Tatooine! I knew this Vancouver Island house reminded me of something.

I’m developing a taste for these. There are lots of dinky suburban tract versions of these perforated walls, but when the scale and placement are well thought out, they can be the building’s most arresting feature. This collection is a mix of decorative landscaping walls or actual exterior treatments on buildings. Either way, the fact that they afford both privacy and light is nice. See also the entry on patterned concrete blocks. Above, “the white room” by Dag4 (‘m not sure if that one is concrete, technically, but it’s the same idea). Below, Racquet Club Tract, Palmer & Krisel. Architect: William Krisel. Palm Springs. American Cement building, and office building, all by Chimay Bleue.

Below, another shot of the Parker Hotel, Palm Springs, by schafphoto:

Photos below by how_long_it_takes, one0one0one, Fernando Stankuns, and Michael-D(new works). Click on photos for more info.

Concrete block and perforated screen fetishists should visit this Flickr pool. The wall above and below is at the abandoned Besser Vibrapac office, a building that served as a display of the company’s own concrete blocks. Besser Vibrapac by The Mover, on Flickr. Click on photos to read more. And see this.

Above, “Empty midcentury modern building in Ft. Meade, FL. It has 2 of my favorite things. Circles and squares.” By JennRation.

Above, Frank Lloyd Wright patterned blocks, by Usonian. Below, Vancouver’s Planetarium (by me), and Blomberg Windows, Sacramento, CA by atomicpear.

Above, Penticton Fire Hall, photo by Drew Makepeace. Below, Mexico City facade, “Concrete Lace,” by VonMurr.

I’ve liked this building from childhood, but somehow I managed to see it with fresh eyes recently – I was late for an art event there, it was dusk, I was tired, the entry was deserted and somehow I suddenly noticed how ridiculously beautiful it is. It houses the Museum of Vancouver and the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium, famous in part for the Led Zep and Pink Floyd laser light shows which everyone steadfastly refuses to attend with me. I’ve been trying to get someone to go with me for years. The building’s shape probably references both flying saucers and the finely woven hats of the Salish First Nations on whose traditional lands Vancouver squats. The architect is George Hamilton and the building was completed in 1968; the stainless steel crab fountain (turned off for maintenance when I took these photos) is by sculptor George Norris. Click photos for more information.

and these shots by ChimayBleue on Flickr:

It shouldn’t be that difficult; it comes apart. The owner residents of Tokyo’s famous Nakagin Capsule Tower have voted to demolish it and rebuild a “modern” tower on the same location, which is now a valuable property adjacent to the Ginza district. See the recent article by architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NYT and an interesting post on pingmag. The building was designed by Japanese architect Kurokawa Kishō in 1972, in the style known as Japanese Metabolism. Typical of the buildings in that movement, each capsule is suspended from the structure independently (rather like this), so even though the capsules’ interiors are now outdated (all-in-one plastic consoles including built-in reel-to-reel audio systems!), each capsule can be removed, gutted, de-asbestosized, refurbished, and lifted back into place, and that is exactly the solution the architect recently proposed before his death. The real issue is land value – the apartment owners want a more “efficient” use of the lot, which means they want to maximize the “value” of each apartment. They say the capsules are cramped, but they’re no different than most Tokyo apartments. Every Japanese architectural association has argued for preserving the building, as have international architectural critics and associations, but the futuristic building’s future doesn’t look good. I love this building; I had a postcard of it on my desk all through school. So I’m asking you, Vancouver, you who contains so little interesting architecture: since these capsules are individually removable, why not have the building stacked like jenga pieces on a freighter and floated over here? Since you apparently want to install a new 14-storey homeless housing 3 blocks from me – despite the fact that this neighbourhood already contains almost the densest social housing for the homeless anywhere in the world, and studies overwhelmingly show that this level of density is a really bad idea – here is my suggestion: I won’t complain about your badly-thought-out scheme IF you buy this 14-storey building from Tokyo. It’s the same height as the one you’re planning anyway – so convenient. And the rooms are actually bigger than the tiny ones you usually provide. Final note: I am the farthest thing from being against housing for the homeless, one of Vancouver’s most pressing needs, but am against the city’s imagination-less, ill-designed social architecture, its decision to locate all of these things in a single 8-square-block area, as well as building an ugly new high-rise in what is otherwise a low-rise neighbourhood. Solutions are necessary, but they need to make sense socially and architecturally too. As for views on micro-apartments in Vancouver, see here. More on Treehugger. Photo of the architect’s own capsule on the top floor is here.

I volunteer to help refurbish it. For a discussion of some of the arguments against the Nakagin Tower, see an excellent article at Reloading Images. Below is from the building’s Wikipedia entry, updated only a few days ago to include Ouroussoff’s article:

The original target demographic were bachelor salarymen. The compact apartments included a wall of appliances and cabinets built in to one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television set, and a reel-to-reel tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an aircraft lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A large circular window over a bed dominates the far end of the room.
Construction occurred on site and off site. On-site work included the two towers and their energy-supply systems and equipment, while the capsule parts were fabricated and the capsules were assembled at a factory…

The capsules were fitted with utilities and interior fittings before being shipped to the building site, where they were attached to the concrete towers. Each capsule is attached independently and cantilevered from the shaft, so that any capsule may be removed easily without affecting the others. The capsules are all-welded lightweight steel-truss boxes clad in galvanized, rib-reinforced steel panels. On April 15, 2007, the building’s residents, citing squalid, cramped conditions as well as concerns over asbestos, voted to demolish the building and replace it with a much larger, more modern tower.

In the interest of preserving his design, Kurokawa proposed taking advantage of the flexible design by “unplugging” the existing boxes and replacing them with updated units, a plan supported by the major architectural associations of Japan, including the Japan Institute of Architects; the residents countered with concerns over the building’s earthquake resistance and its inefficient use of valuable property adjacent to the high-value Ginza.

A developer for the replacement has yet to be found, partly because of the Late-2000s recession. Opposing its slated demolition, Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times, described Nakagin Capsule Tower as “gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, has probably appeared in more Hollywood films than any other notable modern house and has also been heavily used for ad and fashion shoots, music videos and television. The house is currently for sale at US$15 million, hence these new photos by Tim Street-Porter for Christie’s Great Estates. The building is strange enough on its own – Mayan temple meets Arts & Crafts meets deco meets baronial – without the additional fact that it posed as Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner. Living in this house would be  - well, you’d be an actor in someone else’s movie. The exteriors of Wright’s houses are unarguably impressive, but the style of the interiors, which Wright designed and decorated himself, seem stylistically confused and – despite all the natural light – weirdly ornate and heavy. Unless one has been inside a house one isn’t really supposed to comment, and of course architectural photographs, no matter how good, never give a true impression of a place. But the historical styles and references of Wright’s interiors are plainly evident from photographs, and by any standards they’re a very odd mix. The Ennis House interior suggests the palatial, the hobbity, the occult and the medieval all at once; it’s a bizarre hybrid of Arts & Craft leaded glass, concrete tiles molded in a deliberately pre-columbian style (“textile blocks”), persian carpets, Alhambra-ish wrought iron chandeliers and chairs, and heavy furniture in both early Renaissance and English medieval styles. Personally I would have just limited myself to Mayan temple. I sympathize with Wright’s interest in craft, artisanal excellence, and the kind of painstaking hand-production that references the land and environment, but these virtues can belong to any number of aesthetic styles. Why this medley of styles in particular, why this Lord of the Rings grandeur  - in the middle of LA? It’s sort of a megalomaniac architectural fantasy and it’s no wonder so many Hollywood films have been shot at the house, particularly films on the noirish end of the moral continuum. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been shot here, further belying Wright’s quasi-spiritual intentions for the house.  See below for a long but not exhaustive list of movies filmed in the house, compiled by a moderator on pushpullbar as part of an interesting thread on architecture in the movies. It’s a fairly sombre list.

Both photos above from Blade Runner, 1982, via loftlifemag.

Black Rain, 1989

Grand Canyon, 1991.

House on Haunted Hill, 1958.

Ricky Martin 1998 video Vuelve, above. And oh dear.

More films shot in the house (additional photos to be added… please check back):

Female, aka The Violent Years (1956)
House on Haunted Hill (1958)
Terminal Man (1974)
Day of the Locust (1974)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Howling II . . . Your Sister is a Werewolf (1984)
The Annihilator (1986)
TimeStalker (1987)
Remo Williams (1987)
Karate Kid III (1989)
Black Rain (1989)
Twin Peaks (1989)
Calvin Klein’s Obsession, commercial by David Lynch (1990)
Predator 2 (1990)
Grand Canyon (1991)
An Inconvenient Woman (2 part TVM 1991)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Fallen Angels (1993)
Murder, Obliquely (1993)
The Glimmer Man (1996)
House of Frankenstein (1997)
Rush Hour (1998)
The Replacement Killers (1998)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)