White House Redux
Redesigning America’s most famous home for modern times is far and away the perfect architectural challenge for an election year, but it is especially so when that election year serves to recontextualize everything that our presidential office stands for. So, after 500 submissions were sent in from over 42 countries, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group appropriately decided to recap the monumental occasion by featuring the best entries. Ranging from biological protective organisms that serve as a shield for the house itself to concepts so amazingly abstract that one sentence can’t even get close to summing them up, the book serves as an awesome reinterpretation of a very simple, old, white house on a hill.
With almost 500 submissions from 42 countries around the world, White House Redux, a competition launched by Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group last January, became one of the most talked-about architecture competitions in 2008. The brief was simple: what would the residence of the most powerful individual in the world, the White House in Washington, D.C., look like if it were designed today?
Published to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of the competition’s results at Storefront for Art and Architecture, White House Redux – The Book contains a compendium of documentation related to the competition and an overview of the results. It includes essays by Joseph Grima (Storefront) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), a history of the existing White House and 123 selected projects as well as the four winning submissions. A jury assessed the submissions in the spectacular setting of the 45th floor of the World Trade Center Tower 7, a process documented in the book’s 30-page photoessay by Marty Hyers.
If you can’t see the video above, “click here”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohu3anmYu4 for Revenge of the Lawn video presentation.