Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: post-modern architecture

Tel Aviv University Prof. Tzvi Harel, the good-natured architect who designed this post-modernist gravity-defying seaside apartment house, says that he is "proud of being insulted about it. I believe humor and criticism in architecture is very important." The four-story building was never meant to be more than imaginary. Harel sketched it for a 1980s newspaper column on the renaissance of Tel Aviv culture and art. Local entrepreneur Avraham Piltz loved the oddball design and brought it to life, though he died before the house was completed in the mid-1990s. "The idea was that since it was on the shore of Tel Aviv, which in those days was quite neglected, you could be an exhibitionist and expose yourself playfully in front of the sea," Harel says, pointing out that every room in each of the seven apartments has a sea view.

Tel Aviv University Prof. Tzvi Harel, the good-natured architect who designed this post-modernist gravity-defying seaside apartment house, says that he is "proud of being insulted about it. I believe humor and criticism in architecture is very important." The four-story building was never meant to be more than imaginary. Harel sketched it for a 1980s newspaper column on the renaissance of Tel Aviv culture and art. Local entrepreneur Avraham Piltz loved the oddball design and brought it to life, though he died before the house was completed in the mid-1990s. "The idea was that since it was on the shore of Tel Aviv, which in those days was quite neglected, you could be an exhibitionist and expose yourself playfully in front of the sea," Harel says, pointing out that every room in each of the seven apartments has a sea view.

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. …" Tennyson The Passing of Arthur

A small school with a progressive reputation, Bard sits high on a bluff above the Hudson River in Annandale, commanding views that have scarcely changed since the days of the Hudson River painters. Its original library, a perfectly proportioned Ionic temple built in 1893, is the ideal architectural accent for this American arcadia. Of ivory brick surrounded by weathered stone columns, this Greek Revival gem stands for the idea of America as a natural paradise where democracy could take root. … in his competition-winning design, Venturi argued that the best way to honor the temple’s classical symmetry was not to ape it but to contrast it. Attached to the western wall of the earlier annex, flaring slightly as it projects beyond the temple’s portico, his addition is colorful, varied and lop-sided where the temple is monochrome, uniform and symmetrical; flatly surfaced instead of deeply recessed; marked by horizontal bands that counter the temple’s columns. The addition is the temple’s dream of itself in another life – in modern life, in fact. … Windows create counterpoint patterns, and also adjust the addition into harmonious relationship with the temple. Their rhythm and proportions echo the Ionic colonnade, while the mullions suggest fluting and even impart an illusion of roundness. (New York Times, October 31, 1993)