Tag: o. m. ungers

a studio, hillside

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Small (often illegal) studios riddle the Hollywood Hills, where all ilk of entertainment-oriented folk hash out their hits and edit down their next Oscar-worthy performances. . . or so the stereotype goes.

This is such a studio – a miniature white cube set deep into the hillside with a service shed and private garden adjacent.  Upon approach, only the pyramidal skylight is visible, slowly revealing the tall archways underneath upon descending a spiral stair.  The form itself owes much to both Irving Gill and O.M. Ungers, with a few picturesque moments from Wallace Neff’s Spanish Colonial Revivalism thrown in for good measure.  Upcoming posts will feature the interior of the studio, with that large skylight and intricate trusswork above.

it started with a frame

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Rather, they started with a frame.  Shelves, that is.  I was scouring the internet and architecture books for shelves, first to house my inordinately large (and growing) library, and then just for the interest of how shelving could be used/designed in an architectural setting.  So I started with a frame, three cubes stacked, but quickly found myself drawn to a two-by-four stack, with it’s squares within squares.  Squares led me to think of Ungers, but placing a base and a top on it made me think Rossi.  The detail below assumes a hollow metal frame with sheet metal pediment and base, prefabricated coves cut and welded to form rudimentary mouldings.  A wormseye axon explores how an entire wall may be covered with these.  And a final alternate places two large half-round cabinets to either side of the shelving proper, taken from a large wardrobe Lutyens designed for Viceroy’s House, Delhi.

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ungers and lutyens do a kitchen

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I began by drawing cabinetry I found in a new volume on O. M. Ungers, then for whatever reason took a look through a book on Lutyens, where I found a small round wood kitchen island, detailed as four miniature Tuscan columns. I’m not one to shrink from putting two incongruous styles alongside one another, so why not? Lutyens’ kitchen at Castle Drogo, itself a riff on Soane, informed the ceiling.

another riff on gill

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Another Gill-inspired project, this time taking planometric cues from Ungers, with a large central hall that cuts through three stories to a pyramidal skylight atop, wrapped in a continuous arcaded portico all around.  Maybe this one could do with killer attic spaces, for a fourth floor.

a house with a veranda

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To celebrate my birthday, my wife took me to see over 20 of Irving Gill’s extant works.  I’ve always appreciated this seminal figure, and his lasting impact upon Southern California’s architectural development, but had never taken it upon myself to actually seek out his work in person.  Lesson learned.  And as much as I appreciate precedent study, that is the representation of existing works through drawing, I believe that history must be operative – that is, we must look to how history can work for us today.  Not only what we can learn from it, but what we can do with it.

And with that introduction, I give you a small house, three squares in plan, stepped in section, cubic in volume.  The articulation of the volumes is typical Gill, with an arcade wrapping the a portion of the ground floor as a screen, yet open to the air above (quoting Gill’s Bishop’s School in La Jolla).  The remainder of the details are taken from Ungers, with some Schindler-esque diagonal planning.

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two stair towers

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One square, one circular.  The square has a radial winder stair inside (but cut as a square), while the circle has a square stair inside, with habitable spaces inside of that inner square.  This particular example is a rift on a project by Oswald Mathias Ungers, where circular and square towers are set alongside one another (and of course, I can’t track it down, though I know it’s in the Electa monograph. . .).

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yet another basilica

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O. M. Ungers and Richard Meier play the primary instigators in terms of language of this basilica – minus the Doric impluvium entry courtyard, of course.  The front elevation/plan drawing shows shadows that hint at both wormseye and oblique axonometric projections.  Structure and tectonics play a central role where pipe and wide flange columns slide back and forth next to one another, while small circular side chapels cut into the deep poche of the stone walls.

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gallery w/ peristyle, pt. 2

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MISC_02

I was digging through my sketchbooks and found a nice little partial wormseye axonometric drawing that should have been a part of an earlier post.  This one may be a bit more difficult to understand, seeing as it’s a pretty unusual type of drawing.  But effectively, what I’ve done is drawn a corner of the project looking from underneath the building, as if the ground wasn’t there.