Viewpoints are structures designed for observing the landscape from elevated positions. They act as devices that organize the gaze and establish a direct relationship between the body and the territory.
When you design your home with intentionality, you are essentially 'hard-coding' healthy behaviors into your daily rhythm. Health outcomes are the result of thousands of micro-decisions—so in his own home, he prioritized spaces like the kitchen, whose open layout makes cooking a pleasure, and the gym, centrally located.
The intervention, led by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, focused on addressing structural and environmental challenges while maintaining the integrity of Wright's original design.
A couple of years ago, really well-prepared Wright properties sold very quickly. There were historically low interest rates and a lot of liquidity, even in the luxury market. Now the tides are shifting, and a post-pandemic frenzy for Wright designs has softened.
The style is characterized by raw, exposed concrete and bold geometric forms. You've certainly seen it before in many cultural and civic buildings built between the 1950s and '70s. With countless examples spanning countries and continents, the look has both historical significance and remains popular-particularly in residential design-today.
Like the chambered nautilus, its shell was a logarithmic spiral. A wall of rough sandstone and aquamarine glass cullet twisted up fifty feet to an oil-drill-stem mast from which a floating roof was hung by the stainless-steel struts of World War II biplanes. You slid in with the humid air from the ravine outside to stroll a terraced garden of pools and plants, over which suspended and carpeted pods for living and sleeping drifted like clouds.
Decades of research in environmental psychology and building science reveal that indoor conditions can profoundly affect human health and behavior. Lighting influences circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. Air quality impacts cognitive performance and respiratory health. Temperature and acoustics shape comfort and concentration.
The Architect Elevator is a metaphor-in reality, the company leadership may be sitting on the same building floor as you; my car metaphors could fill an entire book; and " Architecture is Selling Options " has become the anchor of many architecture keynotes. So, at least my world of architecture is full of metaphors.
Designed by noted residential architect Roland E. Coate, the home was built in 1926 for Annie Wilson, daughter of pioneering Southern California businessman and politician Benjamin Wilson, for whom Mt. Wilson is named. The gently sloping 1-acre-plus property was once part of the vast holdings of George S. Patton, father of the famed U.S. general.
Gropius, who from 1919 to 1928 directed the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, designed the house in 1921-22 for lawyer Fritz Otte. The property is considered a dramatic evolution of Gropius's earlier seminal Haus Sommerfeld, which was also located in Berlin, but destroyed in World War II. The Bauhaus founder embraced a forward-looking approach with an unadorned, sharp-edged structure that rejected the heaviness of 19th-century historicism.
The dream project for me isn't a skyline object or spectacle, it's a long-life system -a project whose structure is reused, materials are upgraded and recycled rather than replaced, and performance improves over time. Where sustainable strategies aren't hidden in basements, or rooftops, but become part of the architectural experience. A dream project would be an urban district reimagined, edited with a scalpel (rather than a sledgehammer) with its declining building stock given a new life through subtle upgrades, modest interventions, and attention to craft and building performance.
Having explored adaptability at the city scale, we are now zooming in on the building itself-and, crucially, on practice. How can architects, developers, and consultants embed adaptability as a measurable, mainstream outcome? This question will be on the agenda at the Adaptable Building Conference (ABC) on January 22 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where architects, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders will explore the potential of adaptable buildings-and how to deliver them at scale.
Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure.
No matter the style or scale, however, his sixth sense for the provision of creature comforts is evident throughout his work. "He just knew how to design a house for cultured living," notes Escher. It's telling that Williams opted for modernism in his own residence, yet the functionalist disposition of the rooms is balanced with richly personal details. "On one hand, it's still sort of a traditional layout in how the kitchen and back-of-house facilities are organized," says GuneWardena.