The recreation of the Eames House living room, with 1800 original objects, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art till June 3, 2012.
Bobbye Tigerman, assistant Curator of Decorative Arts & Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is on a post-installation high. The last five years of her career, along with head curator Wendy Kaplan, have been spent visiting libraries, museums, and octogenarian and nonagenarian California designers in order to piece together the most comprehensive retrospective of California mid-century design to date. “California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way” features 350 objects spanning categories of home décor, fashion, sports, advertising, and architecture. Paramount to the exhibit is the faithful recreation of Charles and Ray Eames’s twenty foot-high living room from the iconic 1949 Pacific Palisades home also known as “Case Study House 8.”
The colorful exterior of the steel-framed Eames House
The house was built as part of Art & Architecture Magazine’s post-war Case Study Program, which sought to build low cost, high quality, mass-producible homes with readily available industrial components. Though largely glass and steel, Lucia Dewey Atwood, the Eames’s granddaughter, notes that the living room had a “wonderful loving warmth,” a vibe attributed not only to the characters who dwelt within, but to the use of off-the-shelf components in thoughtful and beautiful ways, the connection of the interior space to the outdoors, and to the more than 1800 handmade objects and folk art accumulated over 39 years.
Read the rest of this entry »
2020 Alton Road: Setting Sights on Greenest Home in America
Completion of the stem walls on top of the grade beams at 2020 Alton Road, Miami Beach, FL.
The construction of 2020 Alton Road, a 3,200 square foot, single-family residence in Miami Beach pursuing a LEED Platinum rating is well underway, and the ground floor has just been completed. Before the concrete could be poured, however, a series of preparations were made and underground systems were installed all in accordance with the rigorous guidelines of the LEED for Homes green building certification program.
According to contractor Robert Arkin and developer Matt Lahn of the Florida Green Home Design Group, at this point in the process, the 2020 Alton Road project is tracking high marks. With respect to the Home Energy Rating System (HERS), the house has a 92% projected energy efficiency rate.
Read the rest of this entry »
Get Jet: The 747 Wing House
There is a new residence in the Malibu hills constructed mostly from an old airplane. Consisting of a main house and six auxiliary buildings, the 747 Wing House is an innovative example of sustainable architecture created for a client who requested a unique home with great curves and a green bent.
Santa Monica architect David Hertz, who helms the Studio of Environmental Architecture, designed a sleek and environmentally responsible dwelling by using post-consumer waste in the form of a retired Boeing 747-200. To minimize land disturbance, Hertz chose to reuse some of the 55-acre property’s existing foundations and situate the buildings so as to maximize natural light and air flow, and to achieve the finest possible sight lines.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Great Camp” Architecture of Today
Treetops, a five-year-old "Great Camp" near Keene, NY
Five years ago, friends of mine finished building a gracious family retreat on a beautiful, remote site in the Adirondack Mountains. My friends’ getaway—Treetops, they call it—is a mini version of the rambling, timber-and-stone “Great Camp” compounds constructed by the Gilded Age wealthy.
The original camps—less than 40 survive—combine stylistic elements from Swiss chalet design and the English Arts and Crafts movement. On the material level, however, Great Camp architecture, with its reliance on locally sourced timber and indigenous stone, exemplifies a special, uniquely American vernacular mode.
Read the rest of this entry »
Revitalizing the Hemingway Home in Cuba
In 1939, after selling the film rights to his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway purchased Finca Vigía, a beautiful country property in Cuba. The rambling masonry home—which the author occupied on-and-off until 1960—sits perched on 12 acres of land in the hills outside Havana.
Several years ago, Finca Vigía was in danger of destruction—from heat, humidity, pests, and the sheer passage of time. At that point, an American non-profit that I co-chair, The Finca Vigía Foundation, joined the Cuban government in a successful effort to save the home from ruin. Today, the estate is an internationally recognized museum full of Hemingway’s belongings and his numerous, fascinating collections (guns, typewriters, fishing rods, paintings and, of course, books).
Read the rest of this entry »
Repro Style: Bringing the Past into the Present
Lightfoot House, Colonial Williamsburg
For many, living in a historic home—perhaps like the Lightfoot House (pictured above) in Colonial Williamsburg, VA—would be a dream come true. The luxury of grand room proportions, wood-paneled walls, true-divided light windows, hand-blocked wallpapers, ornate plaster ceiling medallions, period chandeliers and wall sconces, and not one, but several fireplaces, are just some of the details that I would want on my “historic-dream-house” wish list.
However, those who live the life of a preservationist might feel differently, since the cost of maintaining a historic home—particularly with authentic products and materials—can sometimes be a costly and heavy burden.
Read the rest of this entry »
Titcomb Cabin Rises from the Ashes
Thanks to the determination of six enterprising coeds at Dartmouth College, a landmark cabin razed by fire was rebuilt the old-fashioned way—one log at a time.
Photo: Lucas Schulz
In 2009, when Greg Sokol, a student at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, discovered that a nearly 60-year-old cabin owned by the college’s Ledyard Canoe Club had burned to the ground, he knew he had to do something. Like scores of undergraduates before him, Sokol had used the humble cabin on the Connecticut River’s Gilman Island as a base camp during canoe-club outings.
Read the rest of this entry »
