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

Olivetti Showroom /  by hugo keene

Olivetti Showroom - San Marco, Venice, Italy - Architect: Carlo Scarpa - Completed: 1958

10 Photographs

We grew up surrounded by a lot of Italian culture and Italy in its various guises has always been close to my heart. Australia, and Adelaide, in particular, received a lot of post-war immigration from ‘the old country’, our mother speaks Italian, and we have extended family who are of Italian descent. My last job before architecture was in an old Italian cafe around the corner from the Skeleton House which was famous for it’s fabulously rude service, which in truth was all sorts of fun.

While I had been to Italy before, I had never visited Venice, something which seems to be something of a right of passage for young European architects. When I began to work on the Walmer Yard project, it became apparent to Peter and Fenella that this was a shortcoming that needed to be rectified. In order to understand the richly layered textural quality that we were trying to achieve and to grapple with the innovative and unusual problem-solving techniques these two wild-cards employed, I absolutely needed go to Italy, with no delay, and reinforce my colonial ways with a few critical pieces of architectural history. I was armed by these two with a long scribbled list of weird and sometimes wildly inaccurate directions to or descriptions of places that I absolutely must seek out. A couple of weeks and a few convenient coincidences later, I found myself riding along the Grand Canal, sitting on the back of a vaporetto with my backpack.

While I found most of the important ones on the list after considerable effort and cajoling of travelling companions, the Olivetti Showroom was the least difficult to find. An obvious choice for any architect in Venice, despite it being so discretely tucked into a corner on the edge of the Piazza San Marco. When I look back on the photos, it almost seems like it is night-time in some of them, but it was not. I recall flip-flopping about in the heat, seeking refuge in the shade of the colonnade lining the square, that first layer of protection against the Mediterranean sun.

In this exquisite piece of architecture, you can see hundreds of years of Venetian design and craft history, as well as the ubiquitous sense of calm imbued in most of Scarpa’s work, the kind of quality that is usually reserved for Japanese temples. It is an unusual place, like the tiniest museum in history to a set of products that no longer exist. The showroom and typewriters are a bit like Venice itself. They are old and polished and no longer flexible enough to adapt to a new and changing world, but intricate and beautiful, nonetheless.

HWLK

San Cataldo Cemetery /  by hugo keene

San Cataldo Cemetery (The City of the Dead) - Modena, Italy - Architect: Aldo Rossi - Completed: 1971 (Unfinished)

11 Photographs

“I cannot be Postmodern, as I have never been Modern” - Aldo Rossi

Sometime during my early days of architecture school, I remember coming across a small black and white image of the San Cataldo Cemetery, otherwise known as The City of the Dead, in a book on Italian architectural history. I recall being taken by this single image, not dissimilar to the first photograph in this series. I loved the bold geometry and the simplicity of the forms. Though not a follower of religion, I have always loved religious buildings and in particular the cemeteries that often surround or are connected to them, but this was something completely different from everything I had seen before. As a young architect to be, it seemed to speak to me of the possibilities of looking at something and seeing a completely new way of doing it.

Over the years, I kept stumbling across the building in journals and books, yet it wasn’t until 2011 that I finally found myself in northern Italy, on a train to Verona passing through Modena. While the small child inside me wanted to go looking for the bright crimson red of the nearby Ferrari factory, the architect in me had only one destination in mind as I disembarked. It was a baking hot Mediterranean day, the kind that we knew only too well from growing up on Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) and the short walk alongside the train line was anything but pleasant.

There is something unique about the experience of an architect visiting a building they know well. When we read drawings and view images we are able to translate them (with varying degrees of success) into imagined experiences of places, but nothing quite compares to visiting a building, no matter how well you think you know it. In this, I think the qualities of great architecture are impossible to transport. It’s very difficult to distinguish the good from the great without setting foot and eye upon it. At San Cataldo, it was the previously undiscovered moments of the place that impressed me much more than the vast open scorched courtyards, despite those open views of the square red ossuary building being so beguiling to my young architectural mind. It’s a fascinating place, beautiful and confusing in equal measure.

Interestingly, it was a few weeks later that I was lucky enough to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, whom Rossi triumphed over in an architectural competition for the San Cataldo commission. This effectively book-ended a journey of half a lifetime, providing me with two vastly contrasting views of death and how we might approach this from a built perspective. But that place is a story for another post.

HWLK

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Villa Tugendhat /  by hugo keene

Villa Tugendhat - Brno, Czech Republic - Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich - Completed: 1930

12 Photographs

My habit of returning from European ice hockey tournaments via unconventional routes found me stalking up a snow-covered Czech hill one brisk March morning brandishing a sheepish grin and a printed ticket. I hadn’t seen many images of the Villa Tugendhat before but felt I knew it having recently read the fictionalised story of the house in Simon Mawer’s book The Glass Room. The book itself was famously disliked by the descendants of the Tugendahts, but it brought to my attention one of the late European buildings of one of the great modernist masters. I’d seen a number of Mies’ buildings in North America a few years before, but this felt like something different, smaller, less machine-like, no less refined, but in a different way. I was excited.

I really love the moments on an architectural adventure, just before a house or building comes into view, when you know it’s coming. I can clearly see the steep street in my mind, a tall building masking the view as I approached, before the wide side garden opens up, revealing a beautiful white house, settled in the snow, looking out across a rolling town also blanketed in snow. A perfectly white, beautifully clear and simple work of remarkable clarity, deeply modernist, inside and out.

I liked this house much more than I expected. It is opulence at its most austere, managing a kind of warmth that surprised me. The sun-filled rooms and plant-filled glasshouse certainly contribute to this, but it’s definitely more than that. The clean white of the material palette is balanced by the richness of the materials used in the detail; the rosewood, the travertine, the onyx, and the bronze.

The construction nerd in me was delighted at how technically brilliant and innovative the house was for its time, utilising window heaters to eliminate condensation, as well as 4 gigantic 3.1m x 4.8m windows which mechanically dropped into the floor to open the whole front of the living spaces to the garden.

Remarkable.

HWLK

Neue Staatsgalerie /  by hugo keene

Neue Staatsgalerie - Stuttgart, Germany - Architect: James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates - Completed: 1984

12 Photographs

If any building sits at the heart of my fascination with architecture, then the Neue Staatsgalerie is probably it. Not because it’s the best building I’ve visited (it isn’t) or because I particularly love post-modernism (I don’t), but in a similar way to the cemetery at San Cataldo, it came to me at a time in my education when I needed tinder for the lonely sparks of architectural inspiration that I was experiencing.

In my third year at university, I was designing a sunken plaza in Adelaide and my tutor saw my rough model of intertwined shapes and bright colours and sent me off to the library to find this strange fascination he’d described. This was before we had the internet and a hundred images at our fingertips, but after an exhaustive search of architectural books, I found it. As first I was enthralled by the bold colours and exciting geometry, but soon discovered and began to appreciate how the interlocking and interconnected spaces defined the visitors experience of the place by creating possibilities that seemed random, but actually were intimately connected to the building user and their experience.

Despite all this, I had never been in a hurry to visit. Somehow, I knew it would come at some point and it happened organically, while travelling through Germany on a camping holiday. I visited twice, over the course of two days, and the first time I took no pictures nor drew any lines. It was the afternoon, and I walked the place up and down, back to front, inside and out. The next morning, I returned with my camera and took a set of photographs.

It is rare to visit a building and not be disappointed in some way, no matter how exciting or brilliant the building is, but I found it hard to be disappointed by the Neue Staatsgalerie. I knew her faults, like a sometimes irritating old friend that you love at all times regardless, and visiting was a little like coming home. I have visited many buildings before this one and I’m glad I waited, because strangely I don’t think I would have appreciated it like I did.

It was worth the wait.

HWLK

Architectural Adventures /  by hugo keene

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One thing that forged our partnership has been what we call adventures in architecture. Like most architects we love to explore places, sometimes seeking a particular building, or sometimes we just find ourselves somewhere new and have time on our hands. At least once a year, we try to embark on a more extensive study tour of sorts, and some of the adventures chronicled here are part of those journeys, others are chance encounters with less planning involved.

I’ve always been the one to take the photos, cataloging the things we’ve seen, and I’ve had an on/off love affair with photography my whole life. It has changed a lot, and while I mostly don’t miss the days of processing and dark rooms, some potency has been lost. I still love to photograph buildings, but I know how photos cannot convey much of the power of the physicality of being in a place itself.

Now that architectural adventures are not as easily accessible, we thought it would be a good time to share the backlog, to bring ourselves and our friends back to those places to inspire and enjoy.

We’re starting with 4 unique and special buildings, weekly for October (or Archtober?). Each post will be a series of images and a couple of paragraphs, not of architectural critique, but the story of how we came to find ourselves in this place and why.

I hope these are enjoyed, we’ve enjoyed making them.

HWLK