Eastern philosophies and a respect for nature inspire Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Images
The Tao of Taos
So many stories surround Taos, New Mexico, I felt a bit trembly when Highway 518 emerged from the evergreen Carson National forest and looped down into the remote New Mexico valley. According to legend, people who enter Taos are destined to remain there forever…
Shown Above: Organ Mountains Desert Peaks, New Mexico. Photo by Lisa Phillips, Bureau of Land Management, Las Cruces District Rangeland Management via Wikimedia
Experience the EXPERIENCE Music Project
Architect Frank Gehry uses computers to help design and build his famous wavy, shiny, psycho-structures. The EMP in Seattle is a museum of rock-and-roll, but even if you don’t like rock music, you’ll want to see Gehry’s rebellious design for the building.
Learn more > Frank Gehry, Architecture Portfolio of Selected Works
Visit the UN
The tall Secretariat Building overlooking New York’s East River is the centerpiece of the United Nations complex and a symbol of the quest for peace between nations. The smooth glass facade is also a landmark example of the International Style, a mid-twentieth century movement toward simple, geometric design. The architects included Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Wallace Harrison.
The United Nations officially came into being October 24, 1945. The Secretariat building was completed in 1952 and renovated in 2012.
Learn about the International Style >> Modernism – Picture Dictionary of Modern Architecture
Gehry’s Great Concert Hall
Architect Frank Gehry has been making waves for more than sixty years, and his concert hall in Los Angeles ranks as one of his most controversial—and most celebrated.
The stainless steel Walt Disney Concert Hall expanded the Los Angeles Music Center, adding a 2,265-seat main auditorium, a 266-seats theater, and two outdoor amphitheaters. Critics complained that the glittering facade posed a traffic hazard, so Gehry later tweaked the finish to tone down the metallic sparkle.
Learn more
Celebrate Wright’s Guggenheim Museum
With a six-story spiraling ramp, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum is a hallmark example of hemicycle design. At the center, an open rotunda offers views of artwork on several levels. Wright, who was known for his self-assurance, said that his goal was to “make the building and the painting an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before.”
The circular building seems as revolutionary today as it did when the museum first opened on October 21, 1959.
Explore Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright Exhibition at the Guggenheim >>
Lots to Love in Lille
Before winning the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000, architect Rem Koolhaas and his OMA architecture firm gave a blighted section of Lille new life with a dazzling plan for urban development around the Euralille railway.
Lille, France sits at the hub of three great cities: London (80 minutes away), Paris (60 minutes away), and Brussels (35 minutes). The master plan created a dazzling entertainment and residential complex centered around the Koolhaas-designed Grand Palais, also known as Congrexpo.
Gustav Stickley Builds Utopia
In the early part of the 20th century, Arts & Crafts furniture-maker Gustav Stickley had a radical vision for a boy’s school on a farm in northern New Jersey. He bought land in Morris Plains, NJ, about 35 miles from New York City to build a home for his family and to establish his Utopian school.
In 1908, Stickley told readers of The Craftsman magazine “…for the first time I am applying to my own house, and working out in practical detail, all the theories which so far I have applied only to the houses of other people.”
Stickley’s home is now a museum open for tours. Plan to stay a couple hours so you can stroll the grounds.