Asked to name our favorite con­crete build­ing, many of us would strug­gle to hold back a sneer. Though the copi­ous use of that mate­r­i­al by mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry style known as Bru­tal­ism has late­ly gained new gen­er­a­tions of enthu­si­asts, we still more com­mon­ly hear it lament­ed as a source of archi­tec­tur­al “mon­strosi­ties.” But as a build­ing mate­r­i­al, con­crete goes back much fur­ther in his­to­ry than the decades fol­low­ing World War II. To find a uni­ver­sal­ly beloved exam­ple, we need mere­ly look back to sec­ond-cen­tu­ry Rome. There we find the Pan­theon, look­ing much the same as it does in twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Rome today.

The best-pre­served mon­u­ment of ancient Rome, the Pan­theon (not to be con­fused with the Greek Parthenon) has remained in con­tin­u­ous use, first as “a tem­ple to the gods, then sanc­ti­fied and made into a church. Now, of course, it’s a major tourist attrac­tion.” So says schol­ar Steven Zuck­er in the Khan Acad­e­my video above, a brief pho­to­graph­ic tour he leads along­side his col­league Beth Har­ris.

“As soon as you walk in, you notice that there’s a kind of obses­sion with cir­cles, with rec­tan­gles, with squares, with those kinds of per­fect geo­met­ri­cal shapes,” says Har­ris. “Because of the Roman use of con­crete, the idea [obtained] that archi­tec­ture could be some­thing that shaped space and that could have a dif­fer­ent kind of rela­tion­ship to the view­er.”

You can go deep­er into the Pan­theon (built cir­ca 125 AD) through the tour video by Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the ancient-his­to­ry chan­nel Told in Stone. Call­ing the Pan­theon “arguably the most influ­en­tial build­ing of all time,” he goes on to sup­port that bold claim by exam­in­ing a host of struc­tur­al and aes­thet­ic ele­ments (not least its sub­lime­ly spher­i­cal rotun­da) that would inspire archi­tects in the Renais­sance, a time ded­i­cat­ed to mak­ing use of ancient Greek and Roman knowl­edge, and in some sense ever after. This may come as a sur­prise to view­ers with only a casu­al inter­est in archi­tec­ture — more than it would to the Emper­or Hadri­an, com­mis­sion­er of the Pan­theon, who seems not to have been giv­en to great doubts about the dura­bil­i­ty of his lega­cy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

What Hap­pened to the Miss­ing Half of the Roman Colos­se­um?

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Ital­ian Street Musi­cian Plays Amaz­ing Cov­ers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pan­theon in Rome

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

There could be few more Amer­i­can styles of dwelling than the tract house, and few more Amer­i­can archi­tects than Frank Lloyd Wright. But Wright, of course, nev­er designed a tract house. Each of his dwellings, to say noth­ing of his pub­lic build­ings, was in every sense a one-off, not just in its lay­out and its details but in its rela­tion­ship to its con­text. Wright believed, as he declared in his book The Nat­ur­al House, that a build­ing should be “as dig­ni­fied as a tree in the midst of nature.” This he held true even for rel­a­tive­ly mod­est res­i­dences, as evi­denced by the series of “Uson­ian hous­es” he began in the late nine­teen-thir­ties.

The Vox video above fea­tures the “cypress-and-brick mas­ter­piece” that is Pope-Leighey House in Alexan­dria, Vir­ginia, which Wright com­plet­ed in 1941. “Bound­ed by the hum­ble bud­get of the Pope fam­i­ly” — Loren Pope, its head was work­ing as a news­pa­per copy edi­tor at the time — “this struc­ture nonethe­less exhibits the dis­tinct fea­tures char­ac­ter­is­tic of his for­mi­da­ble vision and style.”

So says the house­’s page at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion, which adds that “the archi­tec­tur­al ele­ment of com­pres­sion and release, the can­tilevered roofs, and the win­dows that open to the out­side cre­ate an imme­di­ate inter­ac­tion with the sur­round­ing land­scape.”

Video pro­duc­er Phil Edwards pays spe­cial atten­tion to those win­dows. He cites Wright’s con­vic­tion that “the best way to light a house is God’s way — the nat­ur­al way, as near­ly as pos­si­ble in the day­time and at night as near­ly like the day as may be, or bet­ter.” In the case of the Pope-Leighey house, achiev­ing this ide­al involved the use of not just near­ly floor-to-ceil­ing win­dows, but also cleresto­ry win­dows per­fo­rat­ed in a dis­tinc­tive geo­met­ric pat­tern and posi­tioned so as to cast “light hung like pic­tures on the wall.” The effect is so strong that the house­’s two relo­ca­tions appear not to have dimin­ished it — and so sin­gu­lar that, despite the enthu­si­asm of post-war tract-house devel­op­ers for Wright’s inno­va­tions in hous­ing, it nev­er did make it into Levit­town.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japan­ese Mas­ter­piece, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

How Insu­lat­ed Glass Changed Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion to the Tech­no­log­i­cal Break­through That Changed How We Live and How Our Build­ings Work

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Tokyo once had a hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright. Such an archi­tec­tur­al asset, one might assume, would be pre­served at all costs, yet this one was demol­ished in 1967. But the fact that Wright’s Impe­r­i­al Hotel stood for only 45 years won’t sur­prise any­one famil­iar with Japan­ese build­ing cul­ture, nor will the fact that it was only one of a series of Impe­r­i­al Hotels that have occu­pied the same site. As evi­denced by the Ise Grand Shrine, which has been demol­ished and rebuilt every twen­ty years since the eighth cen­tu­ry, a struc­ture’s val­ue in Japan has noth­ing to do with its longevi­ty. Still, this expla­na­tion may not sat­is­fy Wright enthu­si­asts, the great major­i­ty of whom have only been able to see the mas­ter’s most famous Japan­ese build­ing in pho­tographs, dia­grams, and post­cards.

Just this year, the Frank Lloyd Trust has giv­en us a way to expe­ri­ence it as nobody could in its hey­day: a vir­tu­al tour video “shot” from the per­spec­tive of a fly­ing drone. (Watch above.) It comes as an entry in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works, which “brings Wright’s demol­ished and unre­al­ized struc­tures to life through immer­sive dig­i­tal ani­ma­tions recon­struct­ed from Wright’s orig­i­nal plans and draw­ings, along with archival pho­tographs.”

Here we have Wright’s East-meets-West mas­ter­piece recon­struct­ed just as it must have looked when it opened on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1923 — the same day, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, as the Great Kan­tō earth­quake that dev­as­tat­ed Tokyo. The Impe­r­i­al Hotel took some dam­age, but came through intact.

A less­er earth­quake had already struck the pre­vi­ous year, but it left the hotel unharmed despite its still being under con­struc­tion. (The same can’t be said of the frag­ile remains of the orig­i­nal Impe­r­i­al Hotel, built in 1890 and gut­ted by fire in 1922, that Wright had been com­mis­sioned to replace.) But over sub­se­quent decades, time took its toll in oth­er ways: “the Wright-designed Impe­r­i­al would even­tu­al­ly be con­sid­ered by the post-war trav­el­er to be dark and musty,” writes Steve Sund­berg at Old Tokyo, “and its un-air-con­di­tioned rooms too small. The hotel’s foun­da­tion, too, had by then set­tled uneven­ly into the soft sub­soil; its long hall­ways and cor­ri­dors came to have a wavy, rub­bery appear­ance about them.”

Even when new, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel had its dis­com­forts: Sund­berg quotes a 1925 Far East­ern Review arti­cle call­ing it “a hun­dred years ahead of the age in its archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures and fifty years behind in many things which make for the com­fort of its patrons.” Wright “sac­ri­ficed every­thing to his art, rais­ing a mon­u­ment to his genius and bequeath­ing to the Japan­ese the dif­fi­cult task of mak­ing it a finan­cial suc­cess.” It was finan­cial exi­gen­cies, in part, that moti­vat­ed its demo­li­tion and replace­ment with a third, high-rise Impe­r­i­al Hotel in 1967 — whose own impend­ing demo­li­tion and replace­ment was announced just last year. France-based Japan­ese archi­tect Tsuyoshi Tane has pro­duced a design for the fourth Impe­r­i­al Hotel; what trib­ute, if any, it pays Wright’s lega­cy we’ll only find out when it opens in 2036.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Why Japan Has the Old­est Busi­ness­es in the World? Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

On your first day in archi­tec­ture school, you have to design a dog­house. Hav­ing nev­er set foot inside an archi­tec­ture school, I con­cede that the pre­vi­ous sen­tence may well be false, but you have to admit that it sounds plau­si­ble. As the sim­plest form of shel­ter in com­mon use across the world, the hum­ble dog­house presents to an aspir­ing archi­tect the most basic pos­si­ble test. If you can’t build one, what busi­ness do you have build­ing any­thing else? Yet it was with char­ac­ter­is­tic idio­syn­crasy that Frank Lloyd Wright, that most famous of all Amer­i­can archi­tects, took on the project of a dog­house only toward the end of his long life and career.

Images cour­tesy of the Marin Coun­ty Civic Cen­ter

“ ‘Eddie’s House’ is a dog­house designed gratis by Wright in 1956 to com­ple­ment a Uson­ian-style house he built on com­mis­sion for Robert and Glo­ria Berg­er between 1950 and 1951, in the Marin Coun­ty town of San Ansel­mo, Cal­i­for­nia,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. The com­mis­sion, such as it was, came from the Berg­ers’ twelve-year-old son Jim. “I would appre­ci­ate it if you would design me a dog­house, which would be easy to build, but would go with our house,” he wrote to Wright, spec­i­fy­ing Eddie’s dimen­sions and offer­ing com­pen­sa­tion in the form of his paper-route mon­ey.

“A house for Eddie is an oppor­tu­ni­ty,” replied the archi­tect, and the fol­low­ing year — after fin­ish­ing up the pre­vi­ous project that had delayed him, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um — he sent Jim a lit­er­al back-of-the-enve­lope dia­gram. As explained in the brief video from Marin Coun­ty’s Youtube chan­nel above, that was stan­dard Wright prac­tice: the archi­tec­t’s rough draw­ings were then con­vert­ed into prop­er plans by his staff at Tal­iesin. “I want­ed it to be easy,” says the grown-up Berg­er. “It was­n’t. It was a night­mare, so my dad built it.” And as for Eddie, he nev­er actu­al­ly slept in it.

The Berg­ers’ gold­en retriev­er “cer­tain­ly wouldn’t be the first of Wright’s clients to be dis­ap­point­ed by some of the architect’s short­com­ings,” writes Sharp. “Appar­ent­ly, as with many of Wright’s designs, the roof to Eddie’s House leaked.” Nev­er­the­less, it’s become a beloved addi­tion to the Wright canon since Berg­er rebuilt it for Michael Min­er’s Roman­za: A Frank Lloyd Wright Doc­u­men­tary and sub­se­quent­ly donat­ed it to the coun­ty. To this day, the repli­ca of Wright’s small­est work remains on dis­play inside his largest one: the Marin Civic Cen­ter, a slight­ly lat­er and much more ambi­tious build­ing, but one not entire­ly lack­ing in fam­i­ly resem­blance to Eddie’s House.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Steve Mar­tin Per­forms Stand-Up Com­e­dy for Dogs (1973)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.