A stylized version of the hollyhock adorns the roofline. When Frank Lloyd Wright built the Hollyhock House, between 1919 and 1921, he couldn’t have imagined it would one day appear as the Piranha Temple in the 1989 movie Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. But perhaps not entirely by coincidence, he had designed it for a female client with an independent and adventurous spirit and a passion for the theatrical. And with this project—his first in Los Angeles—he was clearly beginning to explore the Mayan, or Mesoamerican, themes that would evolve throughout his work in Southern California. Though

April 2014 Under-appreciated and usually smaller than today's McMansions, modern houses from the 20th century are disappearing from the architectural ecosystem. Some champions, though, are finding ways to save them. Photo © Rollin R. LaFrance/Courtesy Mitchell|Giurgola Architects Romaldo Giurgola's 1970 Dayton Residence in Wayzata, Minnesota, was purchased for a reported $10 million in 2012. The new owners plan to build a larger alternative, though they are considering options other than demolition, including moving the Giurgola house off-site. Last summer, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) finished restoring the Hatch Cottage, designed by Jack Hall in 1960. Owned by the

American architects have been busy in India during the past decade, but now face an economic slowdown and political uncertainty there. Photo © Michal Ronnen Safdie Khalsa Heritage Center, Punjab; Safdie Architects. Located on a 75-acre site in the holy town of Anandpur Sahib, not far from Chandigarh, this project serves as a museum of the Sikh people and includes a 400-seat auditorium and a library. Safdie’s design, with its swooping galleries and exterior walls clad in sand-colored stone, evoke the fortress architecture of the region. A series of dams in a ravine create a water garden, crossed by a

Architecture schools are applying innovative educational models that foster new ways of thinking and challenge the role of the profession. Photo courtesy UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Thom Mayne and graduate students visit an artists’ collective in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as part of a yearlong studio course at the university’s Now Institute. Toyo Ito’s Tokyo office hosted students in 2012, who worked on tsunami relief projects. Related Links:America's Top Architecture Schools 2014Interview with James P. Cramer View the 2012 Rankings View the 2011 Rankings View the 2010 Rankings Architecture School isn't what it used to be. While core fundamentals, including tectonics

Never Built: Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum revives a century of ambitious schemes that might have been. B+UDowney Office Building, 2009 A history of what didn’t happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitious designs, some right on the brink of realization—that never broke ground in the city. Alongside visionaries who have vanished into obscurity, the thwarted include such famous names as Neutra, Lautner,

If A carpaccio of octopus, tender and razor thin, with notes of mellow olive oil, tangy citrus, and smoky piment'n, could be translated into restaurant design, you might end up with the Workshop Kitchen + Bar in Palm Springs, California.

Los Angeles, California The Getty wrangles a herd of exhibitions on postwar architecture and design. Photo © Ed Ruscha/J. Paul Getty Museum In a keynote address at the University of Southern California in 1940, Frank Lloyd Wright dismissed the built environment of Los Angeles as amounting to little more than a “dish of tripe.” But even without the notable houses he'd built there himself, the city's unfolding architectural saga was already more complex and, in some respects, more appealing than a dollop of offal. And over the next half-century, L.A.'s rapid evolution would produce enough fare–both loathsome and savory–to merit

Running through July 7 at SCI-Arc's downtown Los Angeles space, the show—part of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time series—highlights the pivotal role of the temporary gallery that Thom Mayne ran out of his home for a few weeks in the late 70s. Zago Architecture, the exhibition designers, wrapped the entry zone in skewed, blown-up reproductions of Morphosis' mock postage stamps – a clever riff on Graphic Wrap, one of the six spatial strategies the curators identified in the featured work, most notably Eric Owen Moss' Fun House. In the fall of 1979, Los Angeles’ first gallery for architecture came into

By Edwin Heathcote. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012, 160 pages, $20. This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard. The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has