Christian Wassmann is wondering whether or not to sign a new lease. In Manhattan, with its breathtaking rents, this is no small decision. While getting the extra office space would give him more room (Wassmann and his project-basis employees are used to working in an office carved out of his apartment), it could also force him to take on some work he’d otherwise have the luxury of passing up. If this is the first growing pain for a young architect who has seamlessly transitioned from project architect for Steven Holl to principal of his own practice, it’s not so bad. Only 32 years old, Wassmann has a pedigree that explains his success. After moving to the United States from Switzerland, he began working for Steven Holl because Holl was (and still is) his favorite architect. He has also worked on side projects with another master of American design, artist Robert Wilson, for 10 years. It seems that the mentorship Holl and Wilson have provided—from their influential aesthetics to their willingness to work with Wassmann outside of a standard full-time position—has made all the difference in his career. About leaving Holl’s firm, Wassmann says, “He understood [my decision to leave his office], and encourages me to this day.” While Wassmann left the firm in May 2005, he continued freelancing with Holl to finish a hotel in Austria, then the following winter he co-taught an architecture class with him at Columbia University. This sort of support lessened the anxiety when Wassmann left Holl’s firm without projects in hand. He quickly picked up a diverse group of projects, including a renovation of a radio station and several exhibition designs for the Vitra showroom in Manhattan. While Wassmann relishes the brief time it takes to produce exhibitions (“they’re like architectural one-night stands”), he has a number of longer-term projects on the boards, including a renovation of a 1930s house in Miami, Florida. Much like his other mentor, Wilson, whose work has touched nearly every art form, Wassmann says he wants “to continue to do everything from books to exhibition design to writing and teaching, building houses, furniture, theatrical productions, film, and art projects—the full scale of design.” Wassmann’s strategy for accomplishing his work has already been fruitful, which may explain his hesitation to opt for the new office and the changes it might bring. He still sometimes attends pin-ups at Holl’s office because they can be stimulating, but now that he is no longer part of the structured life of an office, he prefers his own less-orthodox method of getting his work done. “The best ideas,” he says, “come late at night dancing and are then sketched on a piece of paper.”
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When Bill Pedersen, FAIA, co-founder and principal design partner of Kohn Pedersen Fox, bought a three-acre piece of land on Shelter Island, New York in 1981, “Things were a little different on the island,” he wryly recalls. He means that one could buy a waterfront plot with views of Long Island Sound and Coecles Harbor without the excessive fanfare or money that nowadays accompany real estate purchases. In the intervening years, the island has grown more expensive to live on and crowded with visitors during the summer, but Pedersen has created a residence that, nested in the earth and angled to create uninterrupted views of nature, is protected from those changes. Read more…
Sarah Morris’s art is touted for its allusions to and interpretations of the urban environment. With deft mimcry of the grids found in cityscapes, her Midtown series of paintings (1998-99) recall the green-glass-windowed facades of a Gordon Bunshaft building. She followed these up with the series Los Angeles (2005-06), in which her Mondrian-like abstractions were more frantically paced and garishly colored, referencing architectural icons in Los Angeles.
The pieces riff on the chaos and colors of urbanity, but they leave the viewer wondering how they critique it. Pretty and superficial, much of Morris’s work fills the same role in popular culture that a Hollywood starlet or a soulless skyscraper does. But with her latest installation, Robert Towne (named after the famed scriptwriter of Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and other classics of the 1960s and ’70s), Morris may be finally making her long-vaunted commentary on architecture.
Located on the underside of the Lever House’s atrium ceiling, this 19,744-square-foot installation of brightly colored house paint gives new life to an unused space along Park Avenue’s sea of gray suits and black streets. Here Morris’s Technicolor mural—aptly applied to one of Bunshaft’s most celebrated works—offers an alternative reality to the muted tones of Midtown. Like many of the other pieces funded by the city’s Public Art Fund, such as Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center or Sarah Sze’s Corner Plot near Central Park, Robert Towne greets its viewers unexpectedly. For the dozens who lunch, smoke, and talk in the Lever House’s outdoor space, the painting is mesmerizing, yet inexplicable; pulsing and exciting, but directionless. Named after a director whose films are ruthlessly real, Morris’s installation is likewise in-your-face and confrontational.
At the very least, the piece speaks to the many missed opportunities to enhance public space with art. It continues the dialogue that the Lever House started almost 60 years ago, when the building redefined how architects could merge architectural behemoths with human-scaled courtyards. Robert Towne offers a utopian vision where the grid is replaced by a maze; where swathes of energetic hues replace neutral ones; and where people walk while looking up instead of at their feet.
Podcast created in 2007 with Sarah Kramer.
Winner of the 2008 ACLU Stand Up for Freedom contest.
Joe and Lucianne Carmichael were thinking green even before Hurricane Katrina. As the owners of A Studio in the Woods (ASITW), an artists center southeast of New Orleans, they have lived in the bottomland hardwood forests for 30 years using minimal energy resources. They rarely use air conditioning, even during humid Gulf Coast summers, and they always line-dry their clothes. The Carmichaels’ goal is to provide a retreat where artists can hone their craft—and give a lesson in living with nature. “The highest guiding principal of A Studio in the Woods is the opportunity to learn,” Lucianne says. Read more…
Creator of Snack Mountain.
It’s every architect’s fantasy—getting carte blanche from a client. “It was excellent, and the first time for me,” Gus Wustemann says with evident glee, recalling how a couple contacted him after seeing his work in magazines, and offered complete creative license. The couple owned a 2,000-square-foot attic apartment in the historic quarter of Lucerne, Switzerland, and wanted it not just renovated, but transformed. Read more…
Philip Johnson was perhaps the most famous of the Harvard Five and the only one of these noted mid-century Modernists whose entire residentious oeuvre remains standing. That might soon change. The New Canaan Historical Review Committee’s demolition delay on his 1953 Alice Ball House, in New Canaan, Connecticut, expires today. Read more…
Open for just three months during the summer, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, located in London’s Kensington Gardens, could be a mere blip on the architecture radar. Yet it manages to garner the attention usually reserved for major projects. One can see why. Since its inception four years ago, the Pavilion has showcased work by some of the world’s most heralded architects for its annual architectural commission—Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001), and Toyo Ito (2002). This year’s selection for the project, Oscar Niemeyer, Hon. AIA, is no exception. Ninety-five years old and busy at work, the Pritzker Prize winner continues to engage and excite the public with his designs. Read more…