Port

FUGLY

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani spends $2 billion on this.

Sheppard’s Cottage

Glen Quaich by Angus Clyne

Friday FUGLY

1960's bureaucratic modernism

Friday Fugly

is back... with a photographic proof that some people should never be allowed to to design anything except maybe bowling shoes.

Architectural crime - Exhibit A

Gothic Revival, Bath, England

Hugh Comstock's Cottages By The Sea

If you ever get the chance to see these cottages, do it. Hugh Comstock built the first for his wife's doll collection to use as a showroom circa 1900. Then others in the village asked him to build for them. He wasn't an architect nor a builder. He just had a vision and a whole lot of fun. Most of the cottages are about 300 square feet of interior space while some are a bit larger, but they became the heart of the artist's colony there in Carmel by the Sea.

Paul/Penrose House c.1749, Warrington Township, Pa

Lost to a shopping mall

Circa 1627 Post-Tudor Stone House Offered In Wallasey, England

Up for auction on November 23rd in the U.K. is this incredible, post-Tudor, sandstone block property, which is “reputed to be one of the oldest houses in Wirral,” dating to the year 1627.  Yeah . . . that’s just 7 years after the pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

The house – creatively dubbed “The Old House” — is located on Limekiln Lane in Wallasey, in northwest England (see map, above).  Wallasey is a town within the Borough of Wirral – west of the large city of Liverpool on the Irish Sea.

Prevost House

The Prevost House was originally constructed in 1877 for Nick Prevost, an Anderson businessman. It is significant for its architectural design. The house was constructed in the Renaissance Revival style along the lines of the German Pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Prevost and his wife visited the Exhibition and were impressed by the Pavilion designed by H.J. Schwarzmann. The house is a one-story, frame residence on a high brick foundation. The building has a central, rectangular block with flanking wings to the east and west. In its original configuration, the façade was characterized by a central, three-bay, arcaded portico based on Renaissance precedents, with engaged Tuscan colonettes in the piers, semicircular arches with pronounced keystones and a bracketed cornice. The central block of the house has a low-hipped roof sheathed in standing seam metal. Simulated quoins define the corners of the block. Each of the wings has a lower roofline, consistent with the portico’s cornice. Single stuccoed brick chimneys with octagonal caps rise within each wing. The details of the façade were originally defined by contrasting paint. The house has undergone several significant alterations since its construction. The original outbuildings have been destroyed. Listed in the National Register July 10, 1984. The Nick Prevost House is no longer extant. Removed from the National Register December 8, 2005.

An Architectural Crime Against Nature

"Bunker" cottage in the woods. An award winner.











All that's missing are the blast doors.
.

Another award winner from the 1940s.

Fugly Bonus

Funeral home? Bad bank building? Mistake? It is a block long private home in Brooklyn. Obviously a Palladio design, but unfortunately not Andrea. It must have been his cousin Leroy Palladio.

Fugly Tuesday

Metropolitan Cathedral; Liverpool, England, consecrated in 1967

1663 Cape Cod Style House

A stone house was built first, by Pieter Bronck, of the family for whom the Bronx was named, who bought the property from native Americans. That was expanded soon after, and, in 1738 a larger brick house that was connected by a doorway was built by his grandson. The house is reputed to be the location where theCoxsackie Declaration of Independence was signed, more than a year before the Continental Congress signing in 1776.


House site HERE




.

Great Gatsby Mansion Is Being Torn Down

'Gatsby' place joins doomed mansions list
Lands End, the 25-room Colonial Revival mansion that local lore says was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's home in "The Great Gatsby" faces demolition this month.


In the 1920s and '30s, Winston Churchill, the Marx Brothers andEthel Barrymore attended parties there. Fitzgerald was perched on the back deck, drinking in the view. Rooms featured marble, parquet and wide wood-planked floors, Palladian windows and hand-painted wallpaper.


Now, the front door is off its hinges, wood floors have been torn up for salvage, windows are missing and the two-story Doric columns are unsteady.


Sands Point Village in January approved plans to raze the house and divide the site into lots for five custom homes starting at $10 million each.


Lands End is the latest Gold Coast estate to fall. With each demolition, the North Shore loses more of its gilded past, when sea breezes and social events attracted the rich and famous. Historians say hundreds of the mansions have been lost in the past 50 years as owners faced increasing taxes and high maintenance costs.
"The cost to renovate these things is just so overwhelming that people aren't interested in it," said Clifford Fetner, president of Jaco Builders in Hauppauge and Lands End project construction manager. "The value of the property is the land."

Residential Architecture

I typed in "architectural residence" for images and below are the results. They were what I expected. I prefer more comforting environments, but I have spent a great deal of time in modern homes. Some have been stunning while some have just been cold. I found none of them warm.

The house I currently live in started as a one room structure that is now the living room. A half story second floor was then utilized with the addition of a steep staircase when needed and then other rooms. With the addition of the other rooms the owner at the time styled the structure into a simple rural gothic with arched windows in front, steep roof lines and gables. Later still one owner enclosed a two story rear porch for rooms, but forgot about a proper foundation and later still another owner enclosed an ill advised front porch into another room with no foundation at all.

The house has character. The faults are being fixed and the character retained.

Restoration



Before



Works of  reconstruction in the center of  Bordeaux – France / 1978-1992



After



American Carpenter Gothic Residence

Front and side of the Aaron Ferrey House, located at 5058 Sunnybrook Rd.
in far southern Kent, Ohio, United States. Built in 1866,
it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bourton-on-the-Water

At Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire, a Mr Morris, landlord of the Old New Inn, began in 1936 to build a model village on some rough land behind the inn. Three years later, he and his six helpers, had managed to complete a miniature version of Bourton village in Cotswold stone at a ninth scale - right down to a model of the model village itself.

Machu Picchu Stone

Stonework: The Incas utilized existing boulders which they carved and incorporated rocks cut into intricate shapes to fill and for support.