Juan Ramon

Mid century modern is such an ambiguous term. It includes architecture, furniture, and graphic design from the middle of the 20th century. Many of my favorite architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Aldo van Eyck, Jorn Utzon, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, Bertrand Goldberg, Louis Kahn, Oscar Niemeyer Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Richard Neutra could be considered MCM architects, for me they are all Modernists.

Lately though some people seem to use the term exclusively for residential and furniture design from the decade after WWII, almost like if the California residential architecture of Neutra was the poster child of the movement. 

Here are a couple of my favorite projects from that era:

National Congress Oscar Niemeyer

Salk Institute Louis Kahn 

The Farnsworth House Mies van der Rohe

About a month ago I prepared feature posts for some of my favorite female architects. You can see them following the links:

Kazuyo Sejima SANAA 

Julia Morgan 

Allison Williams AECOM

Tatiana Bilbao Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO

Charlotte Skene Catling Skene Catling de la Peña

Di Zhang waa (we architech anonymous)

Zaha Hadid Zaha Hadid Architects

María Victoria Besonías BAK arquitectos + Besonías Almeida Arquitectos

Images of Earth from Space

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) is an imaging instrument onboard Terra, the flagship satellite of NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) launched in December 1999. Beginning April 1st 2016, all Earth imagery from a prolific Japanese remote sensing instrument operating aboard NASA’s Terra spacecraft since late 1999 is now available to users everywhere at no cost.

Images from the top:

NYC

Baektu Mountain

Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah and Palm Deira

Paris

Venice

Washington DC 

Alluvial Fan Taklimakan Desert

Netherlands Dikes 

Angkor Wat

Anti-Atlas Mountains

The public will have unlimited access to the complete 16-plus-year database for Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument, which images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. ASTER’s database currently consists of more than 2.95 million individual scenes. The content ranges from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF-5 tornado and the devastating aftermath of flooding in Pakistan, to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and wildfires in California.