A fluffy blog post for a Friday… I wrote ages back about ‘The greatest fictional architect and house’ (I’d even written a fluffier post on ‘The Best House in a TV Advert’). Well, it has become very easy for me to update the first post with the greatest fictional architect being…:
Rainer von Abt from ‘The Glass Room’ by Simon Mawer:
This is of course a cheat on my part as anyone that knows the background of the book or has the ‘Authors Note’ at the beginning of the book understands that the architect Rainer von Abt is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and that the Landauer House is based on Villa Tugendhat.
For those unfamiliar with this UNESCO World Heritage Listed Centre there is a dedicated Villa Tugendhat website.
What’s interesting is that the tentacles of the influence of Mies are present even today as it was amusing to see other architect guess the influences on this recently completed extension and one of the proposals was… Mies (the master):
Influenced by Mies, Le Corbusier, Neutra or Schindler?
Favourite quotes from the book…
“…I am a poet of light and space and form”
“A building should not look like something! It should just be, a shape without references, defined only by the material it is to be built of and the conception of the architect”
I love this book! I’m actually incorporating extracts of it through my current uni project to try and give a sense of how I would like my spaces to feel. My favourite quote is “It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light reverberating from the glass. It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt.”
Thanks for comment;It’s now become one of my favourite books of all time!
Reblogged this on Mark Stephens Architects and commented:
I wrote this in 2012, great read & ideal Xmas present for architect & book lover