For a look at some of Gehry’s earlier, funkier work before the Walt Disney Concert Hall, visit the campus of Loyola Law School Los Angeles, just west of downtown Los Angeles – or take this virtual tour online.
Loyola chose Gehry to design its new campus in 1978, before he became the “starchitect” who had designed Disney Concert Hall, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and other now-famous structures.
Robert Venturi had some big ideas about architecture, and he found ways to express several of them in this rather small home.
Designed for his elderly mother Vanna, Robert Venturi used the house as a canvas to demonstrate some of the “complexities and contradictions” in modern architecture.
Watch the Segment
Visit the National Building Museum, where you can learn about American innovation in architecture, engineering, and design.
http://www.nbm.org/about-us/about-the-museum
Take a guided tour of the U.S. Capitol, whose neoclassical architecture was championed by Thomas Jefferson.
http://www.uscapitol.gov
What should an airport look like? Can good design make a traveler’s experience better? These were questions facing Eero Saarinen when he received the commission for a new airport west of Washington, D.C. in 1958.
Watch the Segment
New York architecture is often seen up close: standing on the sidewalk and craning to see the towering skyscrapers above. That’s one way to look at things. For a broader perspective, and a fuller appreciation of how these buildings together create the majestic New York skyline, take an architecture tour on the Hudson, East, and Harlem Rivers, put together by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects:
German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was an early director of the Bauhaus in Berlin, a school where the earliest modernist principles of architecture blossomed – that is, until the Nazis shut it down in 1933. Mies came to the U.S. in the late 1930s and brought with him some powerful, even radical, new ideas about architecture.
Victor Gruen was focused on bringing vitality to suburbia, but he unwittingly helped to hasten urban decline. Today, many urban areas are seeing restoration and renewed vitality. In Minneapolis’s Riverfront District, you can see a variety of restored architectural gems, as well as newer landmarks by noted architects, including Frank Gehry and Herzog & de Meuron.
Explore Minneapolis’s Riverfront District with a walking tour or bike ride:
Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen spent his early years in Vienna, where people interacted in lively pedestrian environments filled with shops, cafes, and street artists.
Watch the Segment
Model T Automotive Heritage Complex
Before the Highland Park Ford Plant made the modern moving assembly line possible, Henry Ford’s automobiles were assembled in a much smaller space, where crews of workers had to move their tools and parts from chassis to chassis. You can visit the original 1904 Piquette Avenue plant, now open as a museum.
