Architects and Artisans

For 50 years, modernist Grete Prytz Kittelsen plied her craft as an artist alongside names like Mies, Wright and Eames, but her work these days is only recognized by connoisseurs. Karianne Bjellas Giljie is out to change all that. Her new book on Kittelsen’s work, based on 100 interviews in the ten years before her death in 2010, [...]

A jury of Louisville and Lexington architects has made public its six picks for the 2012 Triangle AIA Residential Tour, to be held on October 6. Jury chair Roberto De Leon headed south to Raleigh in late March to explore in person a number of homes entered for inclusion the tour – and to give [...]

Richard Brooks got his start in custom millwork 30 years ago, restoring antiques and making cabinets. He would eventually expand to create Brooks Custom in Mount Kisco, and to work in metal, glass, concrete and wood.  The business grew to 35 employees in 25,000 square feet, but the Great Recession took its toll. “The blush [...]

When Andrew Jackson Downing began to publish The Horticulturist magazine in 1846, he not only created a 50-page journal to cover house and garden design, but also a matrix for those interested in the design of parks, cemeteries, schoolhouses, colleges and churches. “It was an exchange of information,” says Caren Yglesias, AIA, author of a new [...]

Sometimes, the direction of a nation’s evolution can pivot on one person being in the right place at the right time. Take Andrew Jackson Downing, a mid-19th-century architect, landscape architect and visionary, for example. He was brought up in his family’s nursery business in Newburgh, N.Y., 50 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River.  [...]

Designer Cleto Munari will be auctioning his personal collection of art, objects and furnishings - many created in conjunction with architects like Michael Graves, Richard Meier and Robert Venturi as well as writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Saul Bellow – on April 24. The event will take place at Pierre Bergé in Brussels on April 24.  One [...]

While the rest of the universe of tile and stone gets set at “Coverings” in Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center today, Sara Baldwin’s unveiling her own distinctive work – as well as that of two new collaborators - at  the nearby Peabody Hotel. There, in Columbia Room 35 on the mezzanine level, she’s showing her Synergy Collection from New Ravenna, [...]

Inaki Echeverria’s office in Mexico City has designed a façade in Villahermosa, Tabasco for Liverpool, Mexico’s largest luxury retailer.  It’s located in a strategic area on the south end of the city, in the shopping center Plaza Altabrisa, part of a new development.  The firm’s  aim was to design a dynamic and modern facade that [...]

For almost 40 years, engineer David Easton has been recognized widely as the American guru of rammed earth construction. Now he’s beginning to experiment with a new development in that ancient method: rammed earth building blocks. Traditional rammed earth involves a process of compacting five-to-ten-inch layers of moist soil, gravel, clay, and silt, with cement [...]

Never underestimate the power of a few weather balloons and a little Tyvek when it comes time to retreat from reality. That’s Sylvia Heisel’s attitude, anyway.  She and Scott Taylor formed a group called Post Modern Production in 2011, and opened their first temporary art installation at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles last month. [...]