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A video artist and fan of both Frank Lloyd Wright and the videogame Halflife II has created a machinima (machine cinema) walkthrough of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufman House, aka Fallingwater. If you have the bandwidth, a 57 meg Windows Media version is also available. There’s also a walk-through of the real thing on YouTube; it’s quite a bit more attractive than the video game version.
The great Prairie architect George Maher‘s Bingham House, in Highland Park, Illinois, will likely not be standing this time next month if its new owners get their way. They originally applied for a demolition permit back in January 2006; their application was stayed by the local Preservation Commission via a six-month reprieve, which expires in a little over a week.
The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (LPCI) has prepared a PDF on the structure itself.
Can anyone in Highland Park update us on the status of this property or the Preservation Committee’s action? Thanks to reader James Shewmaker for letting us know about the impending destruction of one of the area’s most striking and historicall important buildings!
A number of recent articles on historically important or otherwise interesting properties, neighborhoods or trends around the country:
Buffalo group restoring Frank Lloyd Wright home: More than a century after Frank Lloyd Wright designed it, and years
after it fell into disrepair, an architectural treasure is being
brought back to life in Buffalo.San Antonio homebuyers looking to historic urban neighborhoods once again: Others go on a more elusive search: trying to identify the next King William or Monte Vista. Interest in San Antonio’s older neighborhoods is picking up, in part
because of rising gas prices, traffic congestion and a desire for
distinctive architecture. Most San Antonio home buyers head straight to the suburbs.
Contemporary custom Craftsman homes win awards in Florida: For the second year, Craftsman-inspired homes near Northwest Florida’s
white-sand beaches took the top spot in the Aurora Awards.Arrol Geliner pleads for home remodelers to stay consistent in style: Not long ago, in a pleasant, ’60s-era neighborhood of California ranch
homes, I came across a renovated house that looked all too familiar.
The owner had replaced the original front doors, all the windows and
the garage door in a style that could most kindly be described as Home
Improvement Store Eclectic.Union Station Dreams: Finished in 1939, Union Station is the last great train station built
in America. It was constructed in a glorious Spanish Mission Revival
and Art Deco style. During the nadir of rail travel it languished. But
today it is busier than ever before, serving as the hub for Metrolink,
Amtrak and Metro Rail.Americans on a Remodeling Stampede: When the Hills bought
their Northwest Side bungalow last year, one thing absolutely,
positively had to go: the tiny, outdated kitchen. So the Hills did what
an estimated 6 million American households will do this year. They remodeled their
kitchen — an endeavor that has turned into a feeding frenzy in recent
years. Even though Americans are cooking less, we’re pumping more money
than ever into souped-up kitchens.An article about my most-hated trend in contemporary homebuilding – Craftsman Style Comes Back in New Homes: What’s old is new again. Drive around emerging communities in much of the country, and it’s hard to miss all the craftsman-style homes. The
covered front porch, the gabled roof, tapered columns at the entrance
and limited use of bricks are architectural details more in line with
1920s and 1930s home construction than anything built in the 1980s and
1990s.Philadelphia-area homes added to a preservation watch list: A number of historically important buildings throughout Lower Merion
could soon be demolished as developers look to the construction of more
condominium developments and single family homes, according to a local
preservation group.Upland, California gets an "extreme makeover": About
six years after teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, this city of
70,000 residents is feeling good and is committing to a makeover.For the Unwary, Fixer-Uppers can Turn Into Money Pits: Julie Hooper hears from people all the time who fantasize about fixing up an old house. "My favorite thing is when a cute young couple comes in and says they
want to redo a house and make it theirs," she said. So
Hooper, the owner of King William Realty, shows them a house with the
stuff a redo is made of: cracked foundations, sagging front porches,
roofs with holes and the absence of air conditioning.Woodland, California – home to many beautiful Craftsman bungalows – begins selling tickets to their excellent September home tour:
About the House: How Trees Do & Do Not Impact Structures: Your Honor, does this lovely Liquid Amber appear capable of doing harm
to anything, let alone Mr. Filbert’s 1926 Craftsman bungalow? No, I
tell you, it’s a lie, a myth, a hit and a myth! My friends the trees have been sorely abused. And it’s all based on
false information and a general lack of understanding about how they
grow and what they do to the foundations of houses. Although I’ve read
tracts by engineers and other experts on the dangers of trees, I’m here
to tell you that it just ain’t so.Landmarking a historic fraternity house in Berkeley: In 1974, the Berkeley Daily Gazette published the photo of a “mystery
house” on the northwest corner of La Loma Avenue and Ridge Road. The accompanying article solicited information about this house,
speculating that it might be the work of architect Ernest Coxhead
(1863–1933), who designed two landmark buildings a block away—Beta
Theta Pi Chapter House, 2607 Hearst Ave. (1893) and Allenoke Manor,
1777 Le Roy (1903).Sy Oshinsky visits two Wright properties in the Laurel Highlands: America’s premier architect, Frank Lloyd
Wright, once said: "If you foolishly ignore beauty, you’ll soon
find yourself without it". I didn’t make that mistake on a recent
trip I took to the Laurel Highlands of western Pennsylvania. The
area includes not only pretty scenery but two landmark houses
designed by Wright, Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob.
My colleague Chris Schultz recently finished restoring his 2 bedroom / 2 bath 1920s brown shingle Craftsman bungalow in Sacramento, CA. He and his wife meticulously restored the wooden paneling, floors, plate rail and many architectural features of the house, installing a new commercial-grade kitchen and beautiful white-tiled bath along the way. They also converted the high-roofed attic to a loft bedroom, which is a particularly succesful addition. Perhaps this project was one reason for his wife’s recent acceptance to a graduate architecture program! more pictures are available on Flickr.
the following interview with Randell L. Makinson, by Linda Arntzenius, was originally published in Autumn 1998 issue of USC’s Trojan Family Magazine.
If there is a Greene & Greene cult abroad in Southern California, USC architecture alumnus Randell L. Makinson can take most of the credit.
Imagine yourself a keen student of architecture. Eager to assist a visiting professor by bringing him slides for his architectural history class, you approach a large, wooden house on a quiet residential street in an upscale Pasadena neighborhood. No sound save birdsong breaks the late morning silence. Lawns are perfectly cropped, hedges trimmed. No one is about as you set up camera and tripod for a carefully composed shot of the magnificent building. Framed in your viewfinder, the portal is a symphony of oiled teakwood and leaded glass.
Then, just as you are about to click the shutter, the door opens. A gentleman, tall and imposing in a dark suit, steps out. You watch as, unsmiling, he makes he way across the wide, private lawn and asks you to explain yourself.
This is precisely what happened to Randell L. Makinson in 1954 in front of 4 Westmoreland Place. But instead of being sent about his business, Makinson founds himself treated to a tour of the house and garden. Three and a half hourse later, he was seated on the living room floor with Cecil and Louise Gamble, pouring over their home’s original blueprints.
much more after the jump, below
"Homefront Six" has an account of her May 2006 visit to the Gamble House on her weblog. Especially notable are the photographs, some from the official Gamble site and some, I think, which she must have snuck in during her tour – they don’t allow you to take pictures, but of course plenty of people do anyway. And as far as no flash is used (flash can certainly damage textiles and other surfaces in the house), I doubt anyone would be severely castigated.
Japanese blogger Minabako also visited the house not long ago, and if you read Japanese you can review her experience as well.
Matt Jalbert developed and maintains the Gamble House website; his own weblog includes some fantastic images of the exterior that capture the late-afternoon light better than any I’ve ever seen.
The Spurious Plum has visited the Gamble House and several other G & G properties in the area, and includes several photographs in her report.
Finally, "Ridiculous Authenticity" visits the Gamble House and writes a bit about his / her visit in an article titled "misadventures in architechture," which does not apply to this particular property.
Our friends at PrairieMod have an excellent article on the community-butchering trend toward excessively large homes. Why do we want what we do not need?
A recent story on NPR
elicited a long and somber *sigh* from the PrairieMod team the other
day. The story, about the recent trend in excessive growth in American
"dream" home size, really highlighted exactly why we feel so passionate
to speak out against this cultural malignancy.Frank Lloyd Wright once said that a house should "spring from the
ground and into the light," a phrase that embodies his ideals behind organic architecture. Unfortunately, McMansions
don’t spring from the ground, they usurp it … blocking the view and
light from all others in its path. One underlying point of the story
was that Americans are building these brick and mortar abominations as
a way of living out the fantasy of "the American Dream" or a sense of
security after 9/11. This is a perverse fantasy of dreams overtaken by
greed. Any sense of security is an ironic one, since the high cost of
energy consumption of these behemoths compounds the problems of foreign
oil dependence that lie at the heart of the 9/11 tragedy.
Read the whole article at PrairieMod.
Kasturi’s weblog, Not Native Fruit, says this about living in a small Berkeley bungalow:
… a small
house is like a spiritual master. It teaches you to be disciplined, to
minimize your possessions, to keep things clean and neat, to respect
other people’s needs for space. You get organized, living in a small
house, or you go bananas. The choice is yours.
Although, as someone who grew up in one of these small homes, I can tell you that size is relative. I live in a 1300 sq ft home here in Sacramento now, and doesn’t seem small at all – probably because I grew up in those Berkeley bungalows.
Kasturi also has some nice photographs of Berkeley bungalows, including her own.
Since we’ve had a huge upsurge in traffic lately, and since many folks are writing to ask questions that boil down to the same thing – what, exactly is a bungalow? – I’ve decided to include a short definition. This is taken from Kenneth R. Trapp’s The Arts & Crafts Movement in California: Living The Good Life:
The bungalow was the major American middle-class
housing innovation of those years, and the Golden State,
"Bungalow-land," was said to be its birthplace. Odes were written to
the California bungalow, characters in novels portrayed it as close to
Nirvana: "Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a
bungalow."Although the prime years of bungalow promotion were
1905-15, the Los Angeles Examiner reported in May 1904 that every
street in Pasadena had a bungalow, and Los Angeles and Hollywood
abounded in the wide-roofed dwellings as well. The typical bungalow
that came to dominate in the greater Los Angeles area combined timber
construction and rustic siding or shingles with such mountain-camp
references as fieldstone foundations or walls, cobblestone chimneys and
piers – sometimes randomly interspersed with protruding clinker bricks – and, perhaps, log or pebble-dash accents.Such "rustic simplicity," deemed the essential
bungalow trait by one writer on Southern California domesticity, was
reiterated inside. A masonry chimney breast or mixed-media surround
(cobblestones, brick, rock, or tile facings) often served as the focal
point of a wainscoted living room incorporating built-in benches and
bookcases to create a compact but imposing fireside inglenook. The
cavernous stone hearth of the Mount Lowe Alpine Tavern was illustrated
in a 1909 House and Garden article on modern fireplaces that captured
the old-fashioned home spirit of the colonial or preindustrial kitchen
and living hall. Also featured in the article were a floor-to-ceiling
rough clinker-brick model from the Los Angeles mail-order bungalow
builder Henry L. Wilson and a Craftsman-like affair of tile, wood
buttresses, and beams framing an overmantel mountain landscape. The
latter fireplace treatment was the work of Carl Enos Nash’s company,
"artists as well as craftsmen," who favored scenic, matte-glazed Grueby
and Rookwood tiles depicting forest, desert, and pastoral motifs in
keeping with the bungalow’s mission to maximize the charms of outdoor
life. The living-room hearth was the most important emblem of the
devoted though informal home life advocated by Charles Keeler
and numerous reformer-idealists associated with the Arts and Crafts
movement. Nash articulated this linkage between material environment
and spiritual state: "As we sit meditating, watching the leaping flames
and listening to the crackle of the fire, what can be more conducive to
perfect contentment than a well designed fireplace?"In January 1913 an account by Charles Francis
Saunders in the West Coast magazine Sunset admirably distilled the
interior and exterior hallmarks of the Californian indoor-outdoor
house, along with the easygoing, wholesome way of life associated with
it. "When you see a cozy one or one-and-a-half storied dwelling, with
low-pitched roof and very wide eaves, lots of windows and an outside
chimney of cobble or clinker-brick half hidden by clinging vines –
that is a bungalow, whatever other houses may be."
John Monteverdi, a faculty member at San Francisco State, bought a lovely 1922 bungalow in Oakland’s Rockridge / Upper Temescal neighborhood in the late 1980s. It’s very typical of one variety East Bay bungalow, which owes its wide front porch to Southern Craftsman homes, its columns and eaves to the Queen Annes that preceded it and its stucco finish and not-uncommon light coloring and red or brown painted steps to the Mission aesthetic that lends itself so well to California.
In addition to the photographs on the front page, scroll down for a few good-sized mpeg movies and a room-by-room tour. the gallery also includes a number of photos of his excellent kitchen remodel, completed in 1998, which fits the house far better than what existed when he moved in. As far as back yard, you can see how creative many folks in the East Bay need to be to turn small and sometimes hilly spaces into attractive, useable yards.