Building Bits

Here's a couple buildings, old and new, in the news this week.

Louis I. Kahn's Esherick House (1961) in Philadelphia hits the auction block.


[photograph by Ezra Stoller/Esto | image source]

Large for a single-person house (as it was designed), but small by today's standards, this dignified piece of architecture is supposed to fetch between $2-3 million. While this supposedly happened yesterday in an auction by Wright in Chicago yesterday, I've yet to hear or see any news on the sale; I'll post an update when known. The auction is actually May 18, not March 18. Me bad.


[photograph by Todd Eberle | image source]

Wright commissioned Todd Eberle to shoot photographs for a catalog that also features an essay by Julie V. Iovine. This aspect of the auction reminds me of the catalog I saw at the Maison Tropicale when I visited it on the Queens side of the East River, where a nearly $100 catalog was for sale. Looks like pricey, museum-quality books to accompany the big show aren't just for museums.

The Ascent at Roebling Ridge by Studio Daniel Libeskind opens on March 26.


[photographer unknown | image source]

Covington, Kentucky's attempt to upstage its neighbor across the Ohio River, Cincinnati, is a building that looks more suited to Las Vegas than a Midwestern city of roughly 50,000. This trait owes not only to its swooping form but its skin, its solid/void patterning and the mirrored glass.


[photographer unknown | image source]

Libeskind justifies the design as one that "echoes the colors of the [Covington-Cincinnati] Suspension Bridge...[and] mimics the Bridge's cables...curving to maximize the views of both the river and the surrounding hillsides." Okay, but that still doesn't distract me enough from that exterior wall -- flat as a curving pancake -- with balconies, for the most part, carelessly inserted into it. I just can't shake that Vegas feeling.


[photographer unknown | image source]