If you haven’t checked out HGTV’s Extreme Living then you are missing out. Check out the highlights in this slideshow.

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s Auldbrass Plantation

Next tour November 2009

Frank Lloyd Wright's Auldbrass Plantation in Beaufort, SC

From the Beaufort County Open Land & Trust:

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, the Auldbrass Plantation buildings, consisting of the main house, kennels, stables, barn and various outbuildings, were constructed during the forties by the late C. Leigh Stevens who called on Wright to design a self-sufficient modern plantation for farming, hunting, and entertaining.

In keeping with his theories of organic architecture, Wright designed Auldbrass to be in harmony with the landscape of which it is a part. Constructed of native cypress boards laid diagonally at 80 degree angles and held by brass screws, the exterior is intended to conform to the lean of indigenous live oak trees, while the abstract forms of ornamental rainspouts suggest hanging clumps of Spanish moss.

In 1987, the plantation was purchased by Joel Silver, a successful film producer and ardent admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Silver has meticulously completed the majority of Wright’s original plan, thus fulfilling Wright’s and Stevens’ dream of making Auldbrass a great 20th century architectural treasure. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Beaufort County Open Land & Trust

Aside from The Cellophane House (see last post), they have put together www.momahomedelivery.org a.ka. Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling & exhibition. If you are in NYC July 20–October 20, 2008 then this is a must for any mid-century enthusiast.

Event Description from MOMA website:

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling is both a survey of the past, present and future of the prefabricated home and a building project on the Museum’s vacant west lot. Not since the mid-century House in the Garden series has MoMA built occupiable model buildings to demonstrate contemporary issues to the public. The fives homes erected on the vacant west lot are designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates (Philadelphia); Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier (New York); Horden Cherry Lee Architects / Haack + Höpfner Architects (London/Munich); Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass (Cambridge); and Oskar Leo Kaufmann (Dornbirn, Austria).

The exhibition, and its accompanying Web site www.momahomedelivery.org, display the process of architectural design and production in equal measure with the actual end result. Within the gallery, eighty-four architectural projects spanning 180 years are presented by means of film, architectural models, original drawings and blueprints, fragments, photographs, patents, games, sales materials and propaganda, toys, and partial reconstructions. This diverse collection of material illustrates how the prefabricated house has been, and continues to be, not only a reflection on the house as a replicable object of design but also a critical agent in the discourse of sustainability, architectural invention, and new material and formal research.

All Plastic House: Ionel Schein

Part of the Moma Home Delivery timeline

“the Cellophane House, a five- story aluminum scaffolding wrapped with insulating transparent walls embedded with solar cells. The structure is easily taken apart to be almost fully recyclable.”

“Its Philadelphia architects, Steve Kieran and James Timberlake, see prefabrication as a way to make green technologies cheaper and reduce the huge amount of energy used by the small army of builders and delivery trucks it takes to build a conventional house.”

- by James S. Russell, Bloomberg.com from the MoMA’s Pods, Solar-Panel Scaffolds Show Prefab Housing’s Future article

This is part of the MOMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

July 20–October 20, 2008

The Cellophane House

The Cellophane House

Check out their Mid-Century couch. Offered in natural (pictured), charcoal & red.

Get it here

“This evolving collection presents an austere use of materials with subtle embellishment. The Mid-Century Modern collection is crafted from healthy non-toxic materials and features clean lines and a sculpted look with streamlined styling. Less is more.”

“The collection appeals to designers and homeowners who appreciate modern architecture as well as ‘resource responsible’ natural wood grains and finishes.”

“Ten door styles are now available: Post Modern, Cubist, Split Level, Biscayne Bay, Barcelona, Butterfly Roof, Golden Gate, Route 66 (Vertical and Horizontal), Flat Frame and Dominoes.”

description from Neil Kelly Cabinets Mid Century Collection

Shop Neil Kelly Cabinets Mid Century Collection here

Delta Shelter

“Tom Kundig is the winner of five National AIA Institute Honor Awards and a recipient of a 2007 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004, Kundig was selected as one of eight North American Emerging Architects by the Architectural League of New York and was elected to the College of Fellows by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He was a finalist for the 2005 National Design Award for Architecture, sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and he is a recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. To date, Kundig has been awarded a total of twenty-seven AIA awards, and over fifty awards total.

Chicken Point Cabin

Kundig’s work encompasses residential, commercial and institutional and is located around the world, from the West Coast to New York, Canada to the South, and across the ocean to Spain. He is internationally recognized for his sense of the American West landscape and for his integration of elegant architecture with the exploration and reinvention of parts of architecture that are overlooked or “forgotten,” such as doors, windows or stairs, as well as for his use of kinetic architectural elements.

Bainbridge Residence

In 2006, Princeton Architectural Press released Tom Kundig: Houses - a book which introduced the details of Kundig’s work to an international audience. He has been published in over 250 publications worldwide. Cover stories have appeared in the New York Times Home Magazine, Italy’s La Republica’s D CASA and Acciaio Arte Architettura, and Spain’s Diseño Interior. His work has been featured in many books on architecture, including Dung Ngo’s World House Now, Casamonti and Pavan’s Cantine 1990-2005, Jean-Louis Cohen and Martin Moeller Jr.’s Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete, and the forthcoming edition of The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture.

Hill House

Kundig has lectured extensively on design and served as a university studio critic throughout the United States and in Japan (at Harvard, Syracuse University, the University of Texas and the University of Oregon, among others). His award-winning work has been widely exhibited in North America, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Syracuse University, the Seattle AIA, and at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC which featured the Mission Hill Winery project as part of the exhibit “Liquid Stone.” A monograph on the work of the firm, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects: Architecture, Art and Craft, was published by the Monacelli Press in 2003. Kundig’s undergraduate and graduate architecture degrees are from the University of Washington.”

- www.olsonsundberg.com

Below is my favorite, The Queen Anne House

When MIT students aren’t hitting the books they are up to their Animal House-esque antics in this one-of-a-kind dormitory.

“the urban concept provides amenities to students
within the dormitory such as a 125 seat theater,
as well as a night cafe. house dining is on street level,
like a street front restaurant with a special awning
and outdoor tables. the corridors connecting the
rooms are like streets which happen upon urban
experiences.
the ‘perfcon’ structure is a unique design,
allowing for maximum flexibility and interaction.
the overall building mass has five large scale
openings. these roughly correspond to main entrances,
view corridors, and the main outdoor activity terraces
of the dormitory connected to programs such as the
gymnasium.
each of the dormitory’s single rooms has nine
operable windows .
the depth of the wall naturally shades out the summer
sun, while allowing the low angled winter sun in to help
heat the building.
in the deep setting of the numerous windows color
is applied to the head and jamb creating identity
for each of the ten ‘houses’ within the overall building.
the night light from the 9-window rooms will be
magical and exciting.

the facade of the M.I.T. dorm was partly inspired,
holl has said, by the sponge he was bathing with
one morning. ‘a sponge can absorb several times
its weight in liquid without changing its appearance.
cast glass seems to trap light within its material.
its translucency or transparency maintains a glow
of reflected light, refracted light or the light dispersed
on adjacent surfaces. this intermeshing of material
properties and optic phenomena opens a field for
exploration. ‘ holl says.
the sponge concept for the new undergraduate
residence hall transforms a porous building
morphology via a series of programmatic and
bio-technical functions.”

- DesignBoom.com