Tag: Transformed

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Inside a Family-Friendly Chicago Home That Was Transformed Through Classic Architecture

Upon stepping off of the elevator and into the expansive Chicago condominium of inside designer Sasha Adler’s longtime clientele, company are transported to a gallery-like place where modern day artwork and exquisite antiques commingle. In the lobby, daring choices from the homeowners’ blue-chip collection—contemporary functions by Sean Scully, Rose Wiley, and Richard Prince—are at household between gilded light-weight fixtures and filigreed furniture. The herringbone wooden flooring, black-and-white checkered tile, and intricate molding suggest a prewar heritage solely by its style and design.

“It’s a brand new constructing,” Adler states of the job, which introduced a blank canvas. “They procured uncooked space, so we required to develop a feeling of architecture in the home and a perception of historical past.” The designer worked in concert with the spouse, whose parents’ history is in antiques. “She has a genuine appreciation and understanding for collecting home furnishings and artwork,” Adler states. The collector’s eye that the design and style and shopper share is apparent all over the home.

The outsized dwelling space with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows features tremendous sights of the Windy City. A place this grand might render cavernous or cold in the incorrect palms, but Adler achieves an inviting, complex really feel. “The rooms are substantial, but we actually needed to make heat, intimate spaces for this household to reside in,” she claims. Adler accomplishes this with classic and bespoke furnishings—a 17th-century console next to a 1970s espresso table and customized sofa, for illustration. “The thought was to build a official residing home infused with a modern day-working day sensibility.” The floorplan is dotted with a series of seating parts giving the overall flexibility and purpose that the clients’ family—including six small children underneath the age of 10—requires. “It’s not roped off. We designed it so that they could really use it,” Adler explains. It is simple to imagine the couple sipping cocktails on the double-sided daybed in front of the antique hearth or the little ones acquiring a Monopoly marathon at the card desk stationed beneath a vivid Basquiat.

The kitchen and adjoined breakfast room are another family hub. For construction and cabinetry, Adler collaborated with Chicago-based Northworks and O’Brien Harris, even though her crew positioned jewellery-like finishing touches, which includes the customized étagères and brass legs for the island. (Adler also worked with Suggestion Leading Builders on the property.) Off the kitchen area, Adler extra a butler’s pantry and a scullery that includes an arched ceiling protected in mosaic tile. An artist painted the scullery’s label onto the door’s classic glass. “These are all thoughts that I have stored in my guide of inspiration for so very long,” Adler states. “To have customers similarly psyched about them is a desire.”

An oak and glass framed archway demarcates the kitchen from the breakfast place, which seats 12. “After college, the young children get all around the table to do homework or lounge on the window seat to examine,” Adler shares. The cushioned bench is an idyllic place to tuck into a reserve, but it’s also exactly where the designer included secret storage—essential for staying away from muddle in these kinds of a hardworking nook.

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Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Statue Will Be Melted Down, Transformed Into New Art | Smart News

Construction crews transport a greenish bronze statue of Lee on horseback past a crowd of onlookers on a truck bed
Crews removed the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from its perch in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2021. Controversy over the statue’s fate sparked the violent “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
Photo by John McDonnell / The Washington Post / Getty Images

Last summer, Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd spurred communities across the globe to remove or dismantle the racist public art decorating their government halls, museums, parks and city squares. Many of these monuments were tucked away in storage facilities. Others, such as the American Museum of Natural History’s Theodore Roosevelt statue and the toppled bronze likeness of an enslaver in Bristol, England, found new homes in museums.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, lawmakers decided to transform one torn-down monument entirely, reports Teo Armus for the Washington Post. Instead of storing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, officials will melt down the 1,100-pound bronze monument into metal ingots—raw material that can then be used to create new art.

City council members approved the proposal unanimously on Tuesday morning, reports Ginny Bixby for the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Put forth by the local Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC), the plan was one of six considered by lawmakers during months of deliberation.

According to JSAAHC’s proposal, organizers plan to hold community listening sessions in barbershops, places of worship, schools and other businesses throughout Charlottesville. With community input, the “Swords Into Plowshares” team hopes to select an artist or artists to design a new public artwork by 2024.

The museum has already raised more than half of the $1.1 million required to bring its project to fruition and is continuing to fundraise online. Proceeds will be used to donate the transformed statue back to the city, where it will go on display by 2026.

JSAAHC executive director Andrea Douglas tells the Post that the project “will allow Charlottesville to contend with its racist past.”

She adds, “It really is about taking something that had been harmful and transforming it into something that is representative of the city’s values today.”

In a JSAAHC video describing the proposal, the director says, “I think this project offers a road map for communities who are also grappling with what to do with their statues.”

The statue of Lee on horseback has sat in storage since July, when it was removed from Market Street Park by city officials. The work was installed in 1924 as one of hundreds of similar statues commissioned by white authorities across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Particularly in the Jim Crow South, these Confederate monuments paid “homage to a slave-owning society and [served] as blunt assertions of dominance over” Black Americans, wrote Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler for Smithsonian magazine in 2018.

Controversy over the Charlottesville statue reignited in 2017, when it was became a “focal point” of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally, as Armus reported for the Washington Post in July.

Responding to calls for the statue’s removal, white supremacist groups organized a protest that quickly turned violent. A man drove his car through a crowd of counter-protesters during the two-day-long demonstrations, injuring dozens of people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Council members will likely reconvene on December 20 to decide the fates of two additional statues removed in July. One depicts Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, while the other portrays explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and Lemhi Shoshone interpreter Sacajawea, per the Daily Progress.

According to Monument Lab’s National Monuments Audit, a recent survey of more than 48,000 statues, plaques, parks and obelisks across the country, Lee is the sixth-most represented historical figure in the American commemorative landscape. As a general for the Confederacy, Lee led thousands to their deaths in a war waged in the name of preserving slavery. He personally enslaved multiple people and, as executor of his father-in-law’s estate, oversaw almost 200 enslaved people on three Virginia plantations.

Elsewhere in Virginia, authorities in the state capital of Richmond recently dismantled a separate equestrian statue of Lee. Standing 21 feet tall and weighing nearly 12 tons, the monument was the largest Confederate sculpture in the United States prior to its removal in September.

Historian Jalane Schmidt, director of the University of Virginia’s Memory Project, worked with JSAAHC to develop the proposal. Her organization develops public engagement around issues of public memory as they relate to the Charlottesville rally.

In the JSAAHC video, Schmidt notes that “Swords Into Plowshares” will offer locals the opportunity to heal from or reckon with the events of 2017 and beyond.

“Our community will confront white supremacy with creativity,” the scholar adds. “Beauty will heal the ugliness of the past.”

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Inside a Historic Marfa Home Transformed by AD100 Designers

Reflecting on Marfa in 1985, Donald Judd wrote: “The area of West Texas was fine, mostly high rangeland dropping to desert along the river, with mountains over the edge in every direction. There were few people and the land was undamaged.” Decades later, that spellbinding beauty and sense of exquisite isolation remain, albeit juxtaposed with the artist’s own legacy—the Judd Foundation (anchored by The Block, his former home) and the Chinati Foundation, the army base he transformed into a museum for contemporary art. Today’s Marfa is a contradiction: a tumbleweed town and an international pilgrimage site, where Judd’s visions of unified art and architecture reached their apotheosis.

Timber bookshelves in the style of Donald Judd line the library; custom-made sofa in a Pindler fabric.

Boston Functional Single Arm Library Light

By Chapman & Myers 

Bow Basket by Annemarie O’Sullivan

It was that heady mix that set two creative New Yorkers, both natives of the Lone Star State, on the long drive to this one-stoplight oasis. “If you’re from Texas and involved in the arts, then all roads lead to Marfa,” says one, whom we’ll refer to as Cowboy for the sake of this western adventure. As his other half—let’s call her Cowgirl—recounts, “The moment I saw the town, I felt connected. It’s intangible…the big sky, the light, the breeze. Marfa is not one thing; it’s many things.”

Their plans to buy land and build a contemporary glass box were scrapped when they visited a 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival house for sale. Designed by Henry Charles Trost, a celebrated El Paso architect who cut his teeth in the Chicago School, the home occupied a hilltop plot not far from the center of town, with spectacular views and an adjoining empty parcel. Judd had even owned it once upon a time. Says Cowgirl, “It just felt true and beautiful and right.”

Terraced plantings of Russian Sage descend from the entertainment pavilion to the pool.

Custom-made ebonized benches and Bonacina 1889 wicker chairs mingle on 
the loggia.

Quilted Kapok Mattress

By Tensira

To reimagine the property, they turned to architect Annabelle Selldorf, whom they knew from New York and through Chinati. She updated the Trost house (whose original details had already been stripped away by the prior owner) through a series of deft interventions to the floor plan. On the main level, clusters of small rooms were combined to create a vast living space, with multiple seating areas, and a spacious chef’s kitchen, where an enormous island can seat six comfortably. A tight, sculptural staircase now descends to the primary suite on the lower level, creating a sequence of compression and expansion. “You had to make the trip downstairs into something exciting,” notes Selldorf, whose hand can be felt most clearly on what had been vacant land, where she devised a side-by-side guest casita and a garage/gym, as well as an entertaining pavilion up on another hill. “The architectural vocabulary is a simple series of volumes that speak to one another but feel distinct from the old architecture,” she notes of the structures, clad in clay-colored stucco and aligned to create beautiful transitions.

A view of the historic home, designed in the 1920s by architect Henry Charles Trost.

The kitchen’s large island can accommodate six on counter stools; antique pendant.

Helado Ceramic Bowl

By Tina Vaia

Along the way, Selldorf connected the clients with landscape mastermind Madison Cox, whom they visited in Marrakech well before Cox made it to Marfa. That first trip to Morocco was an aha moment: Their eyes widened as Cox welcomed them to Villa Oasis, introducing them to the work of designer Bill Willis, and guided them to sites throughout the region, whose landscape, building materials, and sensibilities reminded them of West Texas. In no time, an enormous shipping container filled with pots, zellige, and furnishings of all kinds was on its way to Marfa, where Cox conceived a series of outdoor spaces that blend the local vernacular with Moroccan traditions. Terra-cotta tiles line porches, walkways, and exterior stairs. Terraced terrain, fragrant with sage, descends from the pavilion to the pool—part of a larger strategy to limit lawns for water conservation. And iron pergolas devised with Selldorf offer shade thanks to rush awnings that will one day be replaced by creeping vines.