Little nuggets of treasure from the art world's Fort Knox.
Meet Marcel Breuer: architect, Bauhaus grad, and designer of a chair inspired by his bicycle’s handlebars.
Marcel Breuer in the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1964 / Marc Bernheim, photographer. Marcel Breuer papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Today we’ll get our first live glimpse of the Aquatics Center designed for this Olympics by Zaha Hadid. Looks beautiful in the pictures - only thing it’s lacking is a Calder mural.
Stillman House I, 1954 / Ben Schnall, photographer. Marcel Breuer papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, as quoted by George Biddle in his diary (p. 95). This was FLW’s reasoning for tearing down a silo which he could see from his window at Taliesin. Biddle goes on to describe Wright as “fatherly, warm, coquettish, vain, and very slippery” but also “unquestionably a genius.”
This photo of the Stahl house always reminds me of the fictional “Vandamm house” in North by Northwest, but both the house and the movie came about in 1959, so the similarities must be purely coincidental.
Stahl house, case study house no. 22, 1959 / Julius Shulman, photographer. Esther McCoy papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
I don’t know how the weather is where you are, but here in DC we’re sweltering in an early summer heat wave. Which means that when I look at this slide I am not thinking about the architectural significance of the Loewy House but rather how I’d love to be on that raft with a cold drink right now. Ideally something served in a hulled-out coconut or pineapple.
Loewy House, 1979 / unidentified photographer. Esther McCoy papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The Housing & Urban Development building in DC, around 1968 when it was completed.
HUD office building, Washington, D.C., not before 1968 / Ben Schnall, photographer. Marcel Breuer papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
