Built as a personal residence for John Snyder, the Chief Executive of the Pressed Steel Car Company which manufactured Goldberg’s Unicel freightcars and Unishelter homes, the Snyder House was designed utilizing prefabricated components from the Unishelter program. The prefabricated units, complete with bathroom, kitchen, plumbing and HVAC, were fabricated in Chicago, shipped by rail, then by boat, and finally assembled on Shelter Island. Two separate units, the guest and main houses were glued together on site. The prefabricated elements were built of naturally finished mahogany plywood, which gave the exterior a dramatic sheen. The interior of the main house featured a massive stone fireplace and flagstone floors. The natural materials provided a dramatic contrast to the glass and steel exterior of the main living space. The focal point of the house was a dramatic cantilever, composed of the prefabricated units, which jutted out over Long Island Sound. A man-made beach became a landing area for amphibious airplanes used to transport onlookers between New York City and the “demonstration house.”

As a student in the Bauhaus in the early 1930s, Goldberg discovered the possibilities of a creative relationship between the industrial process and the design industry. The Snyder House was a dramatic expression of that belief. Goldberg was no stranger to the possibilities of plywood. He had used it for everything from furniture to freight cars. With the Snyder House, Goldberg wanted to create a design that would make a commonly invisible building material visible and take the stigma out of plywood.

source: bertrandgoldberg.org

Introduction
The Douglas home is the culminating work of the first period of Meier, where all the ideas developed in the experiments in single-family homes resulted in a more balanced and imaginative structure. Built in the 1970′s, it became a symbol of that period of rationalism.

Situation
The Douglas House is located in Harbor Springs, Michigan. It sits on a wooded hillside, but the artificial construction inserted into the natural landscape is quite a contrast.

Concept
The intention was to create a strong visual contrast to the landscape. The shape is a large white prism that emerges from between the trees. The back of the house is a closed facade with small openings while the front features with large glass panels offering extensive views over the horizon. The shape and arrangement of the windows are in strict compliance with the privacy required ineach area of the home.

Spaces
In this house, Meier proposes formal, space-rich compositions. He organized the internal space such that the small, tight main entrance opens into a large space encased in glass. This style allowed him to express various themes: the contrast between light and shadow, the change in spatial scale, and access via ramps, bridges and stairs.

Structure
Beginning with reinforced concrete, Meier makes desired subtractions from the volume but maintains the glass structure independently of the foundation.

Materials
The materials used are reinforced concrete and glass.

source: http://en.wikiarquitectura.com

Saarinen’s original futuristic design featured a prominent wing-shaped thin shell roof over the main terminal (head house), unusual tube-shaped departure-arrival corridors originally wrapped in red carpet — and critical to the spirit of the design — expansive windows that highlighted departing and arriving jets. The concrete shell’s evocative shape — which inspired Saarinen to develop special, curved edge ceramic tile to conform to the curvilinear shapes — places the design into the categories of Futurist, Googie, and Fantastic architecture.
The terminal was also the first with enclosed passenger jetways, closed circuit television, a central public address system, baggage carousels, electronic schedule board and baggage scales, and the satellite clustering of gates away from the main terminal. Food and beverage services included the Constellation Club, Lisbon Lounge, and Paris Café.

JFK was unusual in having company-owned and designed terminals. Terminals were built by Eastern Airlines and American Airlines and while others carried the names of their airlines, including the Worldport of Pan American World Airways and the Sundrome of National Airlines.

As with many terminals designed before the advent of jumbo jets, increased passenger traffic and security issues, the design proved difficult to update as air travel evolved; terminal gates close to the street made centralized ticketing and security checkpoints difficult.

This structure, and the International style in which it was built, had enormous influences on American architecture. One of the style’s characteristic traits was to express or articulate the structure of buildings externally. It was a style that argued that the functional utility of the building’s structural elements when made visible, could supplant a formal decorative articulation; and more honestly converse with the public than any system of applied ornamentation. A building’s structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram Building, like virtually all large buildings of the time, was built of a steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Mies would have preferred the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material, usually concrete, because improperly protected steel columns or beams may soften and fail in confined fires. Concrete hid the structure of the building — something Mies wanted to avoid at all costs — so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically, like mullions, surrounding the large glass windows. This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice has since become commonplace. As designed, the building used 1,500 tons of bronze in its construction.

On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world’s most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive, high-quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme.

Another interesting feature of the Seagram Building is the window blinds. As was common with International style architects, Mies wanted the building to have a uniform appearance. One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions – fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

The building stands on the San Fernando Valley side of the Hollywood Hills, just off of Mulholland Drive. It is a one story octagon with around 2200 square feet (200m2) of living space. Most distinctively, the house is perched atop a concrete pole nearly thirty feet high. This innovative design was Lautner’s solution to a site that, with a slope of 45 degrees, was thought to be practically unbuildable. The house is reached by a funicular.

The lot had been given to a young aerospace engineer by his father-in-law; despite his own limited means, the engineer, Leonard Malin, was determined to live there. The building, which the Encyclopædia Britannica once called “the most modern home built in the world”, is admired both for the ingenuity of its solution to the problem of the site and for its unique design.

In 1976, the house’s second owner, Dr. Richard Kuhn, was stabbed to death at his home in a robbery by two men, who were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Because of a concrete pedestal, almost 20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter, buried under the earth and supporting the post, the house has survived earthquakes and heavy rains.

By 1997, the interior had become run down; for over 10 years it had been rented out and used for parties and as a result the interior finishes had undergone major and anachronistic alteration. Because of its unique design it proved to be a difficult sell and had sat on the market for most of its time as a rental property.

Since 2000, it has been the Los Angeles home of Benedikt Taschen, of the German publishing house Taschen, who has had the home restored; the only current issue with the home is the higher cost of maintenance. The recent restoration, by Escher GuneWardena Architecture, won an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy.
The house forms part of a retrospective of Lautner’s work which was shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles between August and October 2008.

The house was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2004. It was also included in a list of all time top 10 houses in Los Angeles in a Los Angeles Times survey of experts in December 2008.