NarrowLarry.com presents:

selected modern architecture in the u.s.

by louis sullivan

by frank lloyd wright

by the saarinens

by bruce goff

by mies van der rohe

in california

in the midwest

in philadelphia

in the south

in the southwest

in texas

NarrowLarry's most admired
works of american architecture

* Kimbell Art Museum (Louis I. Kahn, Fort Worth, TX, 1972)
* Taliesin (Frank Lloyd Wright, Spring Green, WI, 1911-1925)
* Fallingwater (Frank Lloyd Wright, Bear Run, PA, 1935)
* Watts Towers (Simon Rodia, Watts, CA, c. 1921-1954)
* Farnsworth House (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Plano, IL, 1951)
* the Beaux-Arts masterpieces of New York City: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1902), The New York Public Library (1911), and Grand Central Terminal (1913)
* S.C. Johnson & Son Co. Administration Building (Frank Lloyd Wright, Racine, WI, 1936)
* the Prairie Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright (1900 - 1917)
* Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville: Monticello (1767-1809) and the University of Virginia (1817-26)
* the "Jewel Box" banks of Louis Sullivan (Owatonna, MN, Sidney, OH, Grinnell, IA, Columbus, WI)
* Gateway Arch (Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) (Eero Saarinen, St. Louis, MO, 1968)
* the Usonian Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright (1940s - 1950s)
* the houses of Bruce Goff (1940s - 1970s)
* the houses of John Lautner (1950s - 1980s)
* the houses of Richard Neutra (1940s - 1960s)
* Chinati Foundation (Donald Judd, Marfa, TX, 1986)
* Chrysler Building (William van Alen, New York City, NY, 1929)
* Menil Collection (Renzo Piano, Houston, TX, 1987)
* Phillips Exeter Academy Library (Louis I. Kahn, Exeter, NH, 1972)
* the projects of Samuel Mockbee & The Rural Studio (1980s-1990s)
* the Case Study Houses of California / the modern architecture of Palm Springs (1940s - 1960s)
* Balboa Park (Bertram Goodhue / Olmsted Brothers / Carleton Monroe Winslow, San Diego, CA, 1912-1914)
* John Deere & Company Administration Building (Eero Saarinen, Moline, IL, 1964)
* Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Frank Furness & George W. Hewitt, Philadelphia, PA, 1876)
* Guaranty Building (Louis Sullivan, Buffalo, NY, 1896)
* Texas county courthouses of the Victorian era
* Spanish missions and chapels of the Southwest
* Taliesin West (Frank Lloyd Wright, Scottsdale, AZ, 1937)
* The Orange Show (Jeff McKissack, Houston, TX, c.1956-1979)
* Esherick House (Wharton Esherick, Paoli, PA, 1966)
* Saint Jean Vianney Catholic Church (Trahan Architects, Baton Rouge, LA, 1999)
* Middleton Inn (Clark and Menefee, near Charleston, SC, 1986)
* the New England libraries of Henry Hobson Richardson (1870s - 1880s)
* Brown Pavilion, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Houston, TX, 1974)
* subway stations of the Washington Metrorail (Harry Weese, Washington, DC, 1968-1976)
* Brooks County Rest Area (Richter Associates Architects, Falfurrias, TX, 1998)
* I do consider Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses sculptures as architecture - timeless and monumental.
* OK, as much as I detest Seaside and think Leon Krier is a bit of a boob, I'm going to have to include the Krier House / AKA the Krier Cottage. I really think it's perfect. (Leon Krier, Seaside, FL, early 1980s)
(Here's my deal with Seaside; I had always thought it was OK in theory, but when I visited in 1997 I found it oppressive in reality. Couldn't wait to get back home to Houston and hug a parking lot. Hate to disappoint ya there, James Howard Kunstler.)
* Sebastopol House (Joshua W. Young, Seguin, TX, 1856)

I want to visit in person just to make sure:
* Salk Institute (Louis I. Kahn, La Jolla, CA, 1965)
* Jefferson Memorial (John Russell Pope, Washington, DC, 1943)
* S.R. Crown Hall (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Chicago, IL, 1956)
* The Johnson House ("The Glass House") (Philip Johnson, New Canaan, CT, 1949)

Skyscrapers are always attention-getting, but I think they're overvalued; extruded lease space doesn't interest me a great deal. If I had to pick any favorites, besides the Chrysler and Guaranty listed above, I'd have to say the Woolworth Building, Lever House, Empire State Building, and RCA Building in NYC, the PSFS in Philadelphia, Pietro Belluschi's Equitable Building in Portland, and Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville. There is one PoMod skyscraper that may belong in here - Cesar Pelli's Carnegie Hall Tower in New York. It's the strongest work he's ever done and one of the few examples of Post Modern architecture that isn't a cartoonish joke. So how about Mies' Seagram Building?? I love Mies, but I've always been really bugged by the elevator carbuncle massing on the back side. (The back that's never photographed.)

More links to great American architecture are under my U.S. Travel Guide page.

. . . and my all-time favorite architects

Of course Wright, Le Corbusier, Kahn, Mies, Aalto, and Sullivan, but also Scarpa, Gaudi, Goff, the Saarinens, Siza, Lautner, Hejduk, Lewerentz, Neutra, and Piano. With a very high respect for Brunelleschi, Borromini, Soane, Jefferson, Furness, Richardson, Nicholas J. Clayton, Wagner, Daniel Burnham, Louis Curtiss, Raymond Hood, Bertram Goodhue, Erich Mendelsohn, Schindler, Albert Frey, Barragan, Kappe, Polshek, Rossi, Bruder, Murcutt, Ando, Zumthor, Souto de Moura, Mockbee, and of course all the not-formally-trained vernacular architects worldwide. If you're asking "where's Calatrava the Genius?!", well... his stuff is fine if you like useless gymnastic formalism, but I'm kinda tired of it. Palladio?? Ehhh, I dunno. Norman Foster? I respect his work, but for whatever reason, it never really did a lot for me. (I was especially disappointed with Foster's Hearst Tower, it's so-called Green status notwithstanding.) And I just wish Herzog & de Meuron, Holl, and Moneo weren't so damn inconsistent.

don't get near enough respect

James Polshek, Moshe Safdie, American Art Deco, McKim, Mead, & White, and the Getty Villa. (The Getty Villa, really?? Yep, especially with Machado and Silvetti's remodeling. As Mies always said, "It's better to be good than original".)

look 'em up, they were great

Nicholas J. Clayton, Louis Curtiss, Henry C. Trost, Harris Armstrong, O'Neil Ford, Harwell Hamilton Harris, E. Stewart Williams

doing some darn good work

Wendell Burnette, Rick Joy, Trey Trahan, Rand Elliott, Lake/Flato, Huff + Gooden, William McDonough, Brian MacKay-Lyons, Gregory Henriquez, O2 Architecture, Frank Harmon, William Massie, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple, KieranTimberlake, William Rawn, Gary Cunningham, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, El Dorado, Office dA, Williams/Tsien (on occasion), Marlon Blackwell, John Zemanek, Arditti + RDT, BNIM, Overland Partners, Foreign Office Architects, Richter/Chu, and Predock_Frane.

they're . . . OK . . . but not much more

Koolhaas (both Rem and Joshua Prince-Koolhaas), Hadid, MVDRV, UN Studio
(As Ivan Chtcheglov once wrote, "It soothes the eye and tells no story".)

sorry, but I don't get it

Eisenman (Dr. E, architecture's egocentric fool of the millennium. Although I have to admit he did get one thing right; the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.), Venturi & Scott-Brown (Yes, Complexity and Contradiction is important and always worth re-reading, but their built work? Feh. An aside; I always thought that Bob & Denise & Izenour's original 1972 edition of Learning from Las Vegas was the best thing ever, unitl I learned that the knockout graphic design was the work of Muriel Cooper, the art director of MIT Press. Apparently the authors didn't care for knockout graphics and the following editions were, as V&S-B would say, ugly & ordinary.), Greg Lynn, Morphosis, Graves (except for the early Ft. Wayne houses...and I never really thought the Humana Building was all that horrible.), 70% of Gehry (Frank's not worthless - I liked the early raw stuff - and Bilbao & the Disney are indeed mesmerizing icons.), 78% of Meier, and 92.7% of Nina Libeskind's husband (Danny shoulda stayed at Cranbrook and kept drawing his cool drawings). A note to Robert All-Mighty Stern: I really have no problem with historicism, but I do have a problem with flat, cartoonish historicism. Are you ever going to learn about proportion and detail that's actually detailed?? (But even Bob's not totally worthless; his New York books are fantastic and his new condo at 15 Central Park West is retro-acceptable.)

don't believe the architectural hype, volume 2,498,512...

* Steven Holl's Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO.
The fact that it truly is so sleek & sexy at night yet so lumpish, leaden, & joyless in daylight makes it that much more annoying. At least it increases the appreciation of the original 1933 masterpiece. That being said, I do want to make a future pilgrimage to Holl's University of Iowa Art & Art History Building. From the photos the building appears to be crisp & poetic, qualities that I admire.

you're no rock n' roll fun

* The entire campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Including, unfortunately and alas, the new Renzo Piano addition.) Now despite the architectural deficiency, go anyway to see the fine collection, especially the Serra sculptures and Tony Smith's masterpiece, Smoke.

a 21st century architectural guide to hell

These dogs ain't just ugly and soulless, they're freaking eeee-vil:

* Caltrans District 7 Headquarters (Morphosis, Los Angeles, CA, 2004)
* Federal Reserve Bank, Houston Branch (Michael Graves, Houston, TX, 2005)
* San Francisco Federal Building (Morphosis, San Francisco, CA, 2007)