usa

Taliesin West /  by hugo keene

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Completed: 1937

12 Photographs

One thing that I found striking about the southwestern USA, was how familiar it felt. It makes perfect sense, given the similarities in climate between the American desert and the place where we grew up on the edge of a desert in Australia, but it wasn’t just the warm dry air and the expanses of sand. What also felt familiar was the landscape, in particular the plants, which have evolved to cope with the harsh dry desert conditions, protecting themselves from the sun, heat, and drought, striking against the raw redness of the dust, dirt and rocks. Our grandmother was a renowned collector of cacti and succulents, so we grew up surrounded by these kinds of plants.

I felt a similar level of familiarity with the architecture of Taliesin West. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t know the building well before we visited. I’ve never studied FLW at length and while it is one of the most prominent of Frank Lloyd Wrights works, he built so much that I just never looked too hard at any individual projects.

What is clear, is how much this his thinking has influenced generations to come. It is most evident in some of the case study houses, but also works further afield, from Australia to London. This building made me think of the early work of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Alabama, raw, immediate, and utilitarian, definitively buildings of spirit. It also reminded me of the work and spirit of my old friend and teacher, David Morris at the Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and of a lot of the architects who have influenced me from back home. In this, it seems the influence of the work extends beyond the landscape in which it is set.

I found it to be a very powerful and evocative architecture, at times almost spiritual. It is literally and figuratively both embedded in and crafted from the earth on which it sits. Splendid stuff.

HWLK

Kimbell Art Museum /  by hugo keene

Location: Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Architect: Louis Kahn
Ccompleted: 1937

15 Photographs

There is something timeless about the Kimbell Art Museum, almost like it could be a hundred years old, or a thousand, the way it rises out of the earth like a stone formation, left alone by the hand of the wind. It has a character quite suited to becoming a ruin, and will no doubt be a highlight in post-apocalyptic tours of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area if it survives the churn.

Henry and I had come to Texas at the end of a long road trip through the deserts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico and we had experienced many wonderful places, people, and events along the way. Only weeks before, we had stood in Monument Valley, admiring the mesas in the dusty purple evening light after dusty day on the road. Having lived as desert rats for the weeks leading up, it is no surprise that when we come to talk about the Kimbell so many years later, Louis Kahn’s masterpiece evokes a similar kind of connection to this place for the both of us.

In the days after our visit, Henry described it as ‘The most complete building, I have ever visited’. In the years before and since, I have seen a lot of concrete buildings, old and new, from the good to the great and all the way down to the terrible. I have been involved in the construction of a few of our own as well. Amidst all of this, I still can’t think of another building that compares. There is a level of craftsmanship in the Kimbell that makes it feel like a piece of furniture as much as a building, and when you understand how in-situ concrete of this type is made, this makes perfect sense. To make a building like this, the liquid concrete is poured into a negative formwork, made of steel or timber, and then that formwork, almost like a cabinet shell itself, is stripped away to reveal the concrete.

I have always been intrigued by how we as humans inhabit the desert. It is such a hostile but beautiful place and from Sedona to Uluru, humans have struggled with how to inhabit the hot dry parts of the world, providing protection from the elements, and embracing the beauty. There is a lot of learning from those attempts in the result at the Kimbell, both in the form of the building and its response to the elements. Like all desert dwellings, the primary objective is to bring in the light, while protecting from the sun and in doing so, this is the great success of the building, above anything else. The way the ceiling vaults reflect light is just divine, the shape and finish carefully crafted to express this as primary to the function of the building.

Like all profound artistic works, the Kimbell Art Museum feels simple enough to be drawn by a child. An architect I admire once claimed that good architecture is obvious in retrospect because where it is successful, it is drawn out of its context in such a way that it feels almost inevitable. The Kimbell is a building that does this, a perfect example of Oliver Wendell Holmes concept of ‘the simplicity the other side of complexity’, sitting neatly at the intersection of a mud hut and a Stradivarius.

HWLK

QN-ArchiPhoto-Kimbell-14.jpg
QN-ArchiPhoto-Kimbell-16.jpg
QN-ArchiPhoto-Kimbell-17.jpg
QN-ArchiPhoto-Kimbell-10.jpg

Walt Disney Concert Hall /  by hugo keene

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Architect: Frank Gehry
Completed: 2003

11 Photographs

The original Gehry masterpiece, the Guggenheim Bilbao, was completed while I was a university student and at the time, this twisted crumpled collision of titanium seemed to turn things upside down. What was not immediately apparent was that the museum was an iteration of a previous design, at that moment unbuilt, for a concert hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Perhaps appropriately it was in the order they were designed that I visited them, rather than the order in which they were built. And thus, they are presented here, in the same sequence.

Unusually with a building like this, we were able to wander freely around all the spaces despite it being ‘closed’, except for the main hall, which required the accompaniment of a tour guide.

My favourite space was a roof garden on the top, nestled among the folds, where each tile of the titanium skin reflected the sky and sunlight in every possible direction, including within the slot, which felt enclosed but open at the same time.

I loved the way the inside of the building is made of a tumbling matrix of knitted timber strips, like a bizarre woven wicker doll from another dimension, all of which is enveloped in a crumpled metal fabric skin which billows in the breeze. I have seen quite a few of Frank Gehry’s buildings, many of which are variations on a theme, but as far as that theme goes, none feel quite as comprehensive and coherent as this one.

HWLK

Stahl House (Case Study House #22) /  by hugo keene

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Completed: 1959

13 Photographs

Los Angeles is an enigma. I have only really seen parts of it, despite driving up and down, across the bridges and back along the overpasses. I’ve seen downtown, Chinatown, the river, the ports, and endless highways, but a city on that scale takes years to understand. You have to start small and expand out from little pockets before you can start to stitch those parts together to get any real kind of picture.

As a visitor, one thing which is both hard to ignore and distinctly familiar is the climate. Coastal California inhabits a unique climatic region, which is found in a few pockets on this planet, the Mediterranean being one, and our home, Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) being another. Even in the middle of winter, you get these clear blue-sky days which are the deepest azure, like something out of a comic book or a Matisse.

Sometimes you get lucky with a building visit and you experience it at the perfect moment, or time of day, and you really understand what the building is all about. This was one of those days. A crisp mid-winter afternoon with a typically clear Angelenos sky, dimming into a spectacular sunset. If you are going to visit a west facing house, perched in the Hollywood Hills, it is the time to do it.

I had always admired the Case Study Houses, a series of post-war experimental houses designed to take advantage of modern material technologies and to provide a vision of the future of individual (and later multiple) houses. There is a bunch scattered around the area, and we saw a few that day, but this was the first and the only one in LA that we were able to explore completely, inside, and out. It was in conversation with my old boss Kerry Hill that I first came to know the Case Study houses, and it shares a similarity with the Tugendhat House, the Barcelona Pavilion, and other of Mies works, and I can see it in Kerry’s work and likewise perhaps echoes in my own.

Just like this house, there is lots to love about a city like Los Angeles and maybe also for some, a lot to hate, but they are definitely both marvels to behold from a distance as they twinkle in the dusk.

HWLK