It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first own­er turned out to have more than a few stones for its archi­tect: Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, the last direc­tor of the Bauhaus, who’d immi­grat­ed from Nazi Ger­many to the Unit­ed States in the late nine­teen-thir­ties. It was at a din­ner par­ty in 1945 that he hap­pened to meet the for­ward-think­ing Chica­go doc­tor Edith Farnsworth, who expressed an inter­est in build­ing a whol­ly mod­ern retreat well out­side the city. Asked if one of his appren­tices could do the job, Mies offered to take it on him­self.

The task, as Mies con­ceived of archi­tec­ture in his time, was to build for an era in which high and rapid­ly advanc­ing indus­tri­al tech­nol­o­gy was becom­ing unavoid­able in ordi­nary lives. Such lives, prop­er­ly lived, would require new frames, and thor­ough­ly con­sid­ered ones at that. The shape ulti­mate­ly tak­en by the Farnsworth House is one such frame: order­ly, and to a degree that could be called extreme, while on anoth­er lev­el max­i­mal­ly per­mis­sive of human free­dom.

That was, in any case, the idea: in phys­i­cal real­i­ty, Farnsworth her­self had a long list of prac­ti­cal com­plaints about what she began to call “my Mies-con­cep­tion,” not least to do with its attrac­tion of insects and green­house-like heat reten­tion (uncom­pen­sat­ed for, in true Euro­pean style, by air con­di­tion­ing).

Chron­i­clers of the Farnsworth House saga tend to men­tion that the cen­tral rela­tion­ship appears to have exceed­ed that of archi­tect and client, at least for a time. But what­ev­er affec­tion had once exist­ed between them had sure­ly evap­o­rat­ed by the time they were suing each oth­er toward the end of con­struc­tion, with Mies alleg­ing non-pay­ment and Farnsworth alleg­ing mal­prac­tice. In the event, Farnsworth lost in court and used the house as a week­end retreat for a cou­ple of decades before sell­ing it to the British devel­op­er and archi­tec­tur­al enthu­si­ast Peter Palum­bo, who espe­cial­ly enjoyed its ambi­ence dur­ing thun­der­storms. Today it oper­ates as a muse­um, as explained by its exec­u­tive direc­tor Scott Mahaf­fey in the new Open Space video above. Hear­ing about all the tur­moil behind the Farnsworth House­’s con­cep­tion, the atten­dees of its tours might find them­selves think­ing that hell hath no fury like a client scorned.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Quick Ani­mat­ed Tour of Icon­ic Mod­ernist Hous­es

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

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

How a 1930s Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­piece Har­ness­es the Sun to Keep Warm in the Win­ter & Cool in the Sum­mer

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Doric, Ion­ic, Corinthi­an: these, as prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who went through school in the West some­how remem­bers, are the three vari­eties of clas­si­cal col­umn. We may still recall them, more specif­i­cal­ly, as rep­re­sent­ing the three ancient Greek archi­tec­tur­al styles. But as ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan points out in the new Told in Stone video above, only Doric and Ion­ic columns belong ful­ly to ancient Greece; what we think of when we think of Corinthi­an columns were devel­oped more in the civ­i­liza­tion of ancient Rome. The con­text is an expla­na­tion of how the ancient Greeks built their tem­ples, one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their design process being the use of columns aplen­ty.

It’s one thing to hear about Greek columns in the class­room, and quite anoth­er to walk amid them in per­son. That, per­haps, is why Ryan deliv­ers the open­ing of his video perched upon the ruins of what’s known as Tem­ple C. Hav­ing once stood proud­ly in Seli­nus, a city belong­ing to Magna Grae­cia (Greek-speak­ing areas of Italy), it now con­sti­tutes one of the prime tourist attrac­tions for antiq­ui­ty-mind­ed vis­i­tors to mod­ern-day Sici­ly.

Though his chan­nel may be called Told in Stone, Ryan begins his brief his­to­ry of the Greek tem­ple before that hardy mate­r­i­al had even come into use for these pur­pos­es. At first, the Greeks fash­ioned the homes of their gods out of mud brick, with thatched roofs and wood­en porch­es; only from the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC, “prob­a­bly inspired by con­tact with Egypt,” did they start build­ing them to last.

Or they built them to last as long as could be expect­ed, in any case, giv­en the nature of the mate­ri­als avail­able in the ancient world and the mil­len­nia that have passed since then. Take the Tem­ple of Apol­lo at the Sanc­tu­ary of Didy­ma in mod­ern-day Turkey, which his­to­ry-and-archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Manuel Bra­vo pays a vis­it in the video just above. It may not look as if the near­ly 2400 years since its nev­er-tech­ni­cal­ly-com­plet­ed con­struc­tion began have been kind, but it’s nev­er­the­less one of the bet­ter-pre­served tem­ples from ancient Greek civ­i­liza­tion in exis­tence (not to men­tion the largest). Even in its ruined state, it gives what Bra­vo describes as the impres­sion of — or at least, in its hey­day, hav­ing been — “a for­est of huge columns,” a built ver­sion of “the sacred forests that Greeks used to con­se­crate to the gods.” They’re Ion­ic columns, in case you were won­der­ing, but don’t sweat it; there won’t be a quiz.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The City of Nashville Built a Full-Scale Repli­ca of the Parthenon in 1897, and It’s Still Stand­ing Today

A 3D Mod­el Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Inte­ri­or Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

How the Parthenon Mar­bles End­ed Up In The British Muse­um

Explore Ancient Athens 3D, a Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tion of the Greek City-State at the Height of Its Influ­ence

What Ancient Greece Real­ly Looked Like: See Recon­struc­tions of the Tem­ple of Hadri­an, Curetes Street & the Foun­tain of Tra­jan

The His­to­ry of Ancient Greece in 18 Min­utes: A Brisk Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s com­mon to hear it said that some par­tic­u­lar city — usu­al­ly one of the Amer­i­can metrop­o­lis­es that sprang into exis­tence over the past cou­ple of cen­turies — “should­n’t exist.” And indeed, as urban plan­ner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On the scale of human his­to­ry, we’ve only just start­ed build­ing the things, and we don’t do so on pure instinct. “There isn’t sup­posed to be a city any­where. They exist because we will them into exis­tence.” And we often do so in unlike­ly con­texts: “Half of Boston was dredged up from the ocean. St. Louis only exists because we tamed the great­est riv­er on our con­ti­nent. Sup­ply­ing Philadel­phia with drink­ing water is an engi­neer­ing feat on the scale of the Los Ange­les Aque­duct.”

Out­side the Unit­ed States, we see the same con­di­tions sur­round­ing “the great­est cities ever built: Tokyo and St. Peters­burg required engi­neer­ing feats on the scale of any­thing seen in the US. Ams­ter­dam and Mex­i­co City were lit­er­al­ly built on top of water.” How that was man­aged in the par­tic­u­lar case of the Dutch cap­i­tal is explained in the new video from The Present Past at the top of the post, as well as in the OBF video below.

Ams­ter­dam’s most strik­ing fea­ture, its canals, were cre­at­ed not to look pic­turesque; in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it, their con­struc­tion was “a mat­ter of life and death.” Too soft for farm­ing or home-build­ing, the swampy ground beneath the city on the riv­er Ams­tel had to be drained; when drained, it became sub­ject to floods, which neces­si­tat­ed build­ing dikes and a dam.

httv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3llzKdAD0

That thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry engi­neer­ing project of damming the Ams­tel pro­tect­ed the city, and also gave it its name. The Ams­tel itself is, in fact, a huge canal, and the rapid expan­sion of the set­tle­ment around it neces­si­tat­ed dig­ging more and more aux­il­iary canals to assist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new dis­tricts (Venice-style, atop hun­dreds of thou­sands of poles dri­ven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this dis­tinc­tive urban struc­ture dic­tat­ed the shapes of the city’s hous­es, with their uni­ver­sal­ly nar­row façades and their depths reflect­ing the wealth of the fam­i­lies with­in. Now, four cen­turies after it took its cur­rent shape — and hav­ing sur­vived numer­ous crises inher­ent to its unusu­al sit­u­a­tion and form — the cen­ter of Ams­ter­dam is looked to as a paragon of urban plan­ning, some­times imi­tat­ed, but with­out sim­i­lar­ly “impos­si­ble” orig­i­nal con­di­tions, nev­er repli­cat­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Dutch & Japan­ese Cities Are Insane­ly Well Designed (and Amer­i­can Cities Are Ter­ri­bly Designed)

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

New Web Site Show­cas­es 700,000 Arti­facts Dug Up from the Canals of Ams­ter­dam, Some Dat­ing Back to 4300 BC

Trav­el from Rot­ter­dam to Ams­ter­dam in 10 Min­utes by Boat: A 4K Time­lapse

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

When the Dutch Tried to Live in Con­crete Spheres: An Intro­duc­tion to the Bol­wonin­gen in the Nether­lands

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In the decades after the Sec­ond World War, many coun­tries faced the chal­lenge of rebuild­ing their hous­ing and infra­struc­ture while also hav­ing to accom­mo­date a fast-arriv­ing baby boom. The gov­ern­ment of the Nether­lands got more cre­ative than most, putting mon­ey toward exper­i­men­tal hous­ing projects start­ing in the late nine­teen-six­ties. Hop­ing to hap­pen upon the next rev­o­lu­tion­ary form of dwelling, it end­ed up fund­ing designs that, for the most part, strayed none too far from estab­lished pat­terns. Still, there were gen­uine out­liers: by far the most dar­ing pro­pos­al came from artist and sculp­tor Dries Kreijkamp: to build a whole neigh­bor­hood out of Bol­wonin­gen, or “ball hous­es.”

The idea may bring to mind Buck­min­ster Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes, which enjoyed a degree of utopi­an vogue in the nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties. Like Fuller and most oth­er vision­ar­ies, Kreijkamp labored under a cer­tain mono­ma­nia. His had to do with globes, “the most organ­ic and nat­ur­al shape pos­si­ble. After all, round­ness is every­where: we live on a globe, and we’re born from a globe. The globe com­bines the biggest pos­si­ble vol­ume with the small­est pos­si­ble sur­face area, so you need min­i­mum mate­r­i­al for it.” The 50 Bol­wonin­gen built in ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, bet­ter known as Den Bosch, were quick­ly fab­ri­cat­ed on-site out of glass fiber rein­forced con­crete. It was­n’t the poly­ester Kreijkamp had at first spec­i­fied, but then, poly­ester would­n’t have last­ed 40 years.

Since they were put up in 1984, the Bol­wonin­gen have been con­tin­u­ous­ly inhab­it­ed. In the video at the top of the post, Youtu­ber Tom Scott pays a vis­it to one of them, whose occu­pant seems rea­son­ably sat­is­fied. (It seems they’re “cozy” in the win­ter­time.)

Like geo­des­ic domes, their round walls make it dif­fi­cult to use their the­o­ret­i­cal­ly gen­er­ous inte­ri­or space effi­cient­ly, at least with­out com­mis­sion­ing cus­tom-made fur­ni­ture; leak­ing win­dows are also a peren­ni­al prob­lem. While each Bol­won­ing can com­fort­ably house one or even two sim­ple-liv­ing peo­ple, only the most utopia-mind­ed would attempt to raise a fam­i­ly in one of them. As with oth­er round or cir­cu­lar home designs, expan­sion would be phys­i­cal­ly imprac­ti­cal even if it were legal­ly pos­si­ble.

Used as social hous­ing by the local gov­ern­ment, the Bol­wonin­gen now enjoy a pro­tect­ed his­toric sta­tus. (As well they might, giv­en their con­nec­tion with the art and indus­try of Dutch glass­blow­ing: it was while work­ing in a glass fac­to­ry that Kreijkamp first began pros­e­ly­tiz­ing for spheres.) And unlike most aes­thet­i­cal­ly rad­i­cal hous­ing devel­op­ments, they haven’t gone to seed, but rather received the nec­es­sary main­te­nance over the decades. The result is an appeal­ing neigh­bor­hood for those whose lifestyles are suit­ed to its unusu­al struc­tures and its con­tained bucol­ic set­ting, of which you can get an idea in the walk­ing video tour just above. By the time Kreijkamp died in 2014, he per­haps felt a cer­tain degree of regret that mass-pro­duced glob­u­lar homes did­n’t prove to be the next big thing. But he did live to see the emer­gence of the “tiny house” move­ment, which should retroac­tive­ly adopt him as one of its lead­ing lights.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Denmark’s Utopi­an Gar­den City Built Entire­ly in Cir­cles: See Astound­ing Aer­i­al Views of Brønd­by Have­by

Good­bye to the Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopi­an Apart­ment Build­ing

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

The Engi­neer­ing of the Strand­beest: How the Mag­nif­i­cent Mechan­i­cal Crea­tures Have Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly Evolved

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Michael Wyet­zn­er talks about a fair few build­ings we’ve fea­tured over the years here on Open Cul­ture: the Impe­r­i­al Hotel, the Ennis House, Tal­iesin, Falling­wa­ter. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still stands as the embod­i­ment of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture more than 65 years after his death. That’s a fair­ly long stretch by mod­ern stan­dards, but nev­er­the­less a short­er one than Wright’s career, which ran over 70 years. Dur­ing his long life, Wyet­zn­er explains, Wright wit­nessed the intro­duc­tion of indoor plumb­ing, elec­tric­i­ty, the tele­phone, the auto­mo­bile, the air­plane, the radio, tele­vi­sion, and space trav­el — and even giv­en that, his archi­tec­ture shows a dra­mat­ic evo­lu­tion.

Begin­ning with Wright’s appren­tice­ship in Chica­go under Louis Sul­li­van, “the father of mod­ernism,” Wyet­zn­er con­tin­ues on to his devel­op­ment of the hor­i­zon­tal indoor-out­door “Prairie Style” house; his Japan­ese com­mis­sions and sub­se­quent much-pho­tographed Los Ange­les hous­es; the emer­gence of his phi­los­o­phy of “organ­ic archi­tec­ture” meant to uni­fy the build­ing with its site and nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment; his dis­cov­ery of the desert; and his Depres­sion-era con­cep­tion of the “Uson­ian house,” which adapt­ed his refined spa­tial sen­si­bil­i­ty for Amer­i­can-style mass pro­duc­tion. This would be more than enough for even the most dis­tin­guished archi­tec­t’s career. Yet it does­n’t even get around to such projects as the Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters, the R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, or his first and last dog­house.

No mat­ter which peri­od of Wright’s career you exam­ine, you can find evi­dence for his belief in the inspi­ra­tion of place, in organ­ic aes­thet­ics, in struc­tur­al expres­sive­ness, and even in indi­rect moral instruc­tion. Yet it’s also pos­si­ble to imag­ine that, in some sense, a series of dif­fer­ent Frank Lloyd Wrights exist­ed, repeat­ed­ly destroyed and recre­at­ed by pro­fes­sion­al set­back, per­son­al dis­as­ter, for­eign sojourn, immer­sion in a new land­scape, or even acquain­tance with a new tech­nol­o­gy. Sure­ly no one could remain pro­duc­tive to the end of his 92 years with­out a lit­tle re-inven­tion. Dur­ing that time, he designed more than 1,000 projects, only about half of which were ever built. Young archi­tects who idol­ize Frank Lloyd Wright would do well to remem­ber that he, too, knew full well the sting of nev­er mak­ing it to con­struc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

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

Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Great­est Archi­tect? – A Free Stream­ing Doc­u­men­tary

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Cit­i­group Cen­ter in Mid­town Man­hat­tan is also known by its address, 601 Lex­ing­ton Avenue, at which it’s been stand­ing for 47 years, longer than the medi­an New York­er has been alive. Though still a fair­ly hand­some build­ing, in a sev­en­ties-cor­po­rate sort of way, it now pops out only mild­ly on the sky­line. At street lev­el, though, the build­ing con­tin­ues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-look­ing columns placed not at the cor­ners, but in the mid­dle of the walls. A vis­i­tor with no knowl­edge of struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing pass­ing the Cit­i­group Cen­ter for the first time may won­der why it does­n’t fall down — which, for a few months in 1978, was a gen­uine­ly seri­ous con­cern.

This sto­ry, told with a spe­cial explana­to­ry vivid­ness in the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, usu­al­ly begins with a phone call. An uniden­ti­fied archi­tec­ture stu­dent got ahold of William LeMes­suri­er, the struc­tur­al engi­neer of the Citi­corp Cen­ter, as it was then known, to relay con­cerns he’d heard a pro­fes­sor express about the still-new sky­scrap­er’s abil­i­ty to with­stand “quar­ter­ing winds,” which blow diag­o­nal­ly at its cor­ners. LeMes­suri­er took the time to walk the stu­dent through the ele­ments of his then-ground­break­ing light­weight design, which includ­ed chevron-shaped braces that direct­ed ten­sion loads down to the columns and a 400-ton con­crete tuned mass damper (or “great block of cheese,” as it got to be called) meant to coun­ter­act oscil­la­tion move­ments.

LeMes­suri­er was a proud pro­fes­sion­al, but his pro­fes­sion­al­ism out­weighed his pride. When he went back to check the Citi­corp Cen­ter’s plans, he received an unpleas­ant sur­prise: the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny had swapped out the weld­ed joints in those chevron braces for cheap­er bolt­ed ones. His office had approved the change, which made sense at the time, and had also tak­en into account only per­pen­dic­u­lar winds, not quar­ter­ing winds, as was then stan­dard indus­try prac­tice. Per­form­ing the rel­e­vant cal­cu­la­tions him­self, he deter­mined that the whole tow­er could be brought down — and much in the sur­round­ing area destroyed with it — by the kind of winds that have a one-in-six­teen chance of blow­ing in any giv­en year.

It did­n’t take LeMes­suri­er long to real­ize that he had no choice but to reveal what he’d dis­cov­ered to Citi­corp, whose lead­er­ship coop­er­at­ed with the accel­er­at­ed, semi-clan­des­tine project of shoring up their gleam­ing emblem’s struc­tur­al joints by night. The work could hard­ly fail to draw the atten­tion of the New York press, of course, but it received scant cov­er­age thanks to an impec­ca­bly timed news­pa­per strike, and on its com­ple­tion made the sky­scraper per­haps the safest in the city. In fact, the sto­ry of the Citi­corp Cen­ter dis­as­ter that was­n’t only came out pub­licly in a 1995 New York­er piece by Joseph Mor­gen­stern, which made LeMes­suri­er a kind of hero among struc­tur­al engi­neers. But it was the stu­dents who’d iden­ti­fied the build­ing’s faults, not just one but two of whom came for­ward there­after, who per­son­i­fied the life-sav­ing pow­er of ask­ing the right ques­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.