The monastery of La Tourette of the Dominican Order of Lyon was built in 1957-1960 by Le Corbusier. It is in Eveux-sur-Arbresle, near Lyon in France for free in the countryside. The system consists of a church, the monastery itself, with 100 cells, chapter room, classrooms, library and refectory. The basic shape is a rectangle that is formed of four wings. The architecture works through its clear design and layout very strict and austere – a place of silence and prayer. The box shape of the church was suspended by the lighting on both sides and provide for a special light show inside.

The versatile artist who had studied architecture in Athens, is mainly known as a musician and composer. received in the history of architecture but it is by his decisive participation in the studio of Le Corbusier during the 1950s. For the monastery of La Tourette near Lyon in Eveux (1955-59), Xenakis was not only project managers but also the designer of the vertical window divisions of the main facade and the cloister.

Another high point of cooperation between Xenakis and Le Corbusier was manifested in the Philips Pavilion for the Brussels World Fair in 1958, the Xenakis as tent-like sculpture designed music room.

Pan de Verre ondulatoire
The so-called “Pan de Verre ondulatoire” are in the monastery of La Tourette in the hallways. The glass surfaces are directly embedded into the concrete and change their distances from each other for musical-rhythmic criteria, which had established the avant-garde composer Xenakis.

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Pierre Puget sculptor, illustrator, painter and architect of French seventeenth century, was born in Marseilles in 1620 and died there in 1694. At fourteen, he learned his trade from the wood sculptor Jean Roman. It creates in the workshop many decorative pieces for ships. Later he worked with Pietro da Cortona to Florence (1638-1643), with Bernini in Rome (1661-1662) and then in Genoa until 1668.

He returned to Marseilles in 1643 and received several commissions, including the cathedral of Marseilles. After his stay Genoese, he became director of construction of the arsenal of Toulon.

In the seventeenth century on land belonging to him near the cathedral of la Major, north side of the Butte des Moulins, Marseille decided to build the Old Charity to accommodate the beggars.

The project stalled and it was only in 1670 that the Provencal Pierre Puget, the French Michelangelo, architect of King and neighborhood child, begins one of his greatest achievements. Building pink and white stone in the career of the Crown (small town north of Marseilles), all of the Old Charity.

It assembles four wings of the building closed to the outside and opens on a rectangular courtyard with galleries on three levels, elegantly punctuate life. At the center of his composition, he draws an oval domed chapel of baroque style. The vanguard of the time. Today it radiates sunlight.

For a century, the charity receives the beggars of the city. Then, after the revolution and until the end of the nineteenth century, the Charity is a hospice dedicated to children and elderly. In 1905, the building is occupied by the army that his Senegalese infantry barracks. Later there legalizes squateurs people in social, in unhealthy cells.

In the early ’40s, Le Corbusier building remark and denounced his state of abandonment. In 1961 the City of Marseille decided to restore this jewel of the Architectural Heritage. The work will be completed in 1986.

Today, the Centre de la Vieille Charite houses a cultural center that hosts exciting exhibitions.

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For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
- John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller,” 1856
The Wagner & Nauland Block, a composition of two Italianate commercial structures at 742-748 Seneca Street, was demolished in the late 1990s. Was it necessary?

This photograph, taken at about 1979 by Black Rock activist Scott Glasgow, shows the block in its final iteration as Mindy’s Home Service, a used appliance store that occupied the site into the mid-1990s. The heritage structures, which would have finely complemented the streetscape of any city, were reportedly in good repair at the time of their demolition, only a few years before the 2002 rehabilitation of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse, 500 feet away, shattered misconceptions about the potential marriage of preservation and economic development in Buffalo’s “near downtown.”

As little as fifteen years ago, economic development officials viewed the Hydraulics as a strategic location for new shovel-ready parcels that could act as an extension of the Exchange Street Business Park, located to the west of Hamburg Street, and the notion of repurposing the district’s existing building stock for economic development was not yet appreciated. Today, the idea of a revived, mixed-use neighborhood, with varied economic activities, is now on the table, but unfortunately for pioneering urban investors who may have acted on the untapped potential of the Wagner & Nauland Block, this opportunity was laid waste by the city’s ubiquitous bulldozers. Here is the same site today:

Seventy-five years ago, the corner of Seneca and Emslie was a hotbed of urban activity. The corner had a stop for the yellow #15 streetcar, replaced by buses in 1941. A line-up of commercial structures fronted the street, a setting for a bank, taverns, groceries, barber shops, a post office, a drug store, candy stores, and a movie theater. Many of these commercial structures still exist, holding out potential for new economic activity, but the Wagner & Nauland Block is only a memory, the panoply of activities it once housed a subject for historians: N. A. Carroll’s wholesale liquor, Casper Wagner’s boarding house, the A & P grocery, a Deco restaurant, Frank Trautmann’s meats, Joseph Romanello’s restaurant, Emele Nicholas confectionery, Frederick Nauland’s market, and Oliver Hosterman’s bakery being only a few examples of productive uses the structures housed since their construction around 1880.

The Wagner & Nauland Block was not only a charming pair of buildings worthy of preservation, they were economic development tools in waiting, capable of housing inexpensive, attractive space in which new ideas, providing new jobs, could have been attempted. While the vacant lots that remain could be still be developed, albeit more expensively, the lost opportunity represented by the demolished structures forces one to ponder: What might have been?

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The Cor Jesu High School in Malang town East Java was a historical building it was built in 1924, finished in 1926 during Netherlands colonial in Indonesia. Corridor between classroom still carefully although have ever experienced fired.

The ornament details on this building have an eccentric colonial design. One of the detail which is remain to defended as artistic object and still be functioned till now there are the Bell made from brass.

The bell material has a real European typical detail form of the material made to be cupreous of pure. Detail like this is very rare remarked by accessories building detail producers because requiring correctness and very expensive for expense of the workers.

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The Larkin Company’s corporate logo, emblazoned across the late mail-order company’s Larkin Terminal Warehouse for the past 97 years, is still a potent advertising vehicle for the heritage structure, now repurposed as Class-A office space.

The corporate logo (“LCo”) was actually obscured for years by another sign for Graphic Controls, which leased 4,000 sq. ft. space in the former warehouse in 1940 and later purchased the entire building from the Larkin Warehouse Co. in 1967, the likely year of the original sign’s concealment. (Graphic Controls expanded to the nearby Exchange Street Industrial Park in 2001.) When the mammoth 600,000 sq. ft. structure was purchased by investors Howard Zemsky, Bill Jones, Doug Swift, and Joe Petrella in 2002, the original Larkin sign was revealed, a highly-visible first step in the building’s rehabilitation.

The LCo signs are lit brilliantly at night, particularly at its south facade. Any guess at why? The south side of the building, now dubbed Larkin at Exchange, faces a very large audience: the tens of thousands of vehicles that pass every day on the Niagara Thruway (I-190). The heritage symbols, the most conspicuous aspect of the otherwise spare concrete structure that so elicited the admiration of early Modernist architects, now serve as veritable billboards advertising office space at the building, which identifies closely with its Larkin history.

The project, which essentially saved what many economic development officials believed would become a real estate “white elephant” for the city when Graphic Controls announced its departure from the building in the mid-1990s, is now nearly 100% occupied. History really does sell.

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DENIS bank (De Nederlandsche first Indian Sparkasse), Braga, Bandung Jl (1935).

Armed with a keen eye to “Aalbers one”, a camera, an address book with names of former employees and residents and by technical illustrators, she asked over the years a work list together of 65 works: 22 Dutch, one Belgian Congolese (design competition) and 42 Indian. Most of the designs for the Dutch East Indies (27) was achieved in Bandung. This town, as envisaged in 1916 as the new home of central government in the Dutch East Indies, was the seat of the agency founded in 1931 been “Aalbers and De Waal, architects’.

Segaar The amount of material collected over the years resulted in a modest but interesting, beautifully furnished exhibition. Reconstruction Drawings, photographs, original design sketches (published by Aalbers during his internment time) and an original movie about the construction of the Hotel Savoy Homann (1938) create a plain but good picture of both the Dutch and the Indian work Aalbers. To work to the Indian place in the contemporary context to the beginning of the exhibition “The Tropics Holland Style. A documentary about Dutch architecture in Indonesia from .1900 to 1940 “by director Ike Bertels see.

Hotel Savoy Homann

The focus of the exhibition is Aalbers’ work from his Indian period. This is possible due to the fact that his Indian work more expressive than his Dutch work. The truth Aalbers case in India as an architect had acquired good reputation among clients and his position in the Netherlands was significantly less prominent.

The Indian design features beside the prevailing tropical characteristics (large roof overhangs, whitewashed walls) by Aalbers some remarkable elements. In particular buildings for (semi-) commercial clients stand out by rounded corners, gently undulating facade lines, slender tower elements and flat roofs – a style in Bandung is now called “Streamline Art Deco ‘Bandung and the nickname” Art Deco City “constituted. Aalbers’ non-commercial construction contracts were generally less expresionistisch although one roof here and there sometimes from the mainstream daktype to depart.

Although the exhibition in one of the corners of the NAI is exhibited (second floor) and the signage is unclear to say the least, is to be hoped that BONAS Foundation (bibliographies and Oeuvre lists of Dutch Architects and Urban Designers) are also in the near future efforts to present these gems as in general and an almost forgotten part of the Dutch architecture, the work in the Netherlands, trained architects and urban planners in the first half of the twentieth century in the Dutch East Indies designed, in particular.

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This week, the highlight is the fence pier of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building, built in 1904 and demolished in 1950, with the exception of this one lone artifact. The fence pier, on Swan Street, is all that remains of Wright’s masterpiece, what was considered by architecture critic Henry-Russel Hitchcock to be “the most important building ever demolished in the 20th century.”

The pier was an obscure piece of urban archaeology until local Larkin buffs, among them Jerry Puma, succeeded in 2003 in seeing the pier restored to some semblance of its original state. Prior to the restoration, the few Wright experts in the know were chipping away at the pier to get their own souvenir of the Wright icon. The fence pier, not actually a pier of the building, but a pier of the fence that surrounded it, was perhaps a tangible enough connection to the complex to merit, in their minds, such incremental acts of destruction.

Here’s a ponderous thought for our readers: Why was this fragment spared? When everything else was smashed and pummeled, why was this left behind? One wonders… did the demolition contractors step back, after destroying a world-significant artwork, and seeing that all that was left was part of a fence, decide to keep this solitary remnant for future generations to rediscover? Is this the only evidence of their sense of guilt?

Or are these questions too charitable? Is the real story that the contractors simply ran out of money after expending far more than they ever imagined to demolish what was meant to last for centuries, and said “the hell with it” when the job was nearly finished?

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The location of the Hydraulic Canal is indicated by the 1872 map:

The same year the map was published, water reportedly stopped flowing altogether through the canal, a victim of technological change and two decades of neglect by the Buffalo Hydraulic Association. The canal was filled by 1882, closing an early chapter in the city’s manufacturing history. The stone walls of the canal may still exist, buried under a few layers of dirt and awaiting rediscovery.

One chapter was closing while another was being written. The Larkin Company built a small soap plant at 667 Seneca Street in 1876. By 1900 the firm was the third largest mail-order company in the world, occupying a sprawling factory complex of nearly two million square feet. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the the company’s Administration Building, one of Wright’s most influential works, in 1904. By 1915 an extensive ecology of rail-connected industries and warehouses had emerged adjacent to a convergence of three different rail corridors, present in the 1870s but not yet fully tapped by industry. In the forty years after the 1872 map was published, the Hydraulics had become an imposing capital of Machine Age architecture and technology.

The 1872 map communicates an embryo of a modern industrial precinct. (Visit this Flickr image to show a full map, courtesy of the New York Public Library, with added details and commentary.) The old water-powered mill district, Buffalo’s first manufacturing area, was dead or dying – only Noah H. Gardner’s tannery, the largest of the original water-powered mills built in the 1830s, is known to still have been operating. Tanneries, two breweries, a soap and potash factory, a steam forge, a slaughter house, and a fledgling retail corridor marked this peripheral district of post-Civil War Buffalo, but nothing yet on a monumental scale. The presence of a vast and growing rail network at the Hydraulics portended the developments to come.

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With the recent passage of New York State’s Enhanced Historic Tax Credit Program, providing tax credits of up to 40% of the costs of rehabilitating heritage structures, the event is a watershed moment in the ongoing development and economic revitalization of the Hydraulics.

The Kamman Building, 755-757 Seneca, is now well on its way to listing on the National Register of Historic Places, making it eligible for historic tax credits being sought by Chaintreuil | Jensen | Stark to transform the structure into apartments and office space to the tune of $1 million. The Hydraulics MPDF (check it out here), prepared by Jennifer Walkowski of the Clinton Brown Company, will make it easier for heritage structures in the Hydraulics to seek designation on the National Register of Historic Places and to take advantage of lucrative national and state incentives that can make projects happen.

“It definitely can help owners or potential owners apply for tax credits,” says Walkowski. “It’s a big support for the neighborhood. This will prove to be useful to the new development planned and will enable the rehab of the historic buildings in the neighborhood.” The next step, according to Walkowski, is a polishing-up of the state application for review by the National Parks Service, a process that’s likely to take another three to four months. It’s almost there. It is big news indeed!

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