• Frank Lloyd Wright & the house beautiful

    From June 28 through October 8, the Portland Museum of Art is presenting a new exhibit showcasing "Frank Lloyd Wright’s passion for creating a new way of life for Americans through architecture."

    In particular, the exhibition focuses on his legendary skill in
    creating harmony between architectural structure and interior design
    while fulfilling the needs of a modern lifestyle. Featuring
    approximately 100 objects, the exhibition includes furniture,
    metalwork, textiles, drawings, and accessories from the collections of
    the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and other public and private
    collections. Curated by Dr. Virginia T. Boyd, professor at the
    University of Wisconsin-Madison, Frank Lloyd Wright and the House
    Beautiful conveys the methods through which Wright implemented the
    philosophy of the “house beautiful.” The exhibition explores how Wright
    sought to develop a modern interior reflective of a uniquely American
    spirit of democracy and individual freedom, illustrates his development
    in integrating the space with furnishings and architectural elements,
    and shows his experiments with bringing these ideas to the homes of
    average Americans.

    Several podcasts and audio programs relating to the exhibit are also available:

  • Small Houses and the Question of Need

    Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:

    Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

    This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
    who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
    next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
    and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
    California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
    space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
    magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
    old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
    an apple orchard in full bloom.

    But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
    calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
    Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
    feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
    isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
    writ tiny.

    Read the whole thing.