From Tract to Tres Chic

Annette Wiley: Tract house made modern

"Architect Annette Wiley turned her 1950s tract home in Corona del Mar into a contemporary residence remodeled with environmentally friendly materials and practices. The siding is ipe wood and cement board with recycled content. The steps leading to the entry are decomposed granite. Sculptural succulents are poised out front, a low-water alternative to lawn. The entry path guides visitors past the round planter to the ipe wood gate. The design was conceived by Lisa Gimmy Landscape Architecture of Culver City. The 2,600-square-foot house has Energy Star appliances, a tankless water heater, rooftop solar panels and other green features. But Wiley's goal was for visitors to step through the front door and see a house that looked modern but still warm and comfortable."

via LA Times

Conversations with Frank Gehry

From the recent NYT article:

"When architects cannot erect they write, and thus we can expect an imminent increase in publications by underemployed practitioners of the building art. However, good times or bad, producing books has been mandatory for architects ever since the modernist masters (and masterly self-publicists) Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier committed their ideas as well as their plans to print."

"Frank Gehry, the most acclaimed American architect since Wright, is not a ­natural-born writer. To satisfy the considerable demand for personal explications of his work, Gehry, who turned 80 in February, has avoided the agony of authorship and cooperated with several interviewers on transcribed texts during the past decade. “Conversations With Frank Gehry” is the latest attempt to elicit the essence of his creative method in his own words."

• Click here to read the entire article at NYT