Month: August 2014

The event “Architecture as a Way of Life and Placemaking” was certainly not business as usual at the Center for Architecture. As AIANY Architecture for Education Committee Co-chair, Umberto Dindo, FAIA, said, it felt like a meditation on the universe, life, space, and sensations with the pictures falling into place. That feeling was already present when AIANY 2014 President Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, in his opening remarks, invoked and recited a poem by the great Bangladeshi poet Rabindranath Tagore, the literary Nobel Laureate of 1913, who’s poetic strength he credited with helping him in a very difficult period of his life.

Unusual also, because – how many times do you have a chance to meet an architect who prefers to sketch with watercolors rather than with a pencil? How many architects accept that we are not destined to change the world, but only to change ourselves and our designs? And perhaps most exceptionally – how many architects find the courage to move forward after teachers tell them to change their profession because they don’t deserve more than a failing grade? Luckily for us, Rafiq Azam, principal of Dhaka-based SHATOTTO architecture for green living, did. Continue reading “Rafiq Azam: The Poetry of Architecture and Watercolors of Bangladesh”

Well veiled, the destination at the end of the street led many too far. Only after returning on a dirt road did a unique awning peek above the shrub and fence line. A sold-out tour gathered neighbors and city-dwellers alike who soon followed Lee Mindel, FAIA, through his grounds and home that subtly combine local references and modern sensibilities to great effect.

The project is a study in balance, from the veiled entry to the dock that opens onto an egret preserve. Mindel mediated large-scale influences – the grid of the street giving way to the waterfront – to inform the geometry of the site planning and house. Passing through the security gate, one enters a gravel forecourt, mimicking the North Sea Harbor on the site’s opposite side. Landscaping by Rumsey Farber reinforces the nearby nature preserve while mapping out level changes and geometry with stone walls. Between these two poles lie the composition of house and pool house and the “pool of grass and the pool of water,” as Mindel describes the open spaces. The pool house appears traditional, but a closer look reveals the progression from a low façade with a full gable dormer, to a dormer half buried in the façade, to a window in a modern cube. This play on form, tradition, and history runs through the project. Continue reading “Mindel House: Eccentric Balance”