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maison en sardaigne
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round vacation
What better place for a summer vacation than a cool round house overlooking the beach? The Water Tower, just off the Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach, California, supplied water to the surrounding area until 1974. Here it is in 1966, in its original state, with a curvy ’60s VW bug in the foreground -
The tower was converted to residential use in the mid ’80s and is now a vacation rental -
At 87 feet tall, it towers over the surrounding palm trees.
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the diary of virginia woolf
We have bought the Round House, & are now secure of a lodging on earth so long as we need sleep or sit anywhere -
In 1919, Virginia Woolf purchased the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes, for £300. She never lived there, as a few weeks later she and her husband found another house they preferred.
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chelsea house
A stunning half circle of an apartment building in central London, designed by Scottish modernist architect Thomas S. Tait in 1934 -
An “exceptionally bright apartment” in the building is currently on sale for £2,200,000. The apartment has a good view of the Park Tower Knightsbridge, a round concrete behemoth on the south side of Hyde Park.
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casualties of the war in syria
The traditional beehive houses of northern Syria are among the country’s architectural treasures, now at risk of destruction in indiscriminate bombings -
Found in villages near Aleppo, the conical structures were designed to trap cool air and keep out the hot sun, making them well suited to the harsh desert climate. While similar structures were common throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean region a few thousand years ago, only in Syria do they still exist.
This 1930s postcard shows a beehive village to the northeast of Aleppo, possibly Sarouj -
Visiting such villages in 1905, archeologist and adventurer Gertrude Bell wrote that they are “like no villages save those that appear in the illustrations to Central African travel books.”
In addition to killing tens of thousands of civilians, the war in Syria has devastated the country’s cultural and architectural heritage. Five of Syria’s six UNESCO world heritage sites have reportedly been damaged, and UNESCO recently placed all of these sites on its list of sites in danger. The members of the World Heritage Committee urged all parties to the conflict in Syria to “refrain from any action that would cause further damage to cultural heritage of the country and to fulfill their obligations under international law by taking all possible measures to protect such heritage.”
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villa vals
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19th century fortress (and 21st century modernist showpiece) for rent
A defensive fortress from the Napoleonic era was converted in 2009 to a private residence -
Made up of some 750,000 bricks, with immensely thick walls, Martello Tower Y was originally built in 1808 as a coastal outpost against an expected invasion from Napoleon’s France. The years passed, the French attack never came, and the building fell into disrepair. It was totally derelict when renovations began, 200 years after its construction.
The 2009 renovation of the building, designed by Piercy & Company, won a host of architectural awards. English Heritage lauded it as “an exemplary and unique conversion of this type of building.”
Located on the Suffolk coast, with spectacular views of the ocean and neighboring wetlands, the tower can be rented by the week as a vacation home.
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r and r in the round
Still looking for a summer holiday escape? There are round houses for rent in vacation spots around the world. Were it not for pressing work deadlines and a depleted bank account, I might run away to this vintage gem in Desert Hot Springs, California.
I could also be tempted to spend time at this northern Scotland stone cottage, this solar-powered Hawaiian home, this mid-century jewel overlooking a river in Oregon, this Balinesian villa, this wine-drenched Sonoma County retreat, and this super-cool futuro spaceship in Wisconsin.
And at $75 a night — or better yet, $500 a month — I might just visit this cheerful and eccentric New Mexico house and decide to stay.
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mой mельников
If you happen to be in Moscow, drop everything and visit the Vkhutemas gallery, on Rozhdestvenka Street, where you can join the fight to protect the iconic Melnikov House -
The innovative cylindrical house, designed in the late 1920s by Russian avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov, is at risk of destruction. A group of developers — the almost-too-perfect-to-be-real Trust-Oil company — is building a large commercial complex just behind the house, with multiple levels of underground parking; the construction is reportedly causing the house’s foundation to sink. Preservationists claim that the work has opened numerous serious cracks in the house’s load-bearing walls; some fear the structure will collapse.
Tonight’s gallery event aims to draw attention to these threats. It will include a film, an interactive performance, and a press conference about the ongoing effort to protect the Melnikov House from destruction.
If like most of us you’re not in Moscow, you can still help. First, learn about Melnikov, his house, and his larger body of work; peruse Melnikov’s models and sketches; listen to a reading of the late Bruce Chatwin’s account of a 1973 visit with Melnikov; immerse yourself in Russian Constructivism, and then — if you’re duly impressed — consider signing a petition urging the mayor of Moscow to take immediate action to preserve the Melnikov House. Or visit the Constructivist Project, which advocates for the protection of the Melnikov House and other Russian modernist buildings, and learn what else you can do.
“The eyes of the world are on Russia in this important case,” said Ana Tostoes, the head of Docomomo International, an architectural preservation group. Leading architects from around the world have rallied to the cause, urging the Russian government to protect the Melnikov House. As they point out, Melnikov was a visionary; his house is extraordinary, and many of his other works “have become paradigms of modern architecture as a whole.”
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a nonconforming form
Round houses interrupt the rectangular grid -
While they’re not, strictly speaking, unique — a badly overused word in real estate — they’re still an unconventional choice in our rectilinear world.
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wish you were here
The curving rooms of the Portland Hotel, in Long Beach, Washington, hosted thousands of guests during the hotel’s 30 years of existence -
Built in the 1880s, the building burned down on December 6, 1914.
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casa pi
Casa Pi, the University of Zaragoza’s entry for the Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 -
The project was a finalist in the competition, selected as one of the 20 best entries among the 50 that were initially submitted. It was designed to be self-sufficient in energy, producing more than it consumes.
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red spats and a round house
The late Bruce Chatwin gave a characteristically entertaining report of his 1973 visit with Konstantin Melnikov, at Melnikov’s cylindrical house in Moscow. The account is worth reading in full -
In January 1973, on a morning of Stygian gloom, I called on Konstantin Melnikov, the architect, at his house on Krivoarbatsky Lane in Moscow . . . . [M]y visit to Mr Melnikov was the high point of the trip, since, by any standards, the house itself is one of the architectural wonders of the twentieth century.
. . . . Melnikov’s house — or rather pavilion in the French sense — is set well back from the street, a building both Futurist and Classical consisting of two interlocking cylinders, the rear one taller than the front and pierced with some sixty windows: identical elongated hexagons with Constructivist glazing bars. The cylinders are built of brick covered with stucco in the manner of Russian churches. In 1973 the stucco was a dull and flaking ochre, although recent photos show the building spruced up with a coat of whitewash. On the front façade above the architrave are the words KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV ARKHITEKTOR — his proud and lonely boast that true art can only be the creation of the individual, never that of the committee or group.
. . . . Among the photographs from Paris, he showed me one of himself, a dandified figure standing on the staircase of the Soviet pavilion. Then, having pointed meticulously to the hatband of his Homburg, his cravat, and his spats he asked me: ‘What colour do you think they were?’ ‘Red,’ I suggested. ‘Red,’ he nodded.
. . . . Given the fertility of his imagination and his keen ability to grasp some feature and use it for his own ends, it is hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint Melnikov’s sources. He is known, as a student, to have studied the utopian projects of Boullée and Ledoux, both of whom designed cylindrical buildings. He is thought to have admired the interlocking cylinders of grain elevators in the American Midwest, which were published by Le Corbusier in his L’Esprit Nouveau. He examined the structure of certain Muscovite churches. And as for the honeycomb construction, whereby windows can be added or subtracted without affecting the weight load, it reminds me of the cylindrical brick tomb-towers of Islamic Central Asia. There was, it is well known, a strong Islamic influence on early Soviet architecture.
I would also like to think that on one of his summer drives around Paris someone drove him to the parish of Chambourcy to see the Désert de Retz, a building that was being ‘discovered’ around that time by Colette, among others.
. . . . For forty years he simply sat at home doing nothing. Occasionally there was talk of his rehabilitation, but nothing really came of it, so that by the time of my visit the house, for all its vestiges of vitality, had become a sombre and gloomy private palace — as sombre as Prokofiev’s 1942 Sonata.
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if you lived in a yurt in a remote part of china
This is the stuff you might own -
For nearly a decade, photographer Huang Qingjun has been taking pictures of families in rural China, together with their houses and all of their belongings. This picture is from 2007.
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true modernism
“Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans . . . or in the square houses with flat straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of windows, where these people are caged in their lifetime . . . These are not modern but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste.”
- Rabindranath Tagore, lectures in Japan, 1916-1917.
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revolutionary round houses
Cuba is among a handful of countries, according to WordPress site stats, from which no visitor has ever found his or her way to this blog. I’ll attribute the lack of Cuban traffic to few computers and many restrictions on internet access, not to a lack of interest in round houses; in fact, as I just learned, Havana has a whole neighborhood filled with circular homes.
The Reparto Abel Santamaria complex, by Nicolas de la Cova, was built in 1963, a few years after the Batista government was forced from power. Those initial post-revolution years were a period of enormous architectural innovation, with young, progressive architects and designers exploring new ideas and new forms as they attempted to build a new Cuba.
Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, a Cuban architect and historian, has commented on the dominance of the circle as an architectural form in Cuba during that period. The city of Havana gained a number of circular buildings, including the Nuevo Vedado primary school and the famous ice-cream store Coppelia.
One can see Reparto Abel Santamaria’s dozens of round houses – and its large circular market building — quite well via Google maps. Each house is about 30 feet in diameter, designed to house a family of six.
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california’s revolutionary round house
“A radical new style in houses—the round house—makes its debut in California” -
The reporter narrating a 1954 British Pathé newsreel spoke in breathless tones of a “revolutionary” round house in California. Designed by architect George Frank Ligar, the house — located in Hollywood, of course — was made of concrete, glass and stone, and included such innovations as folding walls and a climbable roof.
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early 18th century round house
Samuel Waring, an Irish gentleman and amateur architect, drew a set of circular house plans in 1715 -
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360 ° views of a 360 ° house
A round house on a private island in Mamaroneck, NY, is now on sale for $2.595 million (down from its original asking price of $3.1 million) -
This swirling video shows the circular dwelling from the air.
Back in 1962, when the house was under construction, it caused something of a sensation. The New York Times published a front page article that described the house’s layout and architectural elements in detail. Designed by the firm of Harsen, Johns, Kobayashi & Fermery, the house is 65 feet in diameter and cost $50,000 to build.
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thinking outside the boxes
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