These are a mix of glass and lucite, past and present. The bottom 3 pieces are from the 70s and all of the pieces at top are contemporary. Transparency puts furniture into the realm of the future or the imaginary, even when it also automatically harks back to the 1970s. Which may be the same thing. The 70s also had that thing for kaleidoscopic and candyshop colour, iconoclasm, disco and visual pleasure. And conveniently mirrored table tops. Above, XXX tables by Glas Italia, released this year. See this Arren Williams article. Below, glass and lucite by Italian company Sawaya Moroni, who are present-day masters of this too. Example further below are vintage.

Two photos above are by Klick Interiors.

Above, French 70s lucite desk from here. Below, Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table by Ron Ferri, circa 1970’s USA. Mirror, Lucite. From Todd Merrill

Below, unknown chair.

Sports and Leisure Center in Saint-Cloud by KOZ Architectes, via ArchDaily. Photos by Stephan Lucas. This building, designed for children, is so well thought out it’s worth going to ArchDaily and reading the well-written and slightly franglais rationale.

Excerpts: “The building uses colour very openly and assertively, with a wide palette ranging from red to green, by way of yellow, pink and orange. These colours cover the façade in wide stripes. Inside, the same colours are systematically repeated, like stepping in an oversized graffti. A colour coding that helps you locate from the outside the areas created on the inside. A means of spatial orientation for young children. An echo to street culture codes for those who crawl on what is dubbed the coolest indoor climbing wall in France, or practice on the pop fencing rows below!… Over and above the pure functionality of the activities identified in the project, the architects placed great hope on the imagination and inventiveness of the occupants. That’s why all corridors, access ramps and passageways, are wide and spacious, up to 3 times the regulation size… KOZ is part of the “environmentally aware” generation. The openings in the roofs and the glass facades bring maximum natural lighting everywhere to limit electrical consumption. Concrete was chosen for the reasons mentioned above but the preference was for prefabricated concrete, generating less waste and spill. The tinted glass facades provide good protection against setting sun and long-lasting colour. And of course all hot water is solar heated.”

A few years ago architect/builder David Hovey designed and built this house for himself and his family in Winnetka, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Like most of Hovey’s buildings the house is constructed of relatively simple materials, including perforated steel I-beams, and all its parts are designed to be pre-fabricated and then shipped in. The house took only two days to assemble. It’s airy and welcoming, minimalist without being forbidding, and really well decorated. It takes a lot of skill to use this much red and yellow without producing a mustard-and-ketchup colour scheme – how many architects, let alone builder/architects, are this good at interior design as well? All this house needs is an indoor swing; you could hang one just about anywhere. Via AD (article worth reading). Photos by Jon Miller and Hedrich Blessing. More on Hovey at mocoloco and here.

“I’ve spent my career thinking about how to design buildings economically and efficiently,” [Hovey] says. “I want to create systems that go together simply, in a way that leads to rapid construction. By reducing the elapsed time between design and occupancy, I can save a lot of administrative costs. And I want to put everything together using standard products and familiar technologies, which saves even more.”

Vancouver could really use a few builder architects like Hovey – or even just one, somebody with a good eye and an interest in simple materials affordably assembled.

One last Vancouver house by Arthur Erickson. The house was built for and is still owned by the painterGordon Smith and his partner Marion. They have carefully maintained it over the years, in keeping with Erickson’s original design and intention. There’s an interesting article in Vancouver Magazine about the difference between their informed maintenance and the slow degradation of Erickson’s nearby Graham House, which was demolished in 2007. For another painter’s house in West Vancouver, see the BC Binning house here. All photos are from Arthur Erickson’s site and are by Ezra Stoller, John Fulker and Steven Zhen Wang.

The Keevil House, Savary Island, British Columbia. Photos are from arthurerickson.com. Arthur Erickson, 1924-2009.

The Chen House in North Taiwan, design and constructed by Finnish architect Marco Casagrande and Taiwanese architect Frank Chen, was built for an older couple who wanted to retire to the country and grow bamboo and cherry trees – on a flood plain also beset by hurricanes and earthquakes. The house is a light structure constructed almost entirely of mahogany on simple concrete posts. Casagrande quotes Brecht: Last night I saw a terrible strorm in a dream. It ripped off the scaffoldings and crushed the iron joints. Though what was made of wood, bent, and stayed still. Some of Casagrande’s earlier work is as much art as architecture, and has dealt specifically with the destruction of buildings by time, by the elements, by social and economic change, or all of the above (see project at bottom). The Chen House, too, is built to withstand the elements but also with its inevitable destruction in mind – as a future ruin. The style of the house dates from a period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule and houses were built in a more traditional Japanese style. More recently most houses in Taiwan have been made of brick imported from China’s Fujian Province, but Casagrande and Chen wanted to return to the earlier method. Wood better withstands earthquakes; water from flooding passes beneath the low stilts; and by opening windows to promote cross-draft, a hurricane passes through the building more safely than if the building were to try to resist it. The house is situated in Sanjhih, Taipei County, in the Datun Mountains.

Below, Casagrande’s “Land(e)scape” project in Finland (co-produced with Sami Rintala), more commonly known as the “walking barns,” dealt with the abandonment of traditional Finnish farm buildings after people drifted to the city and agricultural practices changed. Casagrande and Rintala constructed barn houses which, now functionless in their environment, somehow seem able to get up on stilt legs and walk somewhere else – the city, perhaps – but which are ultimately animated only by fire.

Click below for an article on the house by Catherine Slessor in Architectural Review, reprinted from Casagrande:

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