Architects and Artisans

As anthropologists ponder the meaning of Charlie Sheen’s recent chair-smashing fit at The Plaza, and a course at the University of South Carolina meanders off into the sociology of fame – looking closely at Lady Gaga, nee Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – others elsewhere are delving into a far more intriguing enigma: Thomas Jefferson’s use [...]

On Oahu, Peter Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has designed and built an award-winning gallery for a family’s collection of post-World War II paintings and sculptures. It’s a small space designed to complement an existing residence by noted early 20th-century architect Charles Dickey, who practiced in the Arts & Crafts style, first in Hawaii and [...]

Bruce Goff was an architect with no formal academic training, a musician who translated notes into buildings and a prolific designer whose work remains some of the most fantastic in the American West. “You can’t put him in any category,” said Ghislain dHumieres, co-curator of a new exhibition of Goff’s work at the Fred Jones [...]

New Yorkers may claim Frederick Law Olmsted as their own, and Virginians might cling to the gardens that Charles Gillette once molded and shaped, but North Carolinians today can embrace their own living icon of the landscape architecture profession. When Manteo native Richard “Dick” Bell launched his practice in 1955, he was just a few years out [...]

From the beginning of his career, architect Ligon Flynn sought to incorporate a site’s natural elements into his designs. By the end, he wanted inside and outside to merge and interact seamlessly. “In drawing there’s a perspective where figure-ground is interchangeable,” he said. “That’s what I’m striving for between indoors and outdoors.” A 1959 graduate [...]

The list of influential artists and architects with whom Isamu Noguchi collaborated in his lifetime reads like a Who’s Who of the 20th-century’s most gifted talent. Among them were Alfred Stieglitz, Constantin Brancusi, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Neutra, Martha Graham, Man Ray, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Willem De Kooning, Edward Durell Stone, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft [...]

The exquisitely fine work in wood and glass at Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Va. is the result of a complex relationship between architect and artisan, master and slave.  Thomas Jefferson trusted John Hemings implicitly with the joinery inside and outside his Palladian retreat near Lynchburg.  Trained at Monticello by master joiner James Dinsmore, Hemings was dispatched [...]

Heather Allen-Swarttouw’s art is about a journey. In her first 20 years as an artist, she created bright and colorful architectural textiles. Her muse was the staircase, where she created space and movement by coloring dye and texturing fabric. Ten years ago she shifted into monochromatic blues, blacks and whites. It was part of growing [...]

Building tree houses and wooden boats wasn’t just a childhood past-time for Doug Lapham of Shooting Star Forge. It laid the foundation for his works of art that are both functional and sculptural. An avid recycler, he recognizes the potential in all materials.  He’s developed an eye for unusual textures and shapes. He looks for [...]

The irony of living in a post-9/11 America is that non-architects are now designing our built environment, according to The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin. At One World Trade Center, New York City police are pushing David Childs of Skidmore Owings & Merrrill to assure that the base of his building is bombproof, creating [...]