From Box to Brilliant

From the NY Times. A boxy apartment in Mumbai renovated and renewed by owner/designer Ashiesh Shah.  Removing a total of nine walls gave him the opportunity to plan the space brilliantly with smart material choices.  I dig his accessory and furniture collection as well.

Design by Nature

To be perfectly honest, I have never been in love with Antoni Gaudi's architecture.  His work is too gaudy for my liking. But, my appreciation for it is certainly there since I know what was involved with the creation of his edifices.  While reading my current National Geographic , an article on Gaudi's Sagrada Familia reminded me of the extraordinary accomplishments Gaudi achieved.  One can say that the church, Sagrada Familia was not an accomplishment because he never finished it.  Unfortunately, he died in 1926.  He dedicated 43 whole years into this structure, beginning in 1843.  167 years later it's still not complete, but the current architects hope to be finished by 2026!  I, on the other hand think the church was a huge accomplishment.  The concept and thought into the detail and meaning of every column, door, window, staircase and stone is genius! 

Gaudi's approach to creating was inspired by nature itself.  Knowing that the natural world is full of curved lines, not straight, and natural materials are sinewy such as wood, muscle, bone and tendons, he mimicked this in his architecture.  Anyway, all I'm saying is I'm in awe of this Church.  Gaudi's genius and design were and still are an extension of nature.  Check out all the details below and make sure to click on images to enlarge. 

Details on a church door:  The numbers in the box can be added in every direction, but the result of the sum is always the same: 33 (Jesus was 33 years old at the time of his death).

The Cloisters

Vintage Postcard of the Cloisters from 1964

I finally made my way up to the Cloisters this past week, and was thoroughly impressed with my visit.  As I roamed through the corridors of the medieval French architecture I was charmed by the ancient objects and art work that line the hand carved stone walls.  All of this in New York! 

The branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1938 as “the crowning achievement of American museology.”  The museum’s main structures are portions of five medieval French cloisters, along with several other European monuments. 

Amazed by the achievement of transporting these massive stone edifices to the west, I was equally impressed with collections from the Romanesque and Gothic periods along with the beautiful gardens that surround the Cloisters.  Perched on a hill top overlooking the Hudson River, a small piece of Ancient Europe in New York City...heaven.

Design Directs Everything

Architecture and Design Film Festival. Oct 14-17 at Tribeca Cinemas.

Visual Acoustics

Yesterday I watched Visual Acoustics, a documentary by Eric Bricker on the modernism photography of Julius Shulman.  What an excellent movie that really captured Julius's sense of humor and his brilliant talent in architecture photography.  He is known for the photograph of the "Case Study house #22" shot in 1945, which is the second image above.  I've always thought the photograph was spectacular, to achieve that quality for an evening shot, then being able to capture the interior lighting and street lights of the Los Angeles background the way he did was remarkable.  Shulman's photographs are seen everywhere while I think most people pass them by, and don't really appreciate the skill and artistic eye behind the work.  I feel it's because his images were so perfect that they look simple to achieve, but quite the opposite.  As Julius say's in the film. "I have control over the visual acoustics."  This control made him the leading photographer of architecture of his time, and possibly still.