The house that architect Eero Saarinen completed in 1957 for J. Irwin Miller and his family in Columbus, Indiana, easily qualifies as a paragon of residential midcentury Modernism.
From certain angles, the house resembles the gable-roofed cottages in the Swiss village of Riedikon, which dates back at least to the early 8th century, on the lake known as Greifensee, near Zurich. Come closer and you realize this house, with its pitched, tentlike roof, its strip window following the angled roofline, and its enclosing screen of 315 vertical spruce slats, rough sawn on the sides and CNC-milled on the front and back, is nothing like its neighbors. The 3,175-square-foot house, designed by Zurich firm Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and Urbanism, is a reinterpretation of the regional typology that, as
Alex de Rijke, founding director of dRMM Architects in London, and his client for the Sliding House hadn’t seen each other since their days as schoolmates and teenage motorcycle enthusiasts.
If you ask Georg Kratzenstein, project architect for Frankfurt, Germany based Meixner Schlueter Wendt Architects, to describe the house his firm designed for a family of five in the town of Kronberg im Taunus, he will tell you it’s a “completely normal, pitched-roof house, built on a slope, where the mass of the garden floor has been subtracted.”
Simple, serene, calm, safe. Not the usual terms used to describe living spaces in New York City, but those are the words chosen by at least one half of the couple renting the West Village carriage house owned by photographer Jan Staller, and designed by New York City–based firm Christoff:Finio Architecture.
Ask Biloxi, Mississippi resident Richard Tyler what he thinks of his house, designed by architect Marlon Blackwell, AIA, and he seems a little shocked at the question. “I love my house,” he says without a moment’s hesitation, “it’s home, you know what I’m saying?”
Talking to 27-year-old architect Jayna Cooper about the house she designed and built for herself on busy La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, you’d think it all came about through luck and happenstance. But, as someone smart once said, luck is no accident.
By day, as a plastic surgeon in Orange County, California, Edward Domanskis corrects and fixes imperfections and flaws provided by, or inflicted on, nature.
No wood. No clutter. Everything white. Oh, and completely soundproof. These were some of the program requirements Alexander Gorlin, FAIA, received from his client, Robert Pollack, when he took on the project of designing a Chicago townhouse for him.