Modern housing

June 25, 2005 12:23 AM

Contemporary buildings and interiors by Johnston Marklee & Associates, including The Sale House in Venice, CA, and The Hill House in Pacific Palisades
posted by growabrain (6 comments total)

I'll take the View House. Photo looks like a Wyeth.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 12:41 AM on June 25, 2005

That hill house is freaky looking. Every shot of it looks like it was taken with a fisheye.
posted by mathowie at 2:14 AM on June 25, 2005

As is often the case with with "architecture," I feel bludgeoned about my sensibilities with rock hard concepts. In my experience, people that live in things like this have, uh, issues.
posted by paulsc at 2:58 AM on June 25, 2005

When are we going to come up with some ideas that aren't knockoff Bauhaus and Corbu? I feel the weight of the dead hand of the past.
posted by jfuller at 5:00 AM on June 25, 2005

jfuller - because true originality is rare. Even Bauhaus and *gasp* Frank Lloyd Wright were derived from others. The reality is that Americans seem obsessed with non-original design, and are affraid of having something "new" or different. Wright spoke of a school of architecture for the United States (Usonian was a term he used at one point), but I think we've forgotten it, and we still build crap ... I mean Cololnial houses.

Changing, adapting, even considering one's environment is too much to ask when trying to build a big McMansion.
posted by petrilli at 5:29 AM on June 25, 2005

I think that if you look at the bridge that they designed you'll something else. I love that one wall/side twists and becomes a covering and that the other is dragged across and under the main structure. This is something that couldn't have been considered by the classic modernists simply because they didn't have the engineering and understanding of materials.

On the other side (of the argument not the bank) the bridge suffers because it looks like so much contemporary architecture because of the liberties that computers have given. The flowing curves of frank gehry's buildings look too computer contrived and controlled by the NURBs of the software he, presumably, uses.
posted by blindsam at 11:04 AM on June 25, 2005