9 of the World’s Top Architectural Pilgrimages, from Chandigarh to Fallingwater
“It
is alarming that publications devoted to architecture have banished
from their pages the words beauty, inspiration, magic, spellbound,
enchantment, as well as the concepts of serenity, silence, intimacy and
amazement,” Mexican architect Luis Barragán mused in 1980. He was
accepting the preeminent architecture award, the Pritzker Prize, which honored
Barragán for his “commitment to architecture as a sublime act of the
poetic imagination” and his “gardens, plazas, and fountains of haunting
beauty.”
Barragán is one of a host of pioneering architects from around the world whose ambitious, transporting designs draws visitors from overseas every year. Below, we explore nine of the world’s most unique architectural pilgrimages, from Barragán’s own colorful home, hidden behind a grey wall in Mexico City, to Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s enchanting spa, tucked into the Austrian countryside.
Barragán is one of a host of pioneering architects from around the world whose ambitious, transporting designs draws visitors from overseas every year. Below, we explore nine of the world’s most unique architectural pilgrimages, from Barragán’s own colorful home, hidden behind a grey wall in Mexico City, to Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s enchanting spa, tucked into the Austrian countryside.
Hotel Rogner Bad Blumau, Austria
Architect: Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Built: 1997
Austrian painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser
loathed straight lines, which he famously derided as “tool[s] of the
devil.” Indeed they are nowhere to be found in his most ambitious
project, Rogner Bad Blumau, a fairytale compound tucked into the rolling
hills of the Austrian countryside. Each of the property’s more than 20
structures that snake across the landscape are spangled with charmingly
uneven windows, colorful patchwork facades, grass-coated roofs, and
bursts of sparkling mosaic. The hotel and thermal spa doubles as a
complete expression of Hundertwasser’s passionate design theories, laid
out in manifestos like “Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in
Architecture” (1958). In it, he insisted: “We should reject any modern
architecture in which the straight line or the circle have been
employed...The straight line is not a creative line, but simply a
reproductive lie. In it there live not God and human spirit, but a mass
created, brainless ant addicted to comfort.”
Brasilia, Brazil
Architect: Oscar Niemeyer
Built: 1956–1960
Oscar Niemeyer’s
sketches for the buildings he designed as part of Lúcio Costa’s plan
for the city of Brasilia showed nude women sunbathing on a grassy
esplanade in front of space-age structures. It was this sort of utopian
vision that inspired Niemeyer’s entire body of work, which sees its apex
in the numerous edifices he created for this central Brazilian city in
the 1950s. Amongst the most spectacular of the group is his swooping,
spiney Cathedral of Brasilia; its trademark white tines arc into the sky
towards a cross at the building’s crown. Across the city’s central
plaza, another Niemeyer masterpiece—the National Congress—embodies the
famed modernist architect’s signature style, in which undulating
elements disrupt an angular core.
Las Pozas, Xilitla, San Luis Potosi, Mexico
Architect: Edward James
Built: 1962–1984
Eight
hours north of Mexico City, deep in the rainforest that covers the
Sierra Madre mountains, the millionaire poet, amateur botanist, and
eccentric Edward James lovingly forged his surrealist
sanctuary Las Pozas over the course of 22 years, from 1962 until his
death in 1984. Described by James as his “Surrealist Xanadu,” the vast
property, which he acquired with a substantial steel and railroad
inheritance, is embedded with monumental stone sculptures that look
part-ancient relic, part-dreamscape. Like an M.C. Escher
drawing, Las Pozas’s moss-covered staircases lead into the sky, and its
concrete arabesques merge with the foliage they mimic. During James’s
life, the paradisiacal retreat saw visits from his cohort of artist
friends, like Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Today, it remains a site of pilgrimage for artists, architects, and eccentrics alike.
Chandigarh, India
Architect: Planned by Le Corbusier, with buildings designed by Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B. Drew, and Maxwell Fry
Built: 1951–1970
Several years after India gained independence in 1947, then-prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru hired Swiss architect Le Corbusier
to concoct a city that would reflect the country’s newfound freedom. Le
Corbusier, by then known for his grand architectural visions, broke
ground on Chandigarh, 240 kilometers north of New Delhi and adjacent to
the Himalayan foothills, in 1951. It was believed that he took on the
project (for much less than his normal fee) “as a way of justifying his
theories,” as the New Yorker claimed
in 1955. With the help of fellow architects Maxwell Fry, Jane B. Drew,
Pierre Jeanneret, and a team of Indian architects and planners including
M.N. Sharma, Le Corbusier realized his plan for Chandigarh, a “Garden
City” organized on a grid and punctuated with public space. Today, the
city’s best-known buildings—the Palace of Justice, the Palace of
Assembly, and the Secretariat—are crumbling and guarded by a cohort of
armed policeman. But they remain icons of Brutalist architecture and Le Corbusier’s game-changing design theories.
Arcosanti, Arizona
Architect: Paolo Soleri
Built: 1970–Present
Arcosanti,
a city of sci-fi proportions designed by Frank Lloyd Wright disciple
Paolo Soleri, rises from a tract of secluded Arizona desert that is
marked only by cacti and dusty dirt roads. It is one of the
last-standing utopian eco-communities born of the 1970s and, more
directly, of Soleri’s theory of “arcology,” the seamless confluence of
architecture and ecology. Described by Soleri as an “urban laboratory,”
the idiosyncratic stone buildings that make up the small city’s core
(and which are still being erected, as funds allow) house all manner of
creative activities—amphitheaters for performances, foundries and
ceramics studios for artmaking. In Arcosanti’s early days, recruitment
posters lured residents with a potent statement: “If you are truly
concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion,
land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation,
intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment. Join us.”
Today, three years after Soleri’s death, the small community of some 50
residents that remain at Arcosanti still live according to this mantra,
with the goal of finally realizing the architect’s vision for an
idyllic eco-city.
Rettungsstation der Strandwache II (Beach Rescue Station), Rügen Island, Baltic Sea, Germany
Architect: Dietrich Otto (architect) and Ulrich Müther (engineer)
Built: 1981
This
former lifeguard hut, designed and erected behind the “Iron Curtain”
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has become known as one of the most
innovative examples of “shell” architecture—easily replicable, poured
concrete structures pioneered in the 1960s. The brainchild of German
architect and engineer Ulrich Müther, this futuristic pod hovers above a
stretch of beach on the Baltic Sea’s remote Rügen Island. Müther’s home
throughout his life, from 1934 until 2007, the island hosts several of
the designer’s most experimental buildings, which he humbly summed up as
“a very rational way of directing energy.” Müther’s other little-known
modernist masterpieces include planetariums in Libya and Kuwait, a
velodrome in Havana, and a mosque in Amman. These curvaceous, elliptical
structures have often been compared to the magnum opi of his
contemporaries, Mexican architect Félix Candela and Brazilian architect
Oscar Niemeyer, both of whom influenced him.
Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Built: 1936-1938
“I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it,” pioneering modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright
famously told Edgar Kaufmann with aplomb. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh retail
mogul, had tapped Wright to design a home in the southwestern
Pennsylvania woods, next to the picturesque waterfalls of Bear Run. The
cantilevered house that Wright dreamed up—and eventually erected, with
great difficulty—would become an icon and one of the most daring
architectural feats of the 20th century. The structure is indeed built
over the falls, which gush under its signature cantilevered concrete
terraces, elegant rectangular windows, and central fireplace embedded in
the waterfall’s rocks. With the goal that Fallingwater would “be an
accompaniment to the music of the stream,” Wright seamlessly
incorporated the surrounding landscape into the building’s exterior and
interior spaces, the latter which he also meticulously designed—right
down to the orange and yellow pillows that decorate long, low-lying
couches.
Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City
Architect: Luis Barragán
Built: 1948
Behind a stark grey facade in Mexico City’s modest Tacubaya neighborhood hides architect Luis Barragán’s
former home and, according to many, his masterwork (it was named a
UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004). The modernist structure’s entry
hall—a space flooded with warm yellow light and capped with a bubblegum
pink door—gives way to more idiosyncratic, colorful flourishes that
animate the building’s hard-edged rooms. A patch of yellow floor, a
courtyard swathed in orange, and a floor-to-ceiling window that reveals a
cascade of green foliage have become Barragán trademarks, invoking the
hues of the architect’s native country. His home inspired fellow
architect Louis Kahn
to dole out one of his most effusive compliments. After visiting Casa
Barragán, Kahn said, “His house is not merely a house but House itself.
Anyone could feel at home. Its material is traditional, its character
eternal.”
The Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo
Architect: Kisho Kurokawa
Built: 1972
—Alexxa Gotthardt
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