Floating House, Lake Huron
On the edge of a tiny island accessible only by boat, this buoyant summer home lives the life aquatic.
The Unfolding Office
“A strategy of extreme density was required,” says Michael Chen of Normal Projects, who along with partner Kari Anderson handled the renovation of this Upper West Side apartment.
Leave it to Beavers
It’s not unusual for New Yorkers to have problems with their neighbors; after all, many a co-op brawl has started over a little late-night noise. But it is rare for the downtown crowd to have a beef with a pack of rowdy beavers—which is exactly the situation in which architect Lynn Gaffney and her husband, financial portfolio manager Bill Backus, found themselves recently at their weekend home in the tiny town of Sharon, Connecticut (population: 2,968). The beavers, who reside in the swamp behind Backus and Gaffney’s house, generally keep a low profile, but every so often let loose with a torrent of logs and sticks that block all the nearby drainage pipes, making a watery mess of local roads and forcing residents to haul away the detritus.
Terra Ephemera
Whether spanning acres or encased in amorphous glass ecospheres, Paula Hayes's singular landscapes blur the boundary between art and nature—and redefine the relationship between art and beholder.
Village Green
This place was a filthy dump when we bought it,” says Cathryn Barmon, sipping tea in a knockoff Le Corbusier chair. “I didn’t want to go barefoot until we’d redone the floors. Mark knew it was a good thing, but I thought it was horrible, sad, and depressing. I couldn’t believe we’d put all our hard-earned savings into this.”
Universal Appeal
When David Carmel decided to propose to Kirsten Axelsen, he was at home in Manhattan and she was in Ethiopia, working to eliminate trachoma (the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness). No problem: David flew 7,000 miles to pop the question at a restaurant in Addis Ababa. A year and a trip to the altar later, the Carmels now live in a Chelsea apartment that’s designed in part to make it easy for David to get around in a wheelchair; a diving accident eight years ago left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Raising the Barn
Architect Preston Scott Cohen resurrected an early 1800s barn as a vacation home for a literary couple and their family, calling to mind both the agrarian spaciousness of the structure’s former life and the vernacular of its new function as a house. Transcending both, Cohen created a piece of architecture that is at once porous and opaque, familiar yet otherworldly.
Mies van der Rohe, Lafayette Park
High-rise superblocks and identical clusters of row houses set apart from the urban grid have been much maligned as some of the major wrongdoings of modernism, but Detroit's Lafayette Park—the first urban-renewal project in the United States—tells a vastly different story. Within a sprawling, decentralized city that has suffered near-disastrous decline, this racially and economically diverse enclave just northeast of downtown has not only aged gracefully but today flourishes with new life.
