Andrea Cochran – Modern Landscaping – The Ross Residence is composed of a series of courtyards that help create a seamless integration of landscape and architecture. Courtyard gardens often seem to be the simplest gardens to design, yet these seemingly small, spaces have a maze of complex issues to be resolved if the result is to be beautiful. (more…)
This house on Maui, Hawaii is one of those houses. A rich variety of spaces exist within the buildings, ranging from double-height living areas open to the sea views, to more internalised lounges nestled into falling land at the more road end of the sites. The pool in the courtyard and many small water canals make it possible to hear water flowing from any outdoor patio or terrace. Landscape designers and architects are making these hoop dreams come true by incorporating well-conceived plant designs with new materials for outdoor recreation and year-round family fun. (more…)
Custom-designed homes can be risky, but there could be a big payoff
Independent Austin architects and designers are making footprints on the cityscape in thoughtful and fiercely original ways.
Drive down a street in Hyde Park lined with bungalows and you’ll probably find a modest jewel of a house tucked behind a tangle of trees.
Who built that? Who lives there? The unfussy lines and calm silhouette say modern, but the tawny limestone and rustic expression are pure Austin. The house is earthy and simple, yet sophisticated. It doesn’t shout, but it grabs your attention. (more…)
It may have been an overexposure to early Frank Lloyd Wright, or perhaps too much time spent in boats, but when I was young, and until very recently, I was horrified by furniture. I always thought that a perfect domestic architecture would be heavy on the built-ins. Shelves, benches, various seats and berths—these were the things necessary to finish a space, to tune it for living, to show at least that the designer was not entirely ignorant of how and by whom a house would be used. Also to anchor it. An uncle of mine lived for many years in a very cool Anglo-built adobe in Taos, New Mexico. At the center of the main space was a large circular pit, dug out of the ground and contoured for sitting: a brutal sunken living room, it seemed so much more profound than the loose, impermanent wooden furniture orbiting all around it, sliding this way and that, imported things ready to take up any position, or be replaced. (more…)
Much of contemporary art finds itself preoccupied with the discrepancies that exist between humans and the lightning-fast changes going on in their living space. Such changes come from technology, quick-flashing bits of media spectacle (in the paper, on television, and now on the Web) and other elements of modernity with which, for better or worse, we must coexist. The artists of our time synthesize these elements and react to them, pessimistically or optimistically.
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