Design Research

Chris Grimley published a review of the book Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes in the February 2011 issue of ArchitectureBoston

Architectural Artifacts

Megan Panzano

Vision and cultural imagination are shaped by how we represent the world. Representations on repeat can perceptually trap us into seeing-only-conventionally. Architectural Artifacts critiques specific limits posed by conventional linear perspective, unlocking different information about the spaces described. The project experiments with the perspective view as an unusual point of origin with architecture as an artifact, or byproduct, of its close read. The exhibit displays three new representational artifacts and their accompanying fresh architectural forms created by pushing perspective’s limits through contemporary tools and new design methodologies. The three dimensionality of the revamped representations establishes new codes of engagement and offers curious perceptual content with real-time effects—their reading intentionally resides between representation and reality, image of a thing or ‘thingness’ itself. The project inverts the trope ‘a room with a view,’ instead designing new views, with rooms.

Portrait/Landscape: Revisiting Kaneji Domoto's Lurie House

Lynnette Widder and Thad Russell

Japanese-American architect and landscape architect Kaneji Domoto (1912–2002) built five houses in Usonia, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed community that was developed in a wooded enclave just outside New York City in the late 1940s. Beginning in 2015, architect Lynnette Widder and photographer Thad Russell collaborated on the documentation of the de- and reconstruction Widder undertook on Domoto’s 1949-50 Lurie House there. Methodically chronicled using both film and digital photography over the course of two and a half years, ‘Portrait/Landscape: Revisiting the Lurie House’ captures the architecture of this era and its remaking in the present.