Search Results

Norwegian architectural and furniture design partnership formed in 1922 by Gudolf Blakstad (b Gjerpen, 19 May 1893; d Oslo, 1986) and Herman Munthe-Kaas (b Christiania [now Oslo], 25 May 1890; d Oslo, 5 March 1970). Blakstad was awarded his diploma as an architect at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1916. He collaborated with Jens Dunker on the New Theatre, Oslo, from 1919 to 1929. After a preliminary training in Christiania, Munthe-Kaas finished his education at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1919.

From the beginning of their careers Blakstad and Munthe-Kaas played a leading role in Norwegian architecture. After studying in Italy in the early 1920s, they advocated Neo-classicism in architectural projects, furniture designs and writings. In 1922 they won the competition for the new Town Hall in Haugesund (1924–31), a major work of 20th-century Norwegian Neo-classicism. Above a powerfully rusticated basement, the long office wing with its regular fenestration contrasts with the higher City Council Hall, accentuated by pairs of monumental, free-standing columns. In general the effect is of robust strength and an exciting interplay of horizontals and verticals....

(b Linz, Oct 15, 1889; d Vienna, March 27, 1957).

Austrian architect, furniture designer and teacher. He trained first in Linz and from 1909 at the Technische Hochschule, Vienna, under the Neo-classicist Karl König (1841–1915). He completed a year in Josef Hoffmann’s studio at the Wagnerschule in 1913–14, and after World War I he returned to work with Hoffmann, rising to be his senior assistant and helping with the development of the Wiener Werkstätte. In 1926 he left to work in Clemens Holzmeister’s studio, teaching with him at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Active in the Österreichischer Werkbund during the 1920s and 1930s, Fellerer built two houses (1932) for the Werkbundsiedlung in Vienna. In 1934 he was appointed Director of the Kunstgewerbeschule and succeeded Hoffmann as head of its architectural section until he was dismissed by the Nazis in 1938. From 1934 he was also in private practice with Eugen Wörle (b 1909) and won a Grand Prix at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in ...

(b Venice, May 14, 1783; d Venice, May 8, 1852).

Italian architect, engineer and landscape designer. He was a prominent Neo-classical architect but was also a noted eclectic, much admired, for example, by Pietro Selvatico, and he introduced the taste for the romantic garden to Italy. He attended courses in architecture and figure drawing at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna (1789–9). This school, which was in the forefront of theatre design and technique, provided a stimulating and enlightened cultural environment; his teachers included Angelo Venturoli (1749–1821) and Francesco Tadolini (1723–1805). After obtaining his diploma in 1800, he moved to Padua, and in 1803 he entered the studio of Giovanni Valle, a mapmaker, where he became a qualified surveyor. He collaborated with the engineer Paolo Artico between 1804 and 1806 on defence works on the River Piave, and in 1807, with the architect Daniele Danieletti (1756–1822), he restored the old prison in Carrara Castle. The same year he was also appointed as an engineer in the Regio Corpo di Acque e Strade in the Brenta region. His works of this period included decorating the town hall (...

(b Paris, March 19, 1715; d St Petersburg, March 24, 1759).

French painter, furniture designer, architect and engraver. He studied with Jacques Dumont and won the Grand Prix de Peinture in 1739. He remained for eight years in Rome, where his architectural designs for the temporary centrepiece of the annual Chinea festival (1745, 1746 and 1747) are early examples of Neo-classicism, displaying a simple architectonic use of the orders that indicates his association with Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the circle of students of the Académie de France in Rome, who were highly influential in French architecture from the 1760s onwards. On his return to Paris in 1747, Le Lorrain enjoyed the patronage of the Comte de Caylus, for whom he executed engravings of ancient paintings and revived the technique of encaustic. Through de Caylus he obtained a commission from Count Carl Gustav Tessin to design quadratura representations of columns and niches for the dining-room walls of his country house at Åkerö, Sweden, in ...

(b Nancy, Sept 18, 1728; d Paris, July 9, 1794).

French architect, designer and engineer. He was a son of Simon Mique (d 1763), an architect and builder related to the Mieg family from Alsace. He studied in Paris under Jacques-François Blondel, and on his return to Lorraine he was appointed Architecte-Ingénieur to Stanislav Leszczyński, Grand Duke of Lorraine and former King of Poland, for whom Simon Mique had rebuilt a wing at the château of Lunéville. Richard Mique’s schemes in Nancy include the Porte St Stanislas and the Porte Ste Catherine (1761), built as Doric triumphal arches in the style of Blondel. On the death of Emmanuel Héré (1763) he was appointed Directeur Général des Bâtiments.

On the death of Stanislav I in 1766 and the reversion of Lorraine to France, Mique was called to Versailles by Maria Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanislav and queen of Louis XV, to design a convent and school for the Ursulines (now the Lycée Hoche). The layout comprises a courtyard flanked by visiting-rooms (...

(b Philadelphia, PA, 1788; d Nashville, TN, April 6, 1854).

American architect, engineer and painter. Among the first generation of native-born architects, he was an influential designer in the Greek Revival style. Over a period of almost 50 years he executed more than 70 commissions, many of them in Philadelphia. His last major building was the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, built from 1845.

Through his father, a master carpenter who had worked on Latrobe’s Bank of Pennsylvania, Strickland was apprenticed to Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1803, remaining in his office for about four years. During his apprenticeship he studied Latrobe’s folios of Greek antiquities, including James Stuart’s and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, 4 vols (1762–1816), as well as publications by the Society of Dilettanti. By 1807 he was in New York with his father, working as a painter of stage scenery. The following year he returned to Philadelphia, where he received his first major commission: a design for the city’s Masonic Hall (...