Three adventures in modern architecture
The mage of the Midwest Renowned for his modernist designs echoing natural forms, Frank Lloyd Wright is widely regarded as the greatest ever American architect. This year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth – making this a fine time to visit Wisconsin, his home state, where you’ll find several of his best buildings, says Jonathan Lorie in The Daily Telegraph. Start in Chicago, just over the border in Illinois, which is home to no fewer than 29 early Wrights in the “elegant” suburb of Oak Park, including a house he built for his family in 1889. With open-plan living rooms, wraparound windows, and geometric furniture, it is “astonishing” in its anticipation of 20th century style. Then head to Racine, in Wisconsin, to admire the Johnson Wax company building: it is like a cathedral, with 50 tapering columns supporting a vast glass ceiling. There are other gems in Madison, Milwaukee and elsewhere – but most “wondrous” is Taliesin, the “house on the prairie” Wright built for himself in later life, “a maze of dreamy rooms with wide windows looking onto woods and the Wisconsin River”.
See www.travelwisconsin.com for details of the Wisconsin Frank Lloyd Wright Trail.
Lingering in Normandy’s phoenix city Flattened by Allied bombing in the Second World War, the French port city of Le Havre – celebrating its 500th anniversary this year – was entirely rebuilt over the next two decades according to the “meticulous” modernist vision of Auguste Perret, tutor to Le Corbusier. The result is often dismissed as too “Soviet bloc” by British tourists debouching from ferries en route to more bucolic parts of Normandy. But look closer and you’ll see proof here that “concrete can be beautiful”, says Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. Perret treated the material with the care usually given to fine timber panelling, creating tactile surfaces that range “from gnarled rock face to lustrous velvet”. His whole 320-acre plan is “serene” and “finely proportioned” – albeit with such “uniform regularity” that it feels a bit “like an eery sci-fi film set”. Named as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2005, the city also has great restaurants and a fine modern art museum, Muma, home to the largest collection of impressionist paintings outside Paris. For information on Le Havre’s anniversary celebrations, see www.uneteauhavre2017.fr.
Sci-fi meets Shinto in Japan A fashionable ski resort and summer retreat of the Japanese imperial family, the little town of Karuizawa wouldn’t feel out of place in Switzerland, thanks to its “self-consciously Alpine aesthetic”, says Hanya Yanagihara in The New York Times. But lurking among its “snug peak-roofed cottages” are a dozen or so “spectacular avant-garde houses” that make a visit here well worth the hour-long train ride from Tokyo, at any time of year. Makoto Yamaguchi’s distressed-steel-and-glass Polygon House perches on a hill like “an abandoned space pod”. The Omizubata N House by Iida Archiship Studio has a “dramatically steepled” roof that “recalls an ancient Norse ship”. TNA’S Ring House, a miniature tower deep in the forest, is constructed of alternating layers of wood and glass: at night, when lit from within, it looks like “stacked slices of pure light”. All are “dazzling”, but also “rigorously humble” in the way they reflect their surroundings, embodying a sense of communion with the Earth – of which the cultural roots might be found in Shinto, the country’s ancient animist religion.
Cazenove+loyd (020-3603 4952, www.cazloyd. com) has a seven-day trip from £5,000, excluding flights.