Architecture Porn (SFW)

October 21, 2012 7:31 PM

Here’re some photographs of outstanding structures & buildings:
The Salk Institute in San Diego
400 Monte Vista Avenue, Mill Valley CA
Light Cathedral, Ghent Belgium
The Buzludzha monument ...

Potala Palace, Tibet

Radisson Blu Hotel, Berlin

The Queen's Hamlet, built for Marie Antoinette in the park of Chateau de Versailles

Harpa Concert Hall (Iceland) by Henning Larson Architects,

Taktshang Monastery, Bhutan and Hanging Monastary in China

City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain

Great Mosque of Djenné; Mali Djenné, Mali

Monument to Genghis Khan Mongolia

Hauptbahnhof, Berlin

The Viennese Underground

Proposed design of Apple's new headquarters in Cupertino

Spadena House, Beverly Hills

Barcelona

Da Vinci Staircase, La Rochefoucauld, France

Des Moines, Iowa Hindu Temple

Stained Glass, La Sagrada Familia

An ornate staircase found at the Palazzo Biscari, Sicily

Tbilisi Glas Bridge

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright

Winter Residence by Ibarra Rosano Design Architects

The copper roof on the Château Frontenac in Québec City

Green Mall in Osaka

33 Thomas Street, NYC, extreme brutalism

Bahauddin Makbara Mausoleum. Junagadh, India

Pit House by UID Architects, Japan

Hagia Sophia, Instanbul

Harper Memorial Library

Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home

A Hanging House in Cuenca, Spain

A manor in Chicago’s Gold Coast. Also there, The Jane Gang & Studio Gang Architects' Aqua, the Loop

Medieval Norwegian Church

Vertical Forest project in Milano

An art deco building in Singapore

Villa Nieuw Oosteinde by Engelarchitecten

A church on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria

Graham House by E. Cobb Architects

Swedish Parliament

Chapel over a stream, Ojców, Poland

Geisel Libray, named after Dr Seuss, UCSD, San Diego

Neuschwanstein front façade and surroundings c. 1900

The Graham House, built in 1965 by Arthur Erickson and demolished in 2007

Stone Seokbulsa Temple and its protectors.

(From here where more information & thoughtful discussions can be found for most links)

posted by growabrain (35 comments total)

Neat-o!
some formatting/sorting might've been great, so as not to make one post take over half the front page :-/
posted by slater at 7:33 PM on October 21, 2012

Tokyo Sewer
posted by odinsdream at 7:35 PM on October 21, 2012 [2 favorites]

[Moved more of the links inside, please let me know if you'd like to reformat things another way or if this is okay.]
posted by jessamyn at 7:37 PM on October 21, 2012

heh. It's funny to me that apparently I have already looked at the 400 Monte Vista Avenue, Mill Valley CA, and Potala Palace, Tibet JPGs
posted by rebent at 7:37 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

I love the Dancing House in Prague, and didn't see it linked.
posted by mannequito at 7:39 PM on October 21, 2012

Oh my gosh, I love this kind of stuff.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 7:41 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh is one of the most amazing buildings I've personally been in.
posted by odinsdream at 7:42 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Salk Institute is just STUNNING.

Other favorites of mine are Philip Johnson's Glass House, the Reiche Kapelle in Munich's Residenz, and the Cologne Cathedral.
posted by sallybrown at 7:53 PM on October 21, 2012

Love the diversity of time and location here. As an amateur photog who has tried many times to take good architectural shots and failed (hellooooo, Memorial Hall), this is some great study material.

Also never expected to see Mill Valley, home of hippies with money, on the Blue.
posted by smirkette at 8:01 PM on October 21, 2012

The Salk Institute was designed by Louis Kahn. He is the subject of a pretty cool documentary My Architect. It looks great in that pic, but it seems awfully desolate and post apocalyptic in other pictures.

My new favorite is the new Norman Foster Hearst Tower.
posted by Ad hominem at 8:03 PM on October 21, 2012

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, DPRK
posted by capricorn at 8:04 PM on October 21, 2012

Harper!
posted by kenko at 8:08 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

I never was interested in La Sagrada Familia from all the pics of the outside I saw, but when I finally visited I realized the most stunning part was the interior. It is light and solid and airy and immovable all at once, just amazing.

I'll second a recommendation of "My Architect". I think the Salk Institute is gorgeous; it is easy to see it as desolate in some pictures, but the location largely prevents that feeling. It is overlooking the Pacific Ocean from one of the most beautiful bluffs just north of San Diego, so it never feels as heavy as it can look. Also, the entrances to the rooms and the offices themselves are very nice wood, which helps alleviate Kahn's love of concrete.

And to all those posting more pics in the thread, keep them coming!
posted by roquetuen at 8:17 PM on October 21, 2012

Very nice! thank you.
posted by safetyfork at 8:48 PM on October 21, 2012

Loving the Salk Institute love in this thread - I live in SD and spent a fair amount of time there when a good friend was a postdoc there some years back. The high level of brainiac work being done inside those stunning buildings adds to the beauty of the place, IMO.
posted by yiftach at 8:56 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

City Hall of Leuven, Belgium. I saw a wedding at that city hall - it was more impressive than any other wedding venue I've ever been at (needless to say).
posted by el io at 9:24 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Re: the Salk Institute, that's a gorgeous picture, but it looks like the buildings are hideous. Bare, unadorned concrete blocks...
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:34 PM on October 21, 2012

City Hall of Leuven, Belgium. I saw a wedding at that city hall - it was more impressive than any other wedding venue I've ever been at (needless to say).

I think my parents got married there.

Good list, but needs more Registan.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 9:53 PM on October 21, 2012

A timely example: 56 Leonard Street from Herzog & de Meuron.

And the SBB Switchtower in Basel, and the similar M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, from the same.
posted by eak at 9:55 PM on October 21, 2012

is this a text based version of Pinterest?
posted by marvin at 10:52 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

The design for a new headquarters looks like an art deco version of Isengard minus Orthanc.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 12:05 AM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

Photographer's slideshow, One Building One shoot
posted by hortense at 1:36 AM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

Re: the Salk Institute, that's a gorgeous picture, but it looks like the buildings are hideous. Bare, unadorned concrete blocks...

Looks like in-situ to me. Bare, unadorned in-situ.
posted by Kiwi at 2:49 AM on October 22, 2012

Re: the Salk Institute, that's a gorgeous picture, but it looks like the buildings are hideous. Bare, unadorned concrete blocks...

Bare concrete and teak was sort of Louis Kahn's thing. That said, the Salk Institute is absolutely stunning in person, too - it's not just this photo.
posted by fifthrider at 6:00 AM on October 22, 2012

I've never really "gotten" Frank Lloyd Wright. I know that I'm supposed to like it, but his buildings just seem profoundly unremarkable. Maybe it's just one of those cases where he invented a style that others refined and perfected, but I just don't get why he's so widely celebrated...

Don't get me wrong... they're very nice buildings, but seem to lack any sort of 'wow' factor. I'll also gladly concede that, out of all high-profile architecture, FLW's houses seem be some of the only ones that were built with the notion that actual humans should be able to live there.

Is that it? Do we celebrate Frank Lloyd Wright, because he was the only high-profile modernist to have built pragmatic buildings that were scaled to "human" dimensions?

I'd actually really love to be told why I'm wrong here. There's got to be something that I'm missing.
posted by schmod at 7:32 AM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

It's a weird inclusion, but how about including the DC Metro in our list of "Great" architecture?

It's got its share of detractors, and it's easy to single out individual train stations that are great -- however, Harry Weese crafted an entire underground transit system that looks fantastic, works well, and makes very few compromises.

His brutalist designs have aged surprisingly well, especially compared to other transit systems of the same (or later) era. The "floating" platforms were a particular stroke of genius -- the walls stay clean because they're all out of reach, and even in DC's darker days, the stations didn't really suffer much vandalism.
posted by schmod at 7:40 AM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

This list needs more Akransas. How 'bout Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs.
posted by pappy at 8:32 AM on October 22, 2012

Oh, pappy, that chapel is beautiful!
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 8:50 AM on October 22, 2012

Thorncrown previously: Fifty Extraordinary Churches
posted by homunculus at 10:21 AM on October 22, 2012

The Buzludzha monument. I watched a documentary on that, or maybe it was just a really in-depth website, but man... What a surreal story, all around. Great pictures, thank you!
posted by xedrik at 11:29 AM on October 22, 2012

Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, designed by Arthur Erickson, is wonderful. It is one of the few outdoor spaces that have given me, a romantic to the death, a frisson of being in a place in the perfect world.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 12:42 PM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Buzludzha monument. I watched a documentary on that, or maybe it was just a really in-depth website, but man... What a surreal story, all around. Great pictures, thank you!

Previously, on Metafilter.
posted by odinsdream at 1:06 PM on October 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

Biblioteca España, Medellín, Colombia.
posted by radiobishop at 2:52 PM on October 22, 2012

I've been to three of these places, and would like to see them all!
posted by Harald74 at 10:38 AM on October 23, 2012

Turtles all the way down: "Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, designed by Arthur Erickson, is wonderful. It is one of the few outdoor spaces that have given me, a romantic to the death, a frisson of being in a place in the perfect world."

I'm sure it's a gorgeous space, but I'm pretty sure that my opinion of the place would be negatively influenced by the fact that it's been used as a backdrop in just about every dystopian science-fiction film ever.
posted by schmod at 12:54 PM on October 25, 2012