– GF
via Plataforma Arquitectura
Although I have absolutely no numbers with 
which to back up my hunch, I would bet that dressing up a trailer – or drastically modifying it as the case seems be with the TrailerWrap Project – isn't going to be any less expensive than building a modest little modern house from scratch.
Marcel Breuer wrapped his trailer way back in 1949 or so. His Wolfson Trailer House surrounds a 1948 Royal Mansion Spartan Trailer, which serves mostly as the house's kitchen and dining area. I think the house and studio on 10 acres in Duchess County, NY, is still for sale by our friend, the painter David Diao. – GF
Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven not by Disney-inspired developers but by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city’s history a deeply personal mission.
At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities.
Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.
The city’s rise began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which opened trade with the heartland. By the end of the 19th century the city’s grain silos and steel mills had become architectural pilgrimage sites for European Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, who saw them as the great cathedrals of Modernity. In their vast scale and technological efficiency, they reflected a triumphant America and sent a warning signal to Europe that it was fast becoming less relevant.
One of the first families of European descent to settle in our town was named Fancher. There are still some Fanchers around, and one of the older roads in town is called Fancher Road. On a small knoll at one of its bends is a saltbox house that, we think, was a Fancher house, although Fanchers haven't lived in it for decades.
But the peaked roof and clapboard and fake shutters never went on this house. The flat roof stayed. The sides, instead of clapboard, revealed themselves to be glass alternating with gray fieldstone. The salt box had a new portico added to the front and was painted a light bluish-gray and then, within the last couple of weeks, a brownish red.
At last year's New Canaan Historical Society Modern House Day, architect Peter Gluck said he did not know of one modern house being built in the metropolitan area. Further up Fancher Road, where the name changes to Barnegat Road, a friend of ours is building a modern house (and doing it himself). And now there's this one. We also have a strong local history. As I mentioned, some Fanchers still live in the area, and on one stretch of nearby road the descendants of two of the families that founded the town in the 1720s still live with half a mile of each other.
As I said, we haven't looked into it much yet, but when we get a chance we'll go to the building department, find out the name of the architect and report back. It's been fun to watch it being built and it'll be fun to see how it ends up. - ta
Like the far-better-known Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson , Mr. Christ-Janer helped transform the town from a haven of traditional Colonial-style homes into an incubator for distinctive Modernist dwellings as well.
then blogged about it. The post is here and although you have to read through the narrative of his entire trip, and more, to get to his impressions of the house, they're worth reading:
Lecture or no, the Aldrich is a fine destination for an autumn weekend.
The National Trust says that Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, which flooded last month, is now open for special tours, with proceeds going into a fund to repair the flood damage. The Farnsworth House, fell prey to Mother Nature Saturday, September 13, and Sunday, September 14, as more than eight inches of rain fell in two days from Tropical Storm Lowell, immediately followed by the remnants of Hurricane Ike. Fox River waters rose two feet over the top deck, entering the Farnsworth House interior. Built within the flood plain of the Fox River in Plano, Illinois, the house is supported by columns more than five feet above the ground which proved not high enough as record breaking rain amounts brought the river more than fourteen feet above its normal level. -- ta
Here's a website (in German or French only) devoted to the the project. The project was overseen by Andrea Deplazes, in his capacity of professor of architecture at Zürich's ETH (Institute of Technology), and partner of one of my fave architecture firms, Bearth + Deplazes.
Clicking through the modern design blogs, with their focus on houses and furniture and artifacts, it's easy to forget that there were people who lived and worked -- created -- entirely in the modern realm. One was our friend Nathan Gluck, who died in late September (Gina wrote about him here). 
While I might disagree that Nathan "finally found his unique voice" in the collages, I absolutely agree that from what I knew of Nathan the collages are an expression of himself. We just happen to like his earlier work a bit better, perhaps because it seemed as if he were creating them for us -- which, in fact, he did. Steven Heller just published a good account of Nathan's life and career for AIGA (which I now know stands for American Institute of Graphic Artists), here. Note the description of Nathan's apartment, filled with art and artifacts. I visited him there twice and it had to be seen to be believed. His most valuable drawings were on the crowded wall but were draped with pages torn from magazines to protect them from the light. He showed me where he had an Andy Warhol piece -- U.S. currency -- that he had sold or given to a museum in exchange for a good copy that he hung on the wall instead. There was a phrenologic head from the 19th century that his father had given him, and which he gave to Gina last February when she and Lisa went to help him pack up for his move to San Diego.
Last week two institutions dedicated to Warhol's work took a death notice in the Times. (If you look at what's been written about Nathan recently, you see hints that he might have had more to do with Warhol's early art than is generally believed). Here's what it says: 
Photo from the current exhibition, ‘Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture’ at The Crypt, Metropolitan Cathedral Liverpool.
In memory of our kind, gentle and creative friend who died over the weekend in San Diego – We’ll miss his visits by train, his concern about our well-being, his holiday phone calls, presence and presents; his drawings, paintings and collages, which arrived in the mail without fail for every New Year, birth and anniversary. . . We’ll miss his kindness, his wisdom, his worldliness.
– GF + TA + family
I used to tell people that I didn't love Frank Lloyd Wright houses. But when I did, it was with an air of authority that I hadn't earned, considering I'd never actually been in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. What I meant instead was that I didn't love the handful of Wright-style houses built by his disciples that I had been in. I'm not sure why -- maybe they were too dark inside, or maybe all the built-in furniture was too authoritarian, as if the architect knew better where to put a chair and table than the people living there.
Last week I finally visited Fallingwater, near Pittsburgh, and although I'm not about to make any sweeping generalizations I will say this: I don't love the one Frank Lloyd Wright house I've been in. It was spectacular, yes. But as a house, it was more of a showpiece than a home (this observation based, of course, on the hour-and-a-half I spent being herded through as part of a tour group). Here's an analogy: You go to a museum, admire a terrific modern painting, and then think to yourself that a museum is a good place for it because you really wouldn't want to have it in your house. The same with Fallingwater: I admired it for a lot of reasons, and it might be fun to stay there for a long visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. I'm not saying, by the way, that this "I wouldn't want to live there" standard should be anybody else's standard for architecture criticism, nor that it would even be my standard if I visited Monticello or Kykuit or one of the great houses on the Hudson. But since I live in an area with a lot of modern houses, and live in a modern house myself, it's the gut-reaction standard I'm most comfortable with.
I was in Pittsburgh for the annual conference of the Land Trust Alliance (I'm the acting executive director of Westchester Land Trust, in New York). Each year the conference organizers offer different field trips, to show off their regions and to get people out of the hermetically-sealed conference centers. I chose an excursion that combined a morning visit to Fallingwater with an afternoon bike ride along eight miles of former railroad bed bordering the Youghiogheny River, which is pronounced Yock-agheny, like Allegheny, and is a tributary of the Monongahela, one of Pittsburgh's three rivers.
Fallingwater is a destination, and visiting it is like visiting a major historical site, with its big parking lot, varied license plates, buses, visitors pavilion, and people in windbreakers carrying cameras wandering around asking where are the restrooms. Fallingwater is in the foggy, cool Alleghenies, maybe an hour and a half southeast of Pittsburgh; 140,000 people a year visit the place.
About 45 people were on our bus and although we arrived shortly after 9, our tour of the house was set for 10:15. We were given a tour of the woods around it instead, which turned out to be a good introduction. We circled the house, saw it from different distances, and learned some of its history and the history of the landscape from our tour guide.
The first thing you notice about Fallingwater is that it's in the woods – no lawn, no landscaping, nothing but forest. In fact it is owned by a land trust -- the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which has protected about 20,000 acres (including the 1,500-acre Bear Run Nature Reserve, which surrounds Fallingwater) and which was the host of the tour and one of the hosts of the conference. Our first glimpse of the house came from a ridge, looking down on it through the tree trunks. I was surprised at the yellowish, almost adobe color of the exterior, and at how massive and dominant the cantilevered terraces are.
Fallingwater was commissioned in the 1930s by Edgar Kauffman, the owner of Kauffman's department store (above -- it's now Macy's), which was tremendously successful in the days when Pittsburgh was a tremendously successful industrial city. The steel and coke factories made it an extremely dirty and polluted city (salesmen at Kauffman's had to bring a couple of changes of shirts to work because their clothes got so dirty while working inside), and so Kauffman and his wife bought a cabin and a fair amount of land (the site of an old Masonic camp) in the Alleghenies. But ultimately the cabin was too modest and close to the road to suit them, so they brought Wright in, showed him the land and the river (the Bear Run -- creeks there are called "runs," similar to the way we in New York still use the work "kill" for a creek or small river), and commissioned him to design a house there.
Wright visited just once. The common wisdom was that Wright, at 68 years old, was washed up. The Kauffman's Depression-era budget was about $75,000. According to the tale the tour guides tell, Wright took the commission and then produced nothing until, sometime afterwards, Kauffman told him he was traveling to Wisconsin for a meeting to see how the plans were going. When Kauffman was two hours away -- again, according to the tour guides' tale -- Wright began to put his plans on paper and had the house finished by the time Kauffman arrived, greeting him with, "Mr. Kauffman, we’ve been waiting for you!" Once construction started, Kaufman and Wright used local workers, paying laborers 25 cents an hour and skilled workers 80 cents an hour. The house ended up costing $155,000 to build. (In his 2003 book Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kauffman and America’s Most Extraordinary House, which is considered definitive, Franklin Toker says the story that Wright designed the house in two hours is a myth. I haven’t read it yet and I can’t say how much else that we were told by the Fallingwater tour guide that I'm repeating here is also myth.)
After about an hour, we returned to the visitors pavilion and then walked back down to the house, where we were met by our guide for house tour, an odd little man from West Virginia who reminded me of Tennessee Williams.
The entrance to the house is around back. It's a low, cave-like passageway that passes a foot bath (above) with water spilling from a spout and a bar of soap on a chain, and leads to a heavy glass-and-red-steel door into the first floor.
Fallingwater is a big house, and there were numerous tour groups going through it in stages, in front of us and behind, and so there was little time to linger and get the feel of the place. But here’s what I saw, and what I thought and felt about it:
The living room is modestly-sized with surprisingly low ceilings. A glass door opens to one of the cantilevered terraces overlooking the Bear Run falls. A wide stone staircase in the living room leads down from the floor to the river, with retractable glass panels in red steel frames above the stairs. All of the stone in the house -- and there was a lot of it, including the floor, which was polished with Johnson's Wax -- was Pottsville sandstone quarried just up the path (the bedrock that forms the falls in the Bear Run is Pottsville sandstone aswell). As we were standing near the hearth and dining table, the tour guide referred to the open plan, which he said was unique at the time. "That was something you just didn't find in the 1930s, an open plan .... It was unheard of in the 1930s.” That’s not true of course and when I questioned him about it later, out of earshot of the others, he used the word “unusual” rather than “unique.”
The guest room had varnished walnut blinds, walnut cabinets, a portrait by Diego Rivera on the wall (the guide mentioned that Frida Kahlo, who “was very crude,” stayed at Fallingwater and that Kaufmann was the first American to buy one of her paintings, which Edgar Kauffman Jr. later sold to Madonna), and a rotating chrome fan on the floor. In Liliane Kauffman's bedroom there’s a Picasso etching, a sizable (maybe three-feet tall) Madonna and Child from the 15th century on a sandstone ledge that Wright designed for it, and a framed page from a Bach score that I didn't ask about. Kauffman was a benefactor of the Museum of Modern Art, and there is another Picasso and a Rivera elsewhere in Fallingwater, and six originals from Audubon’s Birds of America, as well as other paintings, sculptures and artifacts, some interesting, others less so, and none of which I recognized or felt compelled to ask about.
We walked through the master bedroom and the studies upstairs, and I found that the higher we went in the house, the more comfortable I became, maybe because I was getting used to the place. Each room, or so it seemed, had its own terrace above the Bear Run, and two of the upstairs rooms had panelled corner windows that swung out individually at right angles so that the entire corner could open to the view of the woods and the sound of the falls. These were stunning, and the guide said that another Wright house was small enough so that Wright was able to design the entire corner of a room like that. The guest wing (as opposed to the guest room in the main house), which you reached by way of a gracefully cuving, canopied walkway, was a beautiful, compact home on its own, with an unusual, U-shaped, above-ground concrete swimming pool on the hill above the main house.
So by the time the we were done with the house, I was softening. Going back to my parochial standard, I'd live in the guest house immediately. But while Fallingwater as a whole was stunning, I can’t say I loved it. Nor can I say I loved the tour. The house is a bit too much of a showpiece and the tour a bit too rushed (and, I suspect, propelled by misinformation).
Kauffman, who lived in Pittsburgh in what the tour guide told me was a Tudor-style house (he didn’t seem particularly confident when he told me that), went on to commission Richard Neutra to design a vacation house for him in Palm Springs – the famous, threatened Kauffman House. He died in 1959, several years after his wife. Edgar Jr., who was a curator at MOMA and a professor of architecture at Columbia University, inherited Fallingwater and interred his parents' remains in a crypt on the property that has doors sculpted by Giacometti (the crypt is off-limits except on rare occasions). Junior donated the house and the property in 1962 to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. He died in 1989.-- ta
This 
city summer house sits atop a building in Vienna, and even has an outdoor shower.
