A design by the architect Knud Lonberg-Holm: a circa 1925 gas station. CreditJoelle Jensen

The Danish-American architect Knud Lonberg-Holm, the first European to teach the Bauhaus curriculum in America, belonged to that white-hot, manifesto-propelled moment in the 1920s when de Stijl principles were being translated into three-dimensional space. A dozen of his limpid gouache renderings of Michigan houses, all masterly compositions of point, line and plane, show buildings broken into constituent walls, roofs, floors and columns. With a palette of photographic black, white and gray, accented in blues and reds, he created weightless abstractions; solids and voids intersect in optical puzzles. He brushed calligraphic proposals for the new streamlined building types of the Machine Age — gas and radio stations — with a fierce graphic energy. His radically angled photographs of America’s traffic jams, skyscrapers, fire escapes and power lines found their way into “Amerika,” the German architect Erich Mendelsohn’s photographic essay of American cityscapes. Letters from Theo van Doesburg, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe authenticate his position as a peer. Buckminster Fuller wanted to write a book about him.

With renderings, photos, letters, catalogs and even bubble diagrams, the show at Ubu Gallery is really an archive charting a questioning career that broadened the practice of architecture. An advocate of building the most with the least, Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972) wanted invisible architects to build an invisible architecture of lightweight environments without visible structure or machinery. A polymath, he migrated into the architecture of information and efficiency, proposing how graphics can structure knowledge and how time studies can promote efficiency....Continue Reading

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