Field Trip: Annapolis, Maryland

In 1957-58, Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970) designed the 99,000-square-foot Mellon Hall and Frances Scott Keys Auditorium at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. Although St. John's College and surrounding Annapolis are permeated with colonial-era architecture, Richard Weigle, then St. John's College president, wanted a structure that embodied the very finest in modern architecture. Neutra offered the services of his California-based firm Neutra + Alexander for less than its normal fee. He conducted research on campus by soliciting input from faculty and students, studying the school's classic-books curriculum and attending its Socratic method classes.

The building was renowned in its day for its environmentally-conscious motor-operated aluminum louvers that could control incoming natural light according to external conditions.

In 2002, the Great Books college completed a $12.9 restoration project on the structure.

In other Neutra news, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has halted the National Park Service's plans to demolish Neutra + Alexander's 1961 Cyclorama Building. Read more here.

Images above: Richard Neutra, architect. Courtyard of Mellon Hall, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland. Completed 1959. As photographed 10 April 2010 by K. Rylance.

Field Trip: Wisconsin

Wisconsin has a long tradition of roadside "outsider" art -- from Roman Catholic grottoes filled with geodes to concrete animals to forest murals. For over thirty years, the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation (yep, the household faucets people) has assisted in conserving the works of Wisconsin's (and other states) quirky self-taught artists including Emery Blagdon, Billie Logan and Ellie Reed, and Fred Smith.

My favorite Wisconsin site (image above) is located in the back of Delaney's Junkyard. Considered the world's largest scrap metal sculpture and incorporating bits from Wisconsin breweries and munition factories, Dr. Evermor's Forevertron is the machine by which the imaginative may listen to celestial music. Surrounded by hybrid ornithological-musical creatures, the Forevertron stands over fifty feet tall and is surmounted by an egg-shaped space capsule. Tom Every, a Wisconsin native and demolition expert, created the pseudo-Victorian fantasia along with his alternative persona, a nineteenth-century scientist named "Dr. Evermor."

Read Jeffrey Hayes's homage to the demolitions preservationist here.

Image above: "Power Station" from Dr. Evermor's Forevertron outside Baraboo (North Freedom Township), Wisconsin. Posted on Wikimedia Commons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HPIM8818_1.JPG

Field Trip: Venice, California

The House:  Himmelhaus aka Drier House

Address:  513 Grand Boulevard/Venice/California

Architects:  Wolf Prix and Michael Volk of Coop Himmelblau (1995) with renovations by Michael Hricak and Roland Tso (2006)

To read more, see Michael Webb's article in Architectural Review 221:1323 (May 2007): pp. 64-67 available in the TSA Library.

Photograph:  Himmelhaus, 27.01.2009 by K. Rylance.