Richly-colored canvases line the walls of architect Victor Lundy’s hangar-like studio in Houston, Texas. Some 50 feet wide and 65 feet long, there is ample room to make art and houses his de facto archive. Shelved are battlefield sketchbooks from his WWII service as are numerous magazine clippings featuring the architect’s designs. Over his career Lundy’s designed churches and embassies, houses and, even, inflatable structures. Practicing since the early 1950s, he still picks up the occasional house commission and paints daily. At 85, he has a restless creativity. “These days I am thinking a lot and I am on a verge of a breakthrough,” Lundy says over the phone. “I want to invent something, but it is hard. Every time I paint, the rectangle is a limiting thing. Being an architect, everything I paint is seems less important than the space I make.” The architect’s vision is grander than the canvas. It always has been. Read More …
The architect never studied with the masters, but his work was a radical reaction to the Colorado environment, and an expression of futuristic ideals.
Joel Haertling, son and de facto archivist of the late architect Charles A. Haertling, faxed over a single page written by his father. Titled “Thoughts on Architecture,” it’s a blurry, typewritten list. Charles Haertling succumbed to a brain tumor in 1984, but the text is immediate and cuts across the years: 21 enumerated glimpses into a creative mind. Someone has circled point number 14: “Design is always a tortuous, grueling, almost maddening, though heavenly sweet, task.” The line is as familiar as it is revealing. Look at Haertling’s houses with their radically pitched roofs, daring cantilevers, and mushrooming facades—products of a career spent building in the Boulder, Colorado, area—and you can see both his pleasure and his pain.
“I was never an architect’s architect. I’m too impatient. I just can’t wait around for years for a building to get built,” says New Orleans sculptor Laurel Porcari. Her preferred medium, kiln-formed glass, is hot, heavy, and dirty, but immediate—a far cry from CAD drawings. Nevertheless, her pieces, cast so that the material flows and warps to take on textures or resemble landscapes, capture an architect’s sensibility. After receiving her Master of Science in architecture. from Columbia in 1993, Porcari headed for Australia, where she taught design in both Perth and Melbourne. She was also working in plastic, hand-printing abstract maps on acrylic sheets to create art installations. Returning to the States, she landed in New Orleans to study in the urban design Ph.D. program at Tulane University.*
“I was never an architect’s architect. I’m too impatient. I just can’t wait around for years for a building to get built,” says New Orleans sculptor Laurel Porcari. Her preferred medium, kiln-formed glass, is hot, heavy, and dirty, but immediate—a far cry from CAD drawings. Nevertheless, her pieces, cast so that the material flows and warps to take on textures or resemble landscapes, capture an architect’s sensibility. After receiving her Master of Science in architecture. from Columbia in 1993, Porcari headed for Australia, where she taught design in both Perth and Melbourne. She was also working in plastic, hand-printing abstract maps on acrylic sheets to create art installations. Returning to the States, she landed in New Orleans to study in the urban design Ph.D. program at Tulane University.*