August 30, 2009
This house is called the Yakisugi or “charred cedar” house. Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori is using a traditional Japanese technique of charring as a way to finish and preserve wood. See another charcoal house by Fujimori here.
August 26, 2009
This is by far one of my favourite houses in Vancouver. It’s in the municipality of West Vancouver, home to many of the best modern houses in the city, and it belongs to the novelist Douglas Coupland.
August 25, 2009
I had a fit of morbid laughter when I saw this redevelopment banner today. The graffiti could be its Greek chorus. Do you think the condo developer actually bothered to read The Iliad before naming a building after it?
August 23, 2009
Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project.
August 22, 2009
Selwyn Pullan is Vancouver’s most prolific architectural photographer of midcentury modern houses and buildings. He’s 86 now, and recently a collection of his photographs has been shown at the West Vancouver Museum (which make sense, since so much of Vancouver’s modern housing is located in that municipality across the harbour), and at the Charles H.
August 13, 2009
This is the paper-based pavilion designed by Arthur Erickson for the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements that took place in Vancouver in June of 1976. The pavilion, part of Habitat’s exhibit, was erected in front of the old courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).
August 10, 2009
I’ve liked this building from childhood, but somehow I managed to see it with fresh eyes recently – I was late for an art event there, it was dusk, I was tired, the entry was deserted and somehow I suddenly noticed how ridiculously beautiful it is.
July 27, 2009
Why can’t cooperative housing look like this more often? The Avenel Cooperative Housing Project in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, supposedly built either for “a bunch of communists” or for a “group of motion picture cartoonists and their families” (click above for informative Wikipedia article) was affordable when it was built in 1947 and of course is now ridiculously expensive.
July 26, 2009
This is a PS to the earlier Living with boulders post. Thanks to David W. for telling me about this town. It’s the Spanish town of Setenil, or Setenil de las Bodegas, and many of its original houses are built into natural caves under a rock overhang.
July 23, 2009
A few years ago architect/builder David Hovey designed and built this house for himself and his family in Winnetka, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Like most of Hovey’s buildings the house is constructed of relatively simple materials, including perforated steel I-beams, and all its parts are designed to be pre-fabricated and then shipped in.
