The John Lautner foundation has donated almost the complete archive that belonged to Architect John Lautner to the Getty Research Institute Special Collections.
On the images above enjoy one of the most great houses designed by Lautner, the Chemosphere, the Reiner-Burchill Residence (“Silvertop”), Garcia House and Bob Hope Residence among others.
Ginzburg was born in Minsk, graduated from Milano Academy (1914) and Riga Polytechnical Institute (1917). During Russian Civil War he lived in the Crimea, relocating to Moscow in 1921. There, he joined the faculty of VKhUTEMAS and the Institute of Civil Engineers. Founder of the OSA Group, he published the book ‘Style and Epoch’ in 1924, an influential work of architectural theory known as the manifesto of Constructivist Architecture, a style which combined an interest in advanced technology and engineering with socialist ideals.
In 1927, CA magazine announced a non-commercial contest of a project for communal housing. Ginzburg’s proposal, “communal house” followed the idea of Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points of Modern Architecture’ in the USSR and is considered as a direct precursor of Narkomfin Building, a ‘social condenser’ which tried to embody socialist principles in its structure.
The concept of “communal house” is conceived as the living space preserved with minimum private services and all other facilities made in common. The OSA experiments with forms of communal housing to provide for the new Communist way of life. Though Ginzburg was much more interested in the development of personality and the free individual under socialism.
After Gosstrakh and Narkomfin housing proofs, they did not fit well in the communist way of life. They turned on “Disurbanism", in opposite to the creation of vast collective housing. Disurbanism concept purpose small but accommodating individual housing units, which would moreover be mobile and collapsible and closer to Ginzburg’s idea of space for the cultivation of individual personality, allowing each person the freedom to associate with others.
image1.
Communal house for comrades. Moisei Ginzburg. Modern Architecture.1930 +
Ben Tolman lives and works in Washington DC. He received his MFA from American University in 2012 and his BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2005. He has exhibited work nationally and internationally including being a exhibited finalist in the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Hugh Ferriss (1889 – 1962) was an American delineator (one who creates drawings and sketches of buildings) and architect. After his death a colleague said he ‘influenced my generation of architects’ more than any other man. Ferriss also influenced popular culture, for example Gotham City (the setting for Batman) and Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
In 1916, New York City had passed landmark zoning laws that regulated and limited the massing of buildings according to a formula. The reason was to counteract the tendency for buildings to occupy the whole of their lot and go straight up as far as was possible. Since many architects were not sure exactly what these laws meant for their designs, in 1922 the skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned Ferriss to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the zoning law. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow. This book illustrated many conte crayon sketches of tall buildings. Some of the sketches were theoretical studies of possible setback variations within the 1916 zoning laws. Some were renderings for other architect’s skyscrapers. And at the end of the book was a sequence of views in Manhattan emerged in an almost Babylonian guise.
Resistant to the idea of putting the environment and familiar objects around him into a particular box, Denis Cherim walks towards his goal of appreciating the ‘un-apreciable’ around the world. With the simplicity of duplicating the same image and rotating it, this artist opens the doors to a quasi-surrealist landscape.
Parker Jones is drawing the Mexican landscape while cycling 3,000 miles south from the US border. Parker Jones is a freelance designer based in Lake City , Utah.
This collection of recently completed new work by Julie Boserupwas commissioned by Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in New York, and is the first ever artist commission by the gallery. This exhibition was also made possible with the support and assistance of the Museum of the City of New York, whose famed Wurts Brothers Collection served as the initial structure for Boserup’s unique series of large-scale collages.
Inspired by the Wurts Bros.’s novel technique of aligning ground level shots of skyscrapers with images taken from the upper levels of a nearby building, Boserup adds found images, drawing, geological images and her own photographs shot in the streets of New York to an enlarged digital print from the archive. Whereas Lionel Wurts chose his technique of combined images to compensate for the misleading perspective of the bystander’s view, Boserup crafts new visions of the historical document in order to add layers of meaning, mingling both the familiar and fantastical. The NYC-specific series also features early 20th century documentation of the unfinished Queensboro Bridge, culled from the archives of the New-York Historical Society.
