




Villa Mairea
Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house, and rural retreat designed and built by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto for Harry and Maire Gullichsen in Noormarkku, Finland.
The Gullichsens were a wealthy couple and members of the Ahlström family. They told Aalto that he should regard it as 'an experimental house'. Aalto seems to have treated the house as an opportunity to bring together all the themes that had been preoccupying him in his work to that point but had not been able to include them in actual buildings.





The Glass House or Johnson house, built in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, was designed by Philip Johnson as his own residence, and "universally viewed as having been derived from" the Farnsworth House design, according to Alice T. Friedman. Johnson curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohe work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, featuring a model of the glass Farnsworth House.
Glass House




AD Classics: Vanna Venturi House




Most critics usually regard consistency in architecture an important aspect of the design. However in the Vanna Venturi House Robert Venturi took the road less travelled and tested complexity and contradiction in architecture, going against the norm. Located in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania on a flat site isolated by surrounding trees, Venturi designed and built the house for his mother between 1962 and 1964. In testing his beliefts on complexity and contradition (for which he also wrote the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture), Venturi went through six fully worked-out versions of the house which slowly became known as the first example of Postmodern architecture
A great national design competition was launched in 1982 as the initiative of French president François Mitterrand. Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen (1929–1987) and Danish engineer Erik Reitzel designed the winning entry to be a 20th-century version of the Arc de Triomphe: a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than military victories. The construction of the monument began in 1985. Spreckelsen resigned on July 1986 and ratified the transfer of all his architectural responsibilities to his associate, French architect Paul Andreu. Reitzel continued his work until the monument was completed in 1989.
The Arche is in the approximate shape of a cube (width: 108m, height: 110m, depth: 112m); it has been suggested that the structure looks like a hypercube (a tesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world.[1] It has a prestressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built by the French civil engineering company Bouygues.
Grande Arche




(Brasilia) Lucio Costa
Lucio Costa is best known for his urban plan for the new capital of Brasília, located in Brazil's hinterland, having won the job in a 1957 public competition. Costa's Plano Piloto (Pilot Plan) for Brasília is in the shape of an irregular cross, suggesting an airplane or dragonfly. Costa's own Parque Guinle project was the model for Brasília's many residential tower-in-a-park superblocks, and Costa specified even the color of the bus drivers' uniforms: dark grey and with a cap.




The Sony Tower, formerly the AT&T Building, is a 647 feet (197 m) tall, 37-story highrise skyscraper located at 550 Madison Avenue between 55th Street and 56th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is the headquarters of Sony Corporation of America. The building was designed by architect Philip Johnson and partner John Burgee, completed in 1984, and close - in concept - to the 1982 Humana Building by Michael Graves. It became immediately controversial for its ornamental top (sometimes mocked as "Chippendale" after the open pediments characteristic of the famous English designer's bookcases and other cabinetry), but enjoyed for its spectacular arched entranceway, measuring about seven stories in height. With these ornamental additions, the building challenged architectural modernism's demand for stark functionalism and purely efficient design. The effect the building had on the public at large has been described as legitimizing the postmodern architecture movement on the world stage.
The Sony Tower




HAMDAN ALOTAIBI
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