In 1936, during the Great Depression, Herbert and Katherine Jacobs asked architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for them with a construction budget of only $5,000. Wright seized this opportunity to implement his ideas for an affordable home. The result, the brilliant Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, designed down to the last detail, […]
At a superb location on the Baltic coast near Lisön, Ralph Erskine designed a vacation home in 1955 that also had to be suitable for year-round living. The client, Engström, was the owner of a steel construction company, and he collaborated with Erskine on developing the self-supporting dome construction of the house. The dome is […]
At many moments in history architects have turned to the built past to arrive at new architectural solutions. The opening essay of this issue of DASH takes us on a journey past some distinctive examples from over a century of recent history.
The plan documentation of the sixth issue of DASH features a series of historic and more recent projects that provide a panorama of the way in which, over the past 100 years, traditional housing forms have been used as the basis for new projects. Each project is illustrated with new analytical drawings and with photographs […]
The English Arts and Crafts movement modelled itself on an idealized view of society in pre-industrial England. Its adherents were inspired by buildings from this period to develop a new, ‘free’ architecture. Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, a third generation Arts and Crafts architect, persisted in a nondescript, neo-Tudor idiom that was skilfully executed, yet far […]
Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung (1918) by Hermann Muthesius can be read as a manual for the design of garden cities or suburbs. In the introduction, Muthesius, an architect who chiefly owes his fame to studies into innovations in English housing, describes how the Garden City development emerged in Germany during the First World War as a […]
In 1918 a retired teacher and an ex-professional soldier founded a ‘middle-class housing association’, which they named Frisia. Their aim was to introduce a new form of living, whereby likeminded people were housed in compact, yet comfortable and relatively low-cost dwellings. The target group was ‘educated and cultured, including retirees, who wished to continue to […]
Merelhof was designed in 1949 by the Bergen local authority architect J.H. Roggeveen (1888-1955). It exemplifies the principles of the Delft School, a traditionalist movement based on the presumption of an inseparable connection between past and present, which stressed the ‘timeless values’ of architecture. In the sphere of housing design adherents of the Delft School […]
During the post-war years French architect François Spoerry fiercely rejected modernism in general and the work of Corbusier in particular. He confronted the ‘myth’ of modernism, which he believed produced unliveable cities lacking consent and social cohesion, and produced an alternative architecture douce, based on traditional building forms and residential communities, where concepts such as […]
Since the 1980s, Prince Charles of Great Britten has been making prominent and controversial contributions to the debate about urban design and architecture. His explicit and occasionally aggressive attacks on the legacy of modernism and on new developments have caused quite a stir. He expressed his vision in 1989 in a BBC documentary and in […]
This article explore the typologies that have served as the basis for the creation of urban enclaves over the years. The authors argue that a collage of miniature utopias might be a suitable model for the contemporary city.
In the plan documentation for this fifth edition of DASH, ten urban enclaves have been mapped and illustrated using new analytic drawings and photo reportages specially commissioned for this study. These ten projects, spanning some 800 years, show how new residential areas have been designed and created within existing towns and cities. Together they reveal […]