10 homes near a river that will surprise you

Rever and Drage is an architectural office formed by 3 architects (Martin Beverfjord, Tom Auger and Eirik Lilledrange) with offices in Oslo and Flekkefjord.They take on assignments throughout Norway. Currently they have active projects in Sør-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal, Hordaland, Vest-Agder and Rogaland, in addition to Oslo where we carry out the bulk of our work.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1869 and died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1959. He is considered as one of the Modern Movement’s father in architecture and one of the most important architects of the XX Century, together with Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Wright was placed in Chicago, San Francisco, Spring Green (Wisconsin) and Phoenix (Arizona). His life as an active architect in USA was from 1889 to 1962 and in Japan between 1915 and 1923.

Wright was born in a protestant family. His father was preacher of the unitary church, of which he inherited a romantic view, in continuous searching of the universality and the non-conformism. In 1885 he began to study civil engineering in Wisconsin University and worked as draughtsman for an engineer-constructor. Two years later, in 1887 he placed in Chicago where he worked for Joseph Lyman Silsbee, an architect of picturesque nature. Shorty afterward he became a member of Louis Sullivan’s and Dankmar Adler’s studio, and he was the responsible of it in 1889. In this year he started the construction of his first house, for himself in the Oak Park of Chicago (1889-1890).

With Sullivan he made the Charley’s House in Chicago (1891-1892). But at the same time and independently of his work at Sullivan’s studio, he took part of the construction of the Wainwright Building (1890-1891) and the Schiller Building (1891-1892). In 1893 he broke up with Sullivan and he established on his own account, working as domestic architecture.

In 1901 he began his first great creative phase, the “Prairie Houses” period. In this phase, he made the space a real discipline. His most outstanding works were the Susan Lawrence Dana’s house in Sprinfield ¡1902-1904), Avery Coonley’s house in Riverside (1906-1908) and Frederick C. Robie’s house in Chicago (1906) and the unitary temple of Oak Park (1905-1908). He also built the Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo, New York (1902-1906) where he tacked the theme of the work space.

Wirght published in the Architectural Record magazine in 1908, the called 6 organic architecture principles; although he said he had written them in 1894. The principles are: simplicity and elimination of the superfluous; to each client, his life style and his house style; correlation among the nature, topography and architecture; adaptation and integration of the building in his environment and the harmony of the used materials (conventionalization); material expression; and at least, the analogy between the human qualities and the architecture.

In 1909 he decided to travel to Europe and he prepared two synoptic publications with the editor Wasmuth in Berlin. In this phase, Wright has already more than 130 works built. He came back to the United States in 1910. In 1922 he placed in the family lands in Spring Green. Here he planned the called Taliesin House, which would be his house, architecture studio, art gallery and farm. He would extend and modify it during the next years because of two fires in 1914 and in 1925.

Since 1913 he changed his ornamental language due to the European influence and his architecture became more geometric as a consequence, inclusively cubist. This change can be appreciated in the Midway Garden in Chicago (1913-1914) or in the Imperial Hotel of Tokio (1913-1923).

He planned after the Mrs. George Madison Millard’s house “The Miniature” in Pasadena (1923), the John Storer’s house in Hollywood (1923-1924) and the Samuel Freeman’s and Charles Ennis’s houses in Los Ángeles (1923-1924); houses built with reinforced rubblework and walls made of moulding concrete ashlars. But Wright moved to the Arizona desert in 1927, where he found other nature conditions to adapt to. Here he projected a hotel complex in San Marcos, near Chandler, Arizona (1928-1929), which is a growth model that Wright compared with the landscape.

In the 30s, the financial scandals and the consequences of the great depression prevented him to carry out many of his designs and he only projected the Kaufmann Family’s Vacation House: “Fallingwater”, in Bear Run, Pennsylvania; where Wright achieved to unify the nature, the technology and the social organization. In this phase, Wright used the term “Usonians” that referred to the union of the terms USA, utopia and “organic social order”. One example of that is the Herbert Jacops’s House in Madison, Wisconsin (1936-1937). Simultaneously, he built the de Johnson & Company’s headquarters in Racine Wisconsin (1936-1939) and his adjoining tower, where are the investigation laboratories (1943-1950). In 1943, his most important project came: the Art Museum “non objective”, put in charge by Solomon Guggenheim in the 5th Avenue in New York, finished in 1959.

In the 50s, Wright exaggerated increasingly the formal aspect of his buildings. His last projects were: the unitary church of Madison (1945-1951), the synagogue of Beth Sholom in Alkins Park, Pennsylvania (1953-1959), the Annunciation Church in Wautatosa, Wisconsin (1955-1961) and the Martin County’s civic centre in San Rafael, California (1957-1962).

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aquisgran the 27th of Marz of 1886 and died in Chicago the 17th of August of 1969. He was active in Germany, from 1908 to 1938, when he moved to USA and where he was until his death. He was also considerate a “master” of the Modern Movement, since the 50s, and he was one of the fathers of this movement with Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mies van der Rohe, who in his childhood was guided by masters as Hendrik Petrus Berlage or Peter Behrens, he always kept tabs of the Villlet-Le-Duc’s rationalism or Karl Friedrich Schinkel eclectic classicism, having a strong connection with the architectural historicism. As he said in his manifesto “Baukunst und Zeiwille” about this: “it is not possible to move on looking back”.

In 1900 he began to work with his father in the stone workshop of the family and shortly afterward he move to Berlin to work with Bruno Paul in 1902, designing furniture. He planned his first house in 1907, the “Riehl House” in Neubabelsbers and worked from 1908 to 1911 in Peter Behrens’s studio. There he was influenced by structural technics and designs based on steel and glass, as the AEG project in Berlin. While he was in Behrens’s studio he designed the Perls House.

In 1912 he openned his own studio and projected a house in The Hague for Kröller-Müller marriage. The studio received few jobs in its first years, but Mies, contrary to architects as Le Corbusier, in his first years he already showed an architectural policy to follow, being an architect that changed little his architectural philosophy. To his epoch belonged the Heertrasse House and Urbig House as his principal projects.

In 1913 se move to the outskirts of Berlin with his wife Ada Bruhn with whom he would have three kids. The family broke up when Mies was posted to Romania during the World War I.

In 1920, Ludwig Mies changed his surname to Mies van der Rohe and in 1922 he joined as member to the “Novembergruppe”. One year later, in 1923, he published the magazine “G” with Doesburg Lisstzky and Rechter. During this period he worked in two houses, the Birck House and the Mosler House. In 1926, Mies van der Rohe held the post of chief commissioner of the German Werkbund exhibition, being his president this year. In this period he projected the Wolf House in Guden and the Hermann Lange House in Krefeld and in 1927, he met the designer Lilly Reich, in the house exhibition of Weissenhof, where he was director, and he planned a steel structure block for her.

In 1929, he received the project the German National Pavilion to the International Exhibition of Barcelona) rebuilt in 1986=, where he included the design of the famous Barcelona Chair.

In 1930, he planned in Brün – present Czech Republic -, the Tugendhat Villa. He managed the Dessau’s Bauhaus until his closure in 1933. The Nazism forced Mies to emigrate to the United States in 1937. He was designated chair of the Architecture department in Armour Institute in 1938, the one that later merged with the Lewis Institute, forming the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and where he took the responsibility to build a considerable extent of the foundations of the Intitute from 1939 and 1958. One of the buildings of this complex is the Crown Hall, IIT (1950-1956).

In 1940, he met the person who would be his partner until his death, Lora Marx. He became citizen of the USA in 1944 and, one year later, he began with the Farnsworth House’s project (1945-1950). During this stage, in 1948, he designed his first skyscraper: the two towers of the Lake Drive Apartments in Chicago, which were finished in 1951. Shortly after, he planned other building of this typology, the Commonwealth Promenade Apartments, from 1953 to 1956.

In 1958 he projected his most important work: the Segram Building in New York. This building has 37 storeys, covered with glass and bronze, which built and planned with Philip Johnson. He retired from the Illinois Institute of Technology the same year. He also built more towers and complexes as: the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963-1969) and the Westmount Square (1965-1968) and designed the New Square and Office Tower of The City of London (1967).

From 1962 to 1968, he built the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which would be his last legacy to the architecture. The building that rose as exhibition hall is made of steel, glass and granite.

He died in Chicago the 17th of August if 1969 leaving behind a large legacy and influence to next generations.

The Mies van der Rohe’s most famous sentences are “Less is more” and “God is in the details”.
 

Jean Nouvel (12 de agosto de 1945) es un arquitecto francés. Nació en Fumel, Francia y estudió arquitectura y diseño en la escuela de Bellas Artes de París. En 1976 Nouvel fue miembro fundador de "Mars 1976" junto con otros jóvenes arquitectos franceses. También participó en la fundación del Syndicat de l'Architecture. Nouvel ha ganado prestigiosos premios de arquitectura a lo largo de su carrera, incluyendo el Aga Khan Award for Architecture (el premio fue otorgado por el diseño del Institut du Monde Arabe). En el año 2005 recibió el Premio de la Fundación Wolf de las Artes de Jerusalén y En el 2008 el Premio Pritzker.

Nouvel fue galardonado con el Premio Pritzker, el más alto honor en arquitectura, en 2008, por su trabajo en más de 200 proyectos, entre ellos, en palabras de The New York Times, la "exótica persiana" el Instituto del Mundo Árabe, "la Torre Agbar", en Barcelona, con su forma de bala y "colores de caramelo", el "musculado" "Guthrie Theater, con su puente voladizo" en Minneapolis, y en París, el "desafiante, misterioso y excéntricamente salvaje" Musée du Quai Branly (2006) y la Filarmónica de París (un "viaje a lo desconocido", c. 2012).

El Pritzker señalo numerosas obras importantes: en Europa, la Fundación Cartier de Arte Contemporáneo (1994), el Centro Cultural y de Congresos de Lucerna (2000), el Nouvel Opéra de Lyon (1993), la Expo 2002 en Suiza y , en construcción, el Concert Hall de Copenhague y el Palacio de Justicia de Nantes (2000), así como dos altas torres en proyecto en América del Norte, Tour Verre en Nueva York y una torre de viviendas en Los Angeles. Entre sus recientes proyectos culturales destaca los de la sede del Louvre de Abu Dhabi, la Filarmónica de París, el museo Nacional de Qatar en Doha, o el pabellón de la Galería Serpentine, 2010, en Londres.

En su comunicado, el jurado del premio Pritzker señaló:

De las muchas frases que podrían ser utilizadas para describir la carrera de arquitecto Jean Nouvel, las más importantes son los que hacen hincapié en su búsqueda valerosa de nuevas ideas y su desafío de las normas aceptadas para ampliar los límites del campo. [...] El jurado reconoció la "persistencia, imaginación, exuberancia y, sobre todo, un impulso insaciable para la experimentación creativa" como cualidades abundantes en la obra de Nouvel.

Entre sus principales proyectos se encuentran el Instituto del Mundo Árabe en París, la Fundación Cartier y el museo Quai Branly en París, el Centro de Cultura y Congresos KKL en Lucerna, la ampliación del Centro de Artes Reina Sofía en Madrid, el Teatro Guthrie en Minneapolis, la Filarmónica de París ...

Entre los proyectos actualmente en estudio o en construcción se encuentra el "53W53, Tour de Verre" que integra la ampliación de las galerías MoMA en Nueva York, las torres residenciales "Le Nouvel" en Kuala Lumpur, "Anderson 18" y "Ardmore" en Singapur y "Rosewood" en São Paulo, las torres de oficinas "Hekla" y "Duo" en París, el complejo cultural "The Artists 'Garden" en Qingdao o el Museo Nacional de Arte de China NAMOC en Pekín ... El diseño del Louvre Abu Dhabi comenzó en 2006 con la arquitecta asociada de Jean Nouvel, Hala Wardé.

El estudio ha ganado un amplio número de premios por sus diseños tanto en los Países Bajos como en el extranjero.

El trabajo de Marlies Rohmer Architecture + Urban Planning es realista, diverso y distinto, y muestra el estilo distintivo del estudio. Los edificios son tanto aptos funcionalmente por sus soluciones como estimulantes, con respuestas específicas concisas para cada uno. Las obras siempre están inspiradas en la investigación de los fenómenos sociales y culturales que sean relevantes para cada proyecto.

En la perspectiva de Marlies Rohmer Architects & Urbanists, el arquitecto no es sólo un visionario, sino que está socialmente involucrado y cumple una función explícita de prestación de servicios a través de una gran participación.

El estudio, con una plantilla aproximada de 15 personas, funciona como una organización en red. Al completo, la profesionalidad como habilidad básica y la "ingeniería total" son los principos básicos. Así, un diálogo con los clientes y usuarios es lo que da lugar a un diseño que satisface los deseos de todos, pero siempre es más que la suma de sus partes.