Ice Cube & Charles Eames Revel in L.A. Architecture

in Architecture, Music | December 13th, 2011

Here’s a lit­tle known fact about the rap­per and actor Ice Cube. Dur­ing his younger days, before he became a star, Mr. Cube stud­ied archi­tec­tur­al draft­ing at the Phoenix Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in Ari­zona, where he gained an appre­ci­a­tion for the way archi­tects, like rap­pers, can take exist­ing mate­ri­als and work them into entire­ly new cre­ations. Yes, archi­tects can do mashups, too. And per­haps no one did them bet­ter than the hus­band-and-wife design duo, Charles and Ray Eames, who built the Eames House, a land­mark of mod­ern archi­tec­ture, in 1949.

In a video pro­mot­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tive exhib­it, “Pacif­ic Stan­dard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980,” Ice Cube dri­ves the streets of L.A. and explains his admi­ra­tion for the Eames House and oth­er Los Ange­les land­marks. Mean­while below, you’ll find some vin­tage footage that cap­tures Charles Eames (1907–1978), dri­ving around the city, giv­ing his own analy­sis of the hodge-podge archi­tec­tur­al styles that define Los Ange­les.

via The New York Times and Curios­i­ty Counts

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The Gas Station Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

in Architecture | July 14th, 2011

The town of Clo­quet lies in north­ern Min­neso­ta along the St. Louis Riv­er. It has a pop­u­la­tion of rough­ly 11,000 res­i­dents, and sev­er­al of its most famous res­i­dents play for the NHL. The town also hap­pens to be home to the R.W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion – a gas sta­tion designed by none oth­er than Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the ear­ly 1930s, Wright began devel­op­ing con­cepts for Broad­acre City, a city spread out to the point where it would be ‘every­where and nowhere,’ kind of like what we would even­tu­al­ly call ‘sub­ur­bia.’ The design for the Lind­holm gas sta­tion came direct­ly from this con­cep­tu­al project, and it was built in 1956. The sta­tion remains open and ful­ly oper­a­tional today, and it’s cur­rent­ly get­ting restored to its orig­i­nal con­di­tion. The video above gives you the best out­side view of the Wright cre­ation, and this sec­ond one gives you a clos­er look at some of the fin­er details.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter Ani­mat­ed

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

Gehry’s Vision for Archi­tec­ture

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David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

in Architecture, Music, TED Talks | May 3rd, 2011

Since the break-up of Talk­ing Heads in 1991, David Byrne has made a good career for him­self as a solo artist, work­ing in film and music, and also becom­ing an active sup­port­er of cycling. Overt­ly intel­lec­tu­al, Byrne has giv­en lec­tures on a great vari­ety of top­ics – from Carl Jung to the ways in which venue and con­text shape artis­tic cre­ation.

The TED talk above was giv­en in Feb­ru­ary 2010 in Long Beach, Cal­i­for­nia, and here David Byrne presents his ideas on the inter­re­la­tion­ship between music and archi­tec­ture. A tran­script of this talk can be found on the TED Talks page.

Byrne was not the first to explain the link between music and archi­tec­ture. In 2002, renowned archi­tect Daniel Libe­skind deliv­ered a Proms Lec­ture on that very top­ic (find the audio stream here) and, in 2007, Jonathan Cole pre­sent­ed his own lec­ture, “Music and Archi­tec­ture: Con­fronting the Bound­aries between Space and Sound,” at Gre­sham Col­lege, Lon­don. But it is Byrne’s talk that approach­es the sub­ject from the prac­ti­cal point of view of a musi­cian.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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Gehry’s Vision for Architecture

in Architecture | April 6th, 2008

Frank Gehry takes you on a 50 minute tour of his land­mark works. The talk, pre­sent­ed at TED Talks in 1990, is com­plete with slides and gives you a good look at his “messy cre­ative process.” We’ve post­ed the video below, but you can down­load a zipped ver­sion to your desk­top here, or watch it on iTunes here.

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