BrooklynModern

Via NY Times’s The Moment Blog.
Photo by David Heald, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1, Madison, Wisc., 1936-37; developed by Situ Studio, Brooklyn.

In “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” an exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, the models of Wright’s designs are attracting as much attention as the exhibition itself. Perhaps the most notable model is that of Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1 of 1936-37, the first of the architect’s pioneering open-plan, energy-efficient Usonian houses. The basswood model takes the house’s components — from its window frames to its innovative copper-piped radiant-heating system — and explodes them, so that they seem to hang in midair.

See the exhibit and watch an interview with Situ’s architects.

This and the exhibition’s five other models were designed and made by Situ Studio, a four-year-old Brooklyn multidisciplinary firm known for its cutting-edge approach to digital design and fabrication technologies. It’s current projects include fabricating a bamboo and birch lobby for One Jackson Square, a soon-to-be-completed building by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The Guggenheim curators chose Situ because they were determined not to go the usual architectural-model route and they even put a clause in Situ’s contract forbidding the use of those fuzzy little hobby-shop trees. Given the museum’s ramped floors, the architects also decided to forgo the usual flat plinth on which most building models sit. Situ’s Wright models seem to grow out of the Guggenheim’s curving parapet, or cantilever off its walls just above eye level. The tabletop terrain model of Taliesin, Wright’s Wisconsin home and studio, functions as a contoured screen (complete with Monopoly-scaled versions of the property’s structures) for the projection of historic landscape reports and plot maps. The display — to which Situ is still adding data — demonstrates the depth of the young architects’ research. They admitted that before embarking on this five-month project, they had only a cursory knowledge of Wright. “He’s not taught in architecture schools like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,” said Bradley Samuels, one of Situ’s partners. Wes Rozen, another partner, added, “He’s more difficult to analyze.”