India's Modernist Marvel

Is Chandigarh unique? There can't be too many cities in the world that have been designed from scratch to resemble a living organism, complete with head, heart, limbs and circulatory system. Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born modernist architect who was hired to design Chandigarh in 1950, is often described as a visionary, yet the north Indian city is also a tribute to his eccentricity.

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The Other Father of Cubism

The Acquavella Galleries’ splendid Georges Braque exhibition is a 42-gun salute to this pioneering French Modernist. The first large Braque survey to be staged in New York in more than 20 years, it musters a vigorous if compressed account of more than five decades of art making, with 42 paintings and collages, almost all top-notch. More than half have been borrowed from American and European museums; the rest come from private collections and in several cases have not been on public display in quite some time.

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Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens

Scotland's creepiest building in £10m restoration scheme

St Peter's Seminary, a masterpiece of radical architecture, has lain derelict for 30 years and fallen prey to vandals.

An appeal has been launched to save a derelict building hidden in an overgrown wood in Scotland that is described as one of the greatest modernist buildings in Europe.

With its long, clean lines covered by graffiti and its concrete greyed with rainwater, St Peter's Seminary has lain in a state of ruin since it was abandoned by the Catholic church in 1980. The vast, crumbling building is accessible only by foot and, despite a number of restoration proposals over recent decades, it has been left to decay and to the vandals. It has been dubbed "Scotland's shame" and "Scotland's creepiest building", yet a plan to turn the ruin into a hotel in 2007 was dropped because of the cost of restoration.

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A virtual 360-degree tour can be found here.

Landmark Elevator Coming Down

"Once hailed by a master of architecture, the slow demolition of the Ogden Federal Elevator has begun.

Built in 1915, the stark, hulking edifice was once featured in famed architect Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture next to the Parthenon; a symbol in concrete of the noble, functional prairie. Now it sits in a traffic black spot, sandwiched by a sewage treatment plant and the producers of asphalt shingles.

Located in the southeast of the city and within sight of Deerfoot Trail, the building is nearing its end. About a fifth of the structure has been razed.

Lamenting the loss of the historical monument, which was once a city landmark, the Calgary Heritage Authority has taken pains to photograph its inner silos.

"Ideally, we hate to see it torn down, but without any practical adaptive use for the building, it's hard for us to advocate for it to be saved," said Scott Jolliffe, the authority's chairman."


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Mid-Century Modern Furniture Ads – L’Œil Magazine.

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The Genius of Eames

"The details are not the details, they make the design."

- Charles Eames


Designers and architects Charles and Ray Eames (Ray was his second wife, and partner) revolutionized furniture design with their pioneering work in molded plywood. While both had tallied significant improvements priot to this, their debut of the Eames lounge chair in 1956 was the real beginning of their massive influence on the public consciousness. They put industrial techniques to work for home furnishing, and so put the "modern" in the Midcentury.

Eames Lounge Chair Debut on NBC in 1956



The Definitive Eames Lounge Chair



Of course, the Eames' were not just influential furniture designers, but ground-breaking architects in their own right. Perhaps the most striking example of the revolutionary nature of their architectural thinking remains The Eames House, located at 203 North Chautauqua Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Constructed in 1949, Charles and Ray built it to serve as their home and studio.



They even moved beyond traditional design and into purer forms of fine art, as can be seen in the following video, which showcases some of their lesser known pursuits, such as photography.



Finally, even film was within their grasp, with fourteen films being created between 1950 and 1972, with perhaps the most famous being the celebrated film, The Powers of Ten.

Video: The Powers of Ten