stephanieNY

Lego introduced Mies' Farnsworth House to their architecture series.  

The house is joining Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Guggenheim.  Nice choice this time around.  Look how beautiful:

What's next, Lego?!

Check out this lift/room at Rem Koohaas' Maison Bordeaux. The handicapped user here sits in his sweet office to get between floors instead of in a cramped and isolated elevator. Bookshelves run the height of the shaft, thus never depriving the office of books. Each floor is constantly redefined by the presence or absence of the room.  

Beautiful.

The rest of the house (designed as a "machine for living") moves too:

A resort house in South Africa (via today's design-milk)...

...complete with glass walls, bedroom curtains, roof overhangs, a corner pool, and mountains...a lot like Neutra's Kaufmann House (1946)...

J.Crew did a gorgeous catalog spread at the Kauffmann House in 2008.  This is the only pic I could find...

A steep gambrel roof pitched toward a close neighbor is one way to privacy.  A box with solid walls and a light shaft through the middle is another. 

Check out the incredible interior. The split-level stair that circles the kitchen in the core is such a clear and elegant organization of space and way of circulation...It's the kind of space that makes me wish I had thought of it first. Symmetry gets me every time.

Project by Atelier rzlbd

Photo via archdaily

My cousin and his wife recently designed and built their house outside Austin, TX. I feel pretty proud that I can post a design project like this from within the fam. Chris and Sarah captained sailboats for years, where I think they collected habits from efficiency of space and functions, and brought them to their new terrestrial home.

The structure is two (and a half?) levels. A workshop on the first floor lifts their entire living space up close to the tree line, where they tap into the airflow for natural ventilation. The elevated living space is a big open loft that extends out onto an enormous deck, covered by the south-facing shed roof. Even in Texas, they manage to turn off the a/c sometimes and let the roof overhang shade them from the south sun, and the clerestory windows draw air in from the north. Building materials include stucco and standing seam steel outside, poured concrete countertops and stained plywood floors and wall panels inside.  

Oh, and Chris built it.

For more pictures and some better reporting:

grassrootsmodern.com post

statesman.com article

There was an article in The Guardian this week on the feud between owners of the Melnikov House in Moscow.  Melnikov's granddaughter lives there now and gave us a tour of the house when we were there last year.  According to the article, some 30-something rich Russian guy got his hands on a share of the house and wants to turn it over to the public as a museum.  Boooo.

The house sits in the middle of Moscow, tucked cozily among its urban-scale neighbors.  But it's a house, in a city...brilliant. And to boot, it's a cylinder with octagon windows. 

Our project went before the Cambridge Planning Board last night for approval.  Aside from the immediate residential abutters, the community is so supportive and excited for the new addition to Porter Square.  It's actually going to get built!

Been studying a lot of classical architecture at work lately for some restoration work.

This one's from Asher Benjamin's American Builders Companion. I love looking at this stuff.  

Along with the image comes a detailed explanation on what effect one moulding has vs. another in certain light conditions.  Mmmmmm.  Nice.  

My new project:

...for the Art Institute of Boston.  

This is an amazing thought for about 4 1/2 seconds.  Mmmmmm:

Dreamy thoughts of soft sand on your feet quickly squashed by uncomfortable thoughts of sand in your couch.