A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Lawson/Westen House in Los Angeles, California by Eric Owen Moss, 1993 The evolution of the American house has paralleled changes in the family, both in its focus and its structure. The fireplace, long the center of the home, was supplanted by the family room and its accompanying glowing box for family gatherings. The focus moved from inward to outward; to the world outside of the family. Now in a world of constant visual stimulus (television, computers, advertising) the location for interaction with family and friends rests in the kitchen. The Lawson/Westen house in Los Angeles, designed by Eric Owen Moss , reflects this change. Both in plan and in space the kitchen has a constant presence, a multi-story space contained within a truncated and sliced cone. These two formal gestures dictate the form of the rest of the house: truncating the cone creates a skylight bathing the space in light and slicing the truncated ...

Steedman Fellowship Winner in St. Louis, Missouri by Fabio Oppici, 2000 The following is the winner of the 2000 James Harrison Steedman Traveling Fellowship in Architecture, Fabio Oppici of Rome, Italy. Click here to read an excerpt from the competition brief. The winning scheme for a new Museum of American Architecture strongly addresses one of the program brief's main issues: reconnecting the city of St. Louis and the Mississippi, while ignoring others (the possibility of a symbolic vocabulary for museums and the relationship between artwork and container, for example). Essentially the solution is a tube wrapping Interstate 70, which now inhabits a trench that severs the arch and its park from downtown, with program spaces pushed underground. This tube stitches together the park and the city at street level as a pedestrian landscape not disturbing the visual axis between the Courthouse and the ...