Afbeelding auteur

Alan Hess (1) (1952–)

Auteur van Frank Lloyd Wright: The Houses

Voor andere auteurs genaamd Alan Hess, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.

20 Werken 928 Leden 7 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Alan Hess is an architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury News and the author of numerous architecture and design books

Werken van Alan Hess

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Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Hess, Alan
Geboortedatum
1952
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
USA
Woonplaatsen
Irvine, California, USA
Opleiding
University of California, Los Angeles (M.Arch)
Principia College (BA)
Beroepen
architect
journalist
architecture critic
Organisaties
San Jose Mercury News
Prijzen en onderscheidingen
Los Angeles Conservancy President's Award (2015)
Korte biografie
Alan Hess is an architect, architectre critic for the San Jose Mercury News, and author of books that explore new facets of twentieth century architecture. He resides in Irvine, California. [from Organic Architecture (2006)]

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In Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Alan Hess examines the swooping lines and gravity-defying structures that permeated 1950s architecture, reflecting the finned cars and found throughout the California highways. Hess begins with an examination of architecture in the ’30s in order to set up how the futurism on display at events such as the New York World’s Fair foreshadowed the styles of the immediate postwar years. He primarily focuses on California and the area around Los Angeles, looking at houses, cars, coffee shops, and restaurants like McDonald’s. Hess shifts to the late ’50s, the Las Vegas strip, and the push-back from established architects who did not support styles with such close ties to advertising. Hess concludes, “Until recently, the fifties have been a little too close for critics, writers, and professionals to have a good perspective on them. Most assessments of Coffee Shop Modern are the product of high art critics’ low opinion of the fifties: coffee shops are corruptions of the original, pure high art versions of the modern style. In the rush to establish a single reigning modern style, Googie became a dropped thread in the fabric of Modernism. Rediscovered it shows that Modernism has always been wider than academies acknowledged, that its roots went deeper in the culture than has been admitted since” (pg. 119).

In linking the ’30s with the styles of the ’50s, Hess writes, “Wright and Goff choreographed a flow of movement that carried you along, making you aware of each space and transition. Uninterrupted by conventional doors, walls, corners, or windows, space flows continuously around the next corner and outside. This is the final destruction of the box originally called for by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is also the three-dimensional architecture historian Sigfried Giedion identified with Modernism: buildings perceived as a totality only as one moved through and around them” (pg. 85). He features extensive photographs to demonstrate how these styles opened up and blended both the liminal space of outside/inside as well as merging Earth with sky and linking the roadway to the parking lot.

Writing in the 1980s, when fashions began changing again and moving further away from Googie, Hess described how it was subject to criticism even in its own time. He writes, “The one certain difference between high art and commercial vernacular architecture was the quality of the rhetoric surrounding it. The high art establishment used talented critics and the established journals to let people know what their buildings were about” (pg. 94). Googie, for all its visual language, served primarily commercial and advertising interests and did not appeal to critics. Redevelopment in the 1980s lead to the demolition or repurposing of much of the surviving examples.

Hess’s book will appeal to all those interested in the styles of the postwar era and how the architectural arts blended with advertising and commercialism. Hess’s book thematically follows Roland Marchand’s work, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Hess blends analysis with images, though several of the images that appear behind text are often too dark and make the text difficult to read. Otherwise, this is a good early study of ’50s architecture.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
DarthDeverell | 1 andere bespreking | Aug 30, 2022 |
John Lautner's sixty years in architecture comprise one of the great unexamined careers of the twentieth century. Rooted in a personal design philosophy that is the imaginative extension of the organic architectural theories of Frank Lloyd Wright (he was one of Wright's first apprentices), his exuberant designs and broad spectrum of approaches epitomize the landscape of southern California-from the fifties techno-optimism of the drive-in, freeway, and Cadillac tail fin to the structural innovation of opulent hilltop houses overlooking the ocean. Despite the extraordinary technical achievements of his concrete roofs, steel cantilevers, and double curves, dynamic engineering is never the main point of his work. The push-button glass walls and retracting roofs, however innovative, always serve to create humane spaces that allow occupants to commune with nature and themselves.

Lautner's career began at Wright's Taliesin in 1933 and continued after his arrival in Los Angeles in 1938. The book traces the unfolding of his protean conceptions up to his death in 1994. During the forties and fifties, he established his own architecture office and designed several small and medium-sized houses of unusual daring and freedom. His eye-popping designs for roadside coffee ships-the celebrated Googie's, with jazzy roof lines and Kaleidoscopic geometry-and California houses sporting hexagonal roofs, free-floating walls, and indoor-outdoor pools, are among these. In the sixties, the now-iconic Chemosphere, Elrod, and Silvertop houses were built. Extravagance and the refinement of his bold expressions mark the buildings of the final phase, the seventies to nineties. For these houses Lautner's athletic use of concrete reaches its zenith. The sweep of the curves and play between site and structure create dizzingly fantastic forms that are indicative of both the core and the frontiers of the twentieth-century American psyche. This volume, with its authorative text by Alan Hess and full-color and black-and-white photography by Alan Weintraub, splendidly captures the breathtaking interior spaces and extraordinary vistas that characterize the work of an architect who is increasingly seen as one of the great American masters of the twentieth century.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
petervanbeveren | Dec 28, 2020 |
I don't think this one was nearly as good as the book on the houses. Still an interesting look into how the man thought.
 
Gemarkeerd
melsmarsh | Jul 25, 2020 |
Very nice pictures! Would have liked to know more about ground plans
 
Gemarkeerd
melsmarsh | Feb 16, 2020 |

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Statistieken

Werken
20
Leden
928
Populariteit
#27,659
Waardering
4.2
Besprekingen
7
ISBNs
78
Talen
5

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