Tag: minimalism and modernism in architecture

Holley House: An hMa ‘roman a clef’, featuring Holley House

December 17th, 2009

It was winter – nearly christmas - and he still had made no decisions about whether or not he would be visiting Moscow in January. His friends were impatient – but he just could not decide.

In the meantime, there was plenty to do here, gathering wood, getting the house ready for the holidays…

Holley House: view looking south, toward the living room pavilion. In winter, the house features two stone fireplaces: one in the living room, and a second in the master bedroom. For decision making, there's nothing better than a walk in the woods, followed by time by the fire.

To see more views of the Holley House in Garrison, New York, visit our website: www.hanrahanMeyers.com.
Victoria Meyers featured on BUILD Blog : “Women Making an Impact”

November 19th, 2009

BUILDblog is a discussion of modern design from the Northwest. It's authored by the team at BUILD LLC who also run a furniture and cabinet shop and keep a modern list of city recommendations.

Victoria Meyers is featured in a November 18th post on BUILDblog as part of their "Women Making an Impact" series. In this post, the 4th in the series, BUILDblog showcases the work of ten women in architecture creating "hot, forward thinking work." Other architects in this series include Amanda Levete (UK), Louisa Hutton (Germany), Momoyo Kaijima (Japan), Anne Lacaton (France), Dorte Mandrup (Denmark), Victoria Meyers, E.B. Min (U.S.A.)., Toshiko Mori (U.S.A.), Patricia Patkau (Canada), and Carme Pinos (Spain).

From BUILDblog:

Victoria Meyers, U.S.A.

"Meyers has a good handle on the ‘everything it needs to be and nothing more’ aesthetic and her work hits all the right chords with us. There is a nice range of challenging projects on her website and she also keeps a blog –big points from team BUILD."

Click here to view the entire post at BUILDblog

Click here to view more of Victoria Meyers' work at hanrahanMeyers.com

left to right: Victoria Meyers, JCT Pratt Design Center Pavilion in Brooklyn, NY and Holley House in Garrison, NY by hanrahan Meyers Architects
Infinity Chapel in Construction : Curved Wallssacred spaces; chapel design, modern church design; minimalist architecture

September 16th, 2009

view of chapel from mezzanine; Infinity Chapel by hMa, August 2009

detail of curved walls under construction, August 2009

view of mezzanine and curved wall; Infinity Chapel by hMa

Click here to view all photos of Infinity Chapel at www.hanrahanmeyers.com

Shown above are in-progress photos of Infinity Chapel designed by hanrahan Meyers architects. The chapel design evolved out of conversations between the Architects and the members of the Church: Tenth Church of Christ, Scientist.

The clients requested a minimalist chapel design that included dyanmic curves and that was in touch with Nature. The final design for the Chapel reflects research by the Architects into hypercubes and other advanced mathematical forms. The Chapel interior is a cube, deformed by light.

hanrahan Meyers architects specialize in the design of public buildings that connect to light and to nature. The Chapel's windows look out into a public meditation garden which will be the focal point of members sitting in the pews during sermons. The garden is planned to have plantings including a background of Ilex and ivy, with Japanese Red Maples in the foreground. The garden design is a collaboration between hanrahan Meyers architects and GRDN: www.grdnbklyn.com.
Glass and Steel Pavilion: time, distance, form, and architecture Minimalist Architecture; Glass and Steel Design; Public Architecture; Victoria Meyers Architect

July 2nd, 2009

Time : the diagram for Hudson River House as a hieroglyphic

Distance : Digital Water Pavilion facade incorporates a musical score

Form : Pratt Pavillion: a deformed cube floated above a glass entry

hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) is a cutting-edge contemporary architectural office known for their mathematically pure and sophisticated building designs. The illustrations above show details from the design of a house in New York; a new facade for Battery Park City, in Lower Manhattan, where a precisely calibrated facade marks the distance a person travels along an arcing wall leading from a series of parks in Battery Park City, to the World Trade Center site; and the finished steel and glass facade of a new academic building for the Pratt Institute Campus. All three of these projects share a precise crafting of form and space based on ideas from mathematics.

In early modernist architectural thought the clearest thesis that connected the modernist idea of spatial design to geometry was Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’ – a small booklet published by Le Corbusier in 1948, describing his method of laying out architecture using the golden section rectangle. More recently, in 1995, Robin Evans' The Projective Cast , a collection of essays, traced mathematical thought as it informs architecture from the Renaissance through modernism.

covers of Le Corbusier's 'Modulor'

Any great architecture stands in recognition of mathematical ideas. Mathematical principles applied to space brings us in contact with:

time : the Cartesian grid; distance : space; and form : geometry.

Through the application of mathematical forms, we are put in touch with great mathematical minds:

Pythagoras, Decartes, Newton, Fibonacci, Euler, And Nash – for example.

It is in this vast reconnection through space and time that architecture can produce a profound revelation for each of us: connecting back through time for thousands of years; and, vice-versa - connecting us to the open-ended future state of human exploration and endeavor.

Projection and its analogues: The Arrested Image, Robin Evans (from The Projective Cast, MIT, 1995)