Three Classic Fairy Tales Examined Through the Lens of Architecture

What Rapunzel’s braid-to-tree connection has to do with the rotational circumference of Baba Yaga’s house.

As a lover of classic fairy tales and longtime fan of Kate Bernheimer’s modernist ones, I was delighted to come across Design Observer’s three–part series, in which Kate and Andrew Bernheimer reimagine the magical homes from three beloved fairy tales — Baba Yaga, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel — through the lens of architecture. In each installment, a different architecture firm selects a favorite fairy tale and examines its pivotal structure through a new kind of imaginative architectural storytelling.

Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams. This project presents a new path of inquiry, a new line of flight into architecture as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming. We welcome you to these fairy-tale places.” ~ Kate Bernheimer & Andrew Bernheimer

As a child of Eastern European folklore, I’m partial to the first installment, in which Bernheimer Architecture examine Baba Yaga through its most important structure — the chicken legs, of course — and consider “how one might make a structure or an architecture ‘chicken-like,’ both externally and internally.”

In part two, Leven Betts Studio take a curious paradox of Jack and the Beanstalk — that the vehicle for the story’s magic, adventure and triumph is the beanstalk, yet it’s rarely described — and use it as the focal point of their architectural explorations.

Fairy tales are exemplified by spare and abstract detail, leaving enormous space — big as the sky — for the reader to wonder.”

In the third and final installment, Guy Nordenson and Associates bring their masterful structural engineering to Rapunzel’s tower, blending the original vision of the Brothers Grimm with their own pre-existing design for The Seven Stems Broadcast and Telecommunications Tower .

Rapunzel’s tower has come to symbolize both an enchanted, magical home and a dreadful prison from which to escape. Inside, one’s heart is full of desire and longing; and one must always also get out. The complicated emotional valence of this space is part of its longstanding appeal.”

For more modernist fairy tale magic, don’t miss Kate Bernheimer’s My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales — a wonderful anthology of stories by some of today’s greatest fiction writers, including Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender and Lydia Millet. And for a classical take, look no further than the best illustrations from 130 years of the Brothers Grimm.

via It’s Okay To Be Smart

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Architects’ Sketchbooks: Behind the World’s Most Magnificent Buildings

How to limn a skyscraper in a line, or why the Centre Pompidou was inspired by a Chinese bamboo hat.

The sketchbook as surface for envisioning, inventing, and thinking in motion, has been somewhat of an idée fixe on Brain Pickings of late. We’ve looked at the lists of great thinkers, and peeked inside the pages of private notebooks from artists to zoologists around the world.

Today we’re taking a moment to focus on sketchbooks from a discipline that is itself interdisciplinary, brilliantly balancing the demands of both science and art — namely, architecture. The inspiring recent release Architects’ Sketchbooks celebrates the earliest traces of a building’s coming into being, the ideas that pave the way for the precision of engineers’ calculations or CAD renderings. Through the book’s beautiful reproductions of original blots, jots, and scribbles, we can see that even the most awe-inspiring edifices begin as a line — as reassuring an insight into the creative process as any.

Architects’ Sketchbooks assembles work from 85 of the world’s best-known practitioners, including Shigeru Ban, Norman Foster, Terry Pawson, and Rafael Viñoly, as well as names less familiar to those of us outside the practice. Alongside the often functional but occasionally fantastical images from their flat files, the book also contains essays that place the images in context (and the buildings into their eventual environs). Equally fun is seeing all the different media in which architects work today, from comic strips to crayons, and how these choices are literally representative of different worldviews about how we might live.

Here’s a preview of a few of the book’s pages:

Evidence that even the most imposing monuments have their humble beginnings as one person’s notion in a notebook, Architects’ Sketchbooks is a guide to viewing the world’s human wonders in a whole new way.

Kirstin Butler currently lives in Cambridge, MA where she is working on an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs.

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Urban Atrophy: Haunting Photos of Architectural Ghosts

What Classic Coke has to do with abandoned dolls and the afterlife of buildings.

The Japanese find beauty in decay, accepting the natural cycle of growth and collapse. This philosophy might be foreign to our Western clinging to the corporeal, but since 2005, Dan Haga and Dan Ayers have been looking for beauty and poeticism in abandoned schools, psychiatric hospitals, missile silos, amusement parks, cathedrals, jails, churches, and other remnants of modern civilization.

This year, they immortalized their finds in Urban Atrophy — a spellbinding collection of 560 striking, haunting images, alongside text that contextualizes these architectural ghosts and exposes the afterlife of ordinary buildings.

Pennhurst Hospital

Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School

Pennhurst Hospital

The Queen Theater

United Cross

Fort Washington

Hebrew Orphan Asylum

The Queen Theater

Mayfair Theatre

via Web Urbanist; images from Urban Atrophy

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Built to Last: The Illustrated Secrets of Mankind’s Greatest Structures

What gargoyles and mosques have to do with King Edward I and the secrets of Ancient Rome.

Castles. Cathedrals. Mosques. Those are some of humanity’s greatest feats of architecture, design and civic engineering, but how exactly were they built and what makes them stand the test of time? That’s excatly what Caldecott Medal-winning artist and prolific how-things-work author David Macaulay explores in Built to Last — a fascinating illustrated volume of insight into the how and why of mankind’s greatest structures. It combines three of Macauley’s most beloved construction books — Cathedral (1981), Castle (1982), and Mosque (2003) — into a single tome full of never-before-seen full-color drawings and new material.

A reference model for the ribs of the vaulting on the roof truss

Laying out the drawing of the roof trusses

A quick reference model for the roof trusses

An early sketch of the flying buttresses and one gargoyle

Sketch for the kitchen scene while making dinner fit for a king

Macaulay modeling for the drawing of King Edward I. Note the headband and royal Tin Tin watch

Whether the three building types in this book were built to last or simply to impress, they were certainly constructed with determination and care. And without the lessons they offer, our past would be more remote and therefore less useful as we stumble into an uncertain future.” ~ David Macaulay

Combining rigorous research, poetic illustration and the captivating human stories behind these architectural marvels, Built to Last is equal parts illuminating and inspirational, brimming with a kind of visceral curiosity that makes Macaulay’s timeless drawings spring to life.

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