — are down they form the surrounding deck platforms so the tiny structure can expand (images courtesy Olson Kundig). When the vacation ends, the platforms fold up for security and the house is effectively crated, to await the next weekend when it can be unpacked and played with again. Take care of your toys and they will last longer!

These design approaches appeal to me because they are all about serious play: taking inspiration from settings, structure, and materials to fashion something unique and memorable. Use them — along with the many serious and seriously playful schemes in our Cottage Plans Collection and One Bedroom Plans Collection, like 479-1 by architects Peter Brachvogel and Stella Carosso (below)

or 517-1 by architect Jonathan Feldman (below);

or 452-2 by architect David Wright (below)

to help you jump start your own getaway cabin dreams. (When you browse these collections sort by “newest plans” to see our latest designs.) Here’s to the comfort and joy of architectural invention.

]]> http://blog.houseplans.com/2011/12/23/dream-cabins-and-cabin-dreams/feed/ 4 Dan The-Cabin-Cyren-Cyren-10-537x357 from Inhabitat dezeen_Cabin-by-CYRÉN-CYRÉN-5 wood log rustic cabin design from world most beautiful houses wood log rustic cabin design 2 3_full 6_full hill_house_david_coleman_architecture-500x376 Lake Union Floating Home fbwc_041111_01-630x486 479-1re-1642_plan-detail 517-1alt1-860_plan-detail 452-2re-825_plan-detail http://blog.houseplans.com/2011/11/28/fireplace-focal-points-and-house-plans/ http://blog.houseplans.com/2011/11/28/fireplace-focal-points-and-house-plans/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:01:48 +0000 Dan Gregory http://blog.houseplans.com/?p=4372 Continue reading →]]> Architectural Warmth

Here are some images of fireplaces to help you take a breather — or just plain zone out — during the holiday shopping rush. The flames, not to mention the surround, can be mesmerizing.  The Pasadena architects Greene and Greene designed one of the most famous fireplaces  for their Gamble house of 1908.

It’s an inglenook in the living room — rather like a very elegant compartment on a train that just happens to have a large fireplace between the bench seats where the window would be (photo courtesy The Gamble House). Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his fireplaces and an almost ritualistic attitude toward the hearth as the very center and soul of a home.

At Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, of 1937,  he created an organic inglenook from boulders on site (photo courtesy About.com). In the late 1940s, ranch house popularizer Cliff May took the fireplace

outside and added a rotisserie/barbecue. The architectural possibilities are vast and have grown substantially with today’s prefab gas units, like these examples from Ortal Heating Solutions. One can extend across an entire wall

or become a minimalist room divider

that doubles as a display space for artifacts. A frameless glass front can turn the

corner in a minimalist modern way (these three photos courtesy Ortal).

So how do the architects and designers at Houseplans.com treat the fireplace? For Sarah Susanka in Plan 454-6, the fireplace becomes part of a multifunctional wall

with space for storage and display as well as a flat screen television. In Plan 491-7 Braxton

Werner and Paul Field treat it more abstractly as part of a stone wall. Lorenzo Spano echoes Cliff May by going outside with it in Plan 473-3,

only now making it a freestanding piece of sculpture. There are many ways to spark your architectural imagination.

The power of design was made evident to me once again when I visited the recently completed National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site in New York. First you must receive a free visitor pass from the Memorial website specifying the time for your visit.
Then, when you get to the site – which is surrounded by seven skyscrapers in various stages of construction – your visitor pass is inspected and you enter a long line of switchbacks that, after about half an hour, leads into a small lobby where you pass through x-ray machines – as if you are boarding a plane – and

then go out again down a blue walkway, around a corner, to the park itself,

which is a geometric expanse of granite pavers and lawn under a forest grid of swamp white oaks. (The Memorial museum is not yet finished.) Ahead are the two vast 200 feet-square, 30-feet deep pools — one tracing the footprint of the north, the other, the south tower of the World Trade Center. Wide balustrades — dark bronze waist-high, slightly tilted tablets inscribed with the names of those who died in the towers, at the Pentagon, and on Flight 93 — rim the top of each thundering cascade.

Architect Michael Arad had wanted the names to line walkways behind the falling water at the bottom of each pool, which would have turned the water into a veil of tears and would have given each visitor a more private experience, but security concerns made this impossible, hence the inscribed slabs at the top.

The sound of the rushing water and the sheer expanse of dropping space draws you ineluctably to the edge. It is the 21st century equivalent of Frederick

Church’s famous painting of Niagara Falls of 1857 (image courtesy The Corcoran Gallery of Art). The scale of the opening and the volume of the water is mesmerizing. But now it’s not just the power of nature we

are witnessing but the power of human nature we are enshrining. My first thought was that the design is too repetitive but then I realized that it isn’t — since the names are all different — and anyway the towers were twins in presence and must be twins in absence. And at the center of each dark pool is a further, darker chasm, where you can’t quite see the bottom and the water falls into emptiness. Thus the monumental scale and the depth-within-depth describe the collective loss itself, both literally and figuratively.

The ingenious weir at the top turns the water into a painterly element.

The long airfoil shape made of comb-like tines breaks the sheet of water into individual strands that then recombine in a thin curtain of silver to flash in the sunlight. The weir also spreads the flow evenly, maximizing its apparent volume while minimizing actual water and energy use.

Landscape architect Peter Walker — who worked with Michael Arad — spoke of the way the design is about filling and emptying at the same time (as I mentioned in a previous post about Walker’s talk at the Monterey Design Conference), and this seems especially apt, for a memorial is about filling a void that cannot be filled and holding memories that must not be forgotten. This is abstraction at its most elemental and powerful — like nature itself.

In the Swim

On a lighter note, one of my daughters made me aware of another approach to water in New York that is both wonderful and crazy: the cross-shaped multi-purpose Plus Pool (four pools in one) designed to float in the East River and that is being proposed by Dong-Ping Wong of Family Architects, and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab.

They got hot last summer – “So we proposed a pool. More specifically, we proposed a pool that uses and filters the very water that it floats in. A pool that makes it possible to swim off the shores of New York, in river water, that’s clean.”

The engineering firm Arup devised a filtering membrane that makes the clean water possible.

And the four-part configuration allows for a variety of swimming styles.

Through a Kickstarter campaign they have raised enough money to test the filtering system. Ingenious. Part of the power of design is thinking outside the pool.