Before becoming a museum, the Asakura Museum of Sculpture was the home and creative sanctuary of Fumio Asakura, one of the fathers of modern Japanese sculpture. This was where art, family, and more than ten beloved cats shared space under one roof.

Asakura moved to the Yanaka area in 1907 after graduating from Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He expanded the property over the years, completing a major renovation in 1935 to open a sculpture school. As a professor at his alma mater, he mentored countless students while developing his realistic style and portrait sculptures that bridged Western techniques with Japanese sensibilities.

The building itself reflects his innovative vision. It combines a concrete Western-style studio with traditional Japanese wooden residential architecture. The ground level features a serene garden with a pond where Asakura kept koi fish, while his rooftop garden served as both an outdoor studio and meditative space.

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Three years after Asakura's death in 1964, the building became a museum in 1967. The living quarters remain preserved with original furniture. Located in Tokyo's Taito ward near Nippori Station, the museum houses many of his works, from intimate portrait busts to larger sculptures.

ASAKURA MUSEUM OF SCULPTURE

Alberto Giacometti is widely acknowledged as having made some of the most important contributions to Surrealist sculpture in the 1930s, later becoming influential for his elongated human figures that captured the essence of postwar existential thought.

In 1926, Giacometti moved into a tiny 23 square meter studio on Rue Hippolyte-Maindron near Montparnasse. He later recalled, the longer he stayed, the bigger the studio became. His brother Diego joined him in 1929, becoming his assistant and making the pedestals and metal structures for Alberto's plaster sculptures. The studio was so narrow that Giacometti sometimes would carry his works out to the street to judge their scale properly.

Fondation Giacometti

The space was chaotic and crowded with books, drawings, and plaster sculptures everywhere. He sketched directly on the walls and worked surrounded by paint-splattered surfaces, brushes, and ephemera. When he died in 1966 at age 64, the sculpture he had been working on that final day remained on his pedestal.

Annette Giacometti, who he had married in 1949, removed everything from the studio after his death, including tools, art supplies, sculptures, prints, photos, furniture, and the plaster walls he had scribbled on. The Institut Giacometti opened in 2018 in a former Art Deco mansion designed by Paul Follot, just one kilometer from the original studio. The meticulous reconstruction required extensive work, including verification and inventory, preventive conservation studies, and restoration. The result is an intimate recreation where only 40 visitors at a time can experience the studio of one of the 20th century's most influential sculptors.

ATELIER DE GIACOMETTI

Paul Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1840. His approach to form and color influenced generations of artists including Picasso and Matisse. Despite achieving recognition late in life, Cézanne remained devoted to his hometown and the surrounding Provençal landscape, particularly the iconic Mont Sainte-Victoire.

In 1901, Cézanne stumbled upon a hut and land for sale on the Lauves hill while painting outdoors. He fell in love with the site, which offered a unique panorama of the Sainte-Victoire mountain, and purchased the property along with 7,000 square meters of land planted with olive and fig trees.

According to his own plans, Cézanne had a studio built on the property. After ten months of work, he moved in September 1902. The studio was a place of silence and light. Writers who visited in 1905 noted that his studio was a big mess, with canvases piling up in every corner. The large north-facing window provided the natural light Cézanne preferred. Here, he created his final masterpieces including the Grandes Baigneuses.

Aix-en-Provence, ville de Cezanne

In October 1906, while painting outdoors during a storm, Cézanne collapsed and was brought back to his apartment in a laundry cart. He died on October 22, 1906 at age 67. His son sold the studio to Marcel Provence, who carefully preserved it until 1951, leaving it untouched just as the artist had left it.

In 1952, art historian John Rewald and writer James Lord established the Cézanne Memorial Committee and raised funds to purchase the property. The studio opened as a museum on July 8, 1954 and is now owned by the Aix Tourist Office. The studio preserves his easel, paint pots, work clothes, plaster casts, and the still life models he painted: bottles, pottery, paper flowers, and fabrics. Following major renovation for the Cezanne 2025 celebrations, visitors can now access the ground floor rooms including the kitchen, dining room, and living room.

Atelier des Lauves

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1903 and became one of Britain's most important modern sculptors. She studied at Leeds School of Art from 1920 to 1921 alongside Henry Moore, and both continued their studies in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. By the 1930s, she had become a leading figure in the international modern art movement.

Hepworth worked directly with her materials, carving straight into stone, wood, bronze, and clay rather than using the traditional method of creating models for craftsmen to reproduce. Her work explored form, movement, and abstraction, focusing on relationships between shapes and spaces. A transformative trip to France in 1933 connected her with the era's most influential artists, including Picasso, Brâncuși, Jean Arp, and Mondrian, whose studios she visited and whose work profoundly shaped her artistic vision.

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BARBARA HEPWORTH HOME & STUDIO

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson moved their young family to the seaside town of St Ives in Cornwall. In 1949, she purchased Trewyn Studio, and it became both her home and creative sanctuary for the next 26 years. She described finding it as magical, a place where she could finally work in open air and space. She designed the garden herself with help from composer friend Priaulx Rainier, carefully placing her bronze sculptures among the plants and trees. In 1960, she acquired additional space across the street at the Palais de Danse, a former cinema and dance hall, allowing her to create the large-scale bronzes that defined her later work.

The studios remain much as they were when she died in an accidental fire in 1975 at age 72. Her stone carving studio is still filled with tools, paint pots, half-finished sculptures, and personal items. Following her wish to establish her home and studio as a museum, the property was opened by her family in 1976 and given to the Tate Gallery in 1980. The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden now houses the largest collection of her works on permanent display, with over 30 sculptures in bronze, stone, and wood positioned throughout the garden just as she placed them. Her living room remains furnished as she left it, offering an intimate glimpse into how one of the few female artists of her generation to achieve international recognition lived and worked.

Black Mountain College was an experimental liberal arts school founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, Frederick Georgia, and Ralph Lounsbury after they were dismissed from Rollins College for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, the school was governed democratically by both students and teachers, believing that the arts are central to learning and that education should focus on the individual rather than the institution.

The college had no course requirements, official grades, accredited degrees, entry exams, or tuition. Students graduated when they felt ready, receiving hand-crafted diplomas. Everyone participated in the college's operations, including farming, construction, and kitchen duty. Classes could happen anywhere, even outdoors in the middle of the night. This radical approach attracted maverick spirits from around the world.

Many faculty members came from the Bauhaus, which the Nazis shut down in 1933. Josef Albers became the college's first art teacher, while his wife Anni Albers taught weaving and textile design. The school became legendary as an incubator for talent. Buckminster Fuller and students built the first large-scale geodesic dome here. Merce Cunningham formed his dance company at the college. John Cage staged his first musical happening on campus. In the 1950s, Charles Olson founded The Black Mountain Review and developed the Black Mountain poets movement with Robert Creeley.

Black Mountain College

A remarkable roster passed through these halls, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, Ruth Asawa, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, and Dorothea Rockburne. Their work would shape modern art, dance, music, and literature for decades to come.

The college closed in 1957 due to financial difficulties, with debts finally settled in 1962. The original campus at Lake Eden, about 20 minutes east of Asheville, is now privately owned. Two frescoes painted by Jean Charlot in 1944 remain intact on the site, and the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center offers walking tours of the historic campus buildings in partnership with Lake Eden Preserve.

Founded in 1993 by arts advocate Mary Holden, the museum opened in a 6,000 square foot space in downtown Asheville in 2018. It preserves and continues the college's legacy through rotating exhibitions, a research center, an oral history program, and public events like the annual ReVIEWING International Conference. The museum's collection includes over 3,000 pieces connected to Black Mountain College, from sculptures and paintings to photographs, ephemera, and primary source materials, all offered to visitors free of charge.

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

Ellsworth Kelly's Austin is a 2,715 square foot stone building with a 26 foot ceiling, colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture, and fourteen black and white marble panels. It is the only building the American artist ever designed, representing the culmination of his seven decade career exploring color, form, and light.

The concept began in 1986 when collector Douglas S. Cramer commissioned Kelly to design a chapel for his California vineyard. The project never materialized, but the idea stayed with Kelly for decades. In 2012, when gallerist Hiram Butler asked if Kelly would donate the design to an institution willing to build it, the 89 year old artist agreed. Butler and architect Rick Archer approached University of Texas, and Blanton Museum director Simone Wicha spearheaded the campaign to raise $23 million for construction and endowment.

Kelly gifted the design to the Blanton in January 2015 and named it Austin in honor of the city. Construction began in December 2015, just two months before his death at age 92. For the first time in his career, he worked with colored glass, testing countless samples at his studio. Each of the 33 windows is composed of three different colors of glass laminated together to achieve the exact shade he envisioned. The structure is clad with 1,569 limestone panels from Spain, while the entry door is crafted from a native Texas live oak tree.

NYTimes

Kelly, a lifelong atheist, created what he called a place of calm and light, stripping away explicit religious imagery while relating to the modernist tradition of artist designed structures like the Rothko Chapel and Matisse's chapel in Vence. The 18 foot tall redwood totem stands in the windowless wing, while the black Belgian marble and white Italian marble echo the Stations of the Cross in purely abstract form.

Austin opened to the public on February 18, 2018. Because its interior light constantly changes with the sun's intensity and angle, it is also a time based work, attuned to nature. Kelly hoped visitors would go there to rest their eyes and minds. It stands as his final masterpiece and his gift to a city that embraced his vision.

BLANTON MUSEUM

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Casa Azul, the Blue House, though she later claimed she was born in 1910, symbolically aligning her birth with the Mexican Revolution. The house is located in the Colonia del Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacán, then a village on the outskirts of Mexico City. It was built by her father Guillermo Kahlo in 1904 in a traditional style with thick cobalt blue walls and a central courtyard.

Kahlo's life was marked by physical suffering. At age six, she contracted polio, which left her right leg thinner and shorter. At eighteen, she was in a devastating bus accident that fractured her spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis. The injuries caused lifelong pain and required over 30 surgeries. During her long recovery, confined to bed, she returned to painting. Her mother had a special easel made so she could paint lying down, and a mirror was installed above the bed for self-portraits.

In 1929, Kahlo married the famous muralist Diego Rivera, who was 20 years her senior. They lived in various places but eventually returned to Casa Azul, which they extensively remodeled in the 1940s. Rivera added display cases throughout to showcase their pre-Columbian artifact collection. The couple lived a turbulent life together, marked by infidelities, affairs, divorce, and remarriage.

Museo Frida Kahlo

Kahlo spent her last thirteen years at Casa Azul. Her paintings from these years often depicted her physical and emotional pain through powerful, dreamlike imagery. She died in the house on July 13, 1954 at age 47, officially from a pulmonary embolism. Her ashes remain at Casa Azul in a pre-Columbian urn.

Four years after Kahlo's death, in 1958, Rivera directed that it be turned into a museum. The Frida Kahlo Museum opened to the public, and the collection is displayed in rooms that remain much as they were in the 1950s. Visitors can see her studio with her wheelchair and paints, the kitchen with its traditional tiles, and the bedroom where she died. Casa Azul has become one of Mexico City's most visited museums. Reservations should be made in advance.

CASA AZUL (THE BLUE HOUSE)

Oscar Niemeyer designed Casa das Canoas in 1951 as a family home for himself, his wife, and their daughter Ana Maria. Built on a hillside in São Conrado overlooking Guanabara Bay, the house exemplifies his signature style of curves, sensuality, and harmony with nature. It remains one of the most significant examples of modern Brazilian architecture.

The house was Niemeyer's third residence. He had built his first home in 1942 on a hillside facing Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, then adapted a rural structure near Mendes for weekend retreats in 1949. He used the uneven terrain to create a platform that extends beyond the structure's boundaries, supporting a pavilion containing the living areas, dining room, and kitchen on the upper level, with private bedrooms below.

The design showcases Niemeyer's genius for blending architecture with landscape. A large boulder from the hillside enters through the glass walls into the living room, serving as a sculptural element and anchoring the interior stairs that connect both floors. The curved flat roof, supported by steel columns, seems to float above transparent glass walls that dissolve the boundary between inside and outside. The pool wraps around another massive stone, while sculptures by his friend Alfredo Ceschiatti are placed throughout the property.

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Architectuul

Niemeyer and Ana Maria designed the interior together. The private spaces contrast with the open living areas, featuring small windows that offer views of the vegetation outside, creating intimacy within the larger openness.

The family lived here until 1965, when Niemeyer was forced to leave Brazil due to the military dictatorship. After moving to a flat in Ipanema, a devastating landslide damaged parts of the property. The house is now open to the public and maintained by the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation, offering visitors a permanent exhibition on the architect's work. Located at Estrada das Canoas 2310, it serves as headquarters for the foundation and stands as a testament to Niemeyer's philosophy that architecture should celebrate both human creativity and the natural world.

CASA DAS CANOAS

Luis Barragán was born in 1902 in Guadalajara to a wealthy family and grew up on a large ranch in rural Jalisco. After obtaining a degree in civil engineering in 1925, he spent two years in Europe, where he met Le Corbusier and encountered the modernist movement that would influence his work.

Built in 1948 in the Miguel Hidalgo district of Mexico City, Casa Luis Barragán served as both his residence and studio until his death in 1988. The concrete building reflects his philosophy of integrating modern and traditional Mexican elements into a new context. With the exception of the breakfast nook, the house is designed to not need artificial light during the day. Windows and openings are carefully placed to capture as much natural light as possible, filling the warm spaces with shifting patterns throughout the day.


Barragán's work is notable for its use of traditional materials, rich spaces, broad forms, and the use of bright, bold colors. His influence on Mexican architecture remains strong even decades after his death.

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Kriteria

The Modern House

In 1976, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major exhibition of his work, and in 1980, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor in architecture. In 2004, Casa Luis Barragán became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the only individual property in Latin America to receive this distinction. UNESCO recognized it as a masterpiece in the development of the modern movement that merges traditional and vernacular elements with diverse philosophical and artistic currents.

In 1993, the government of the state of Jalisco and the Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán Foundation acquired the house, converting it into a museum in 1994. The house is faithfully kept just as it was when Barragán lived there, with original furniture and his personal objects. His art collection spans the 16th to 20th centuries and includes works by Picasso, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Jesús Reyes Ferreira, and Miguel Covarrubias. The museum maintains a library of about 3,000 publications, personal papers, and photographs. Tours are available by appointment only, and the house remains one of the most visited sites in Mexico City.

CASA LUIS BARRAGÁN

Chaim Gross was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains. After fleeing the turmoil of World War I and being deported from Hungary, he immigrated to New York City in 1921 as a teenager. He studied at the Educational Alliance Art School on the Lower East Side and at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he worked with sculptors including Elie Nadelman and Robert Laurent.

Gross became a prominent modern American sculptor working in New York from 1921 until his death in 1991. He worked predominantly in wood, stone, and eventually bronze, and is known for his carvings of circus performers, dancers, and intimate mother and child pairings in a style that combined Modernist, African, and folk forms. His work was featured in major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian, and in 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Over the course of his life, Gross created and collected hundreds of works of art. For years, he struggled financially and moved frequently between studios and apartments. In 1963, Gross and his wife Renee finally purchased a four-story historic townhouse at 526 LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village, transforming the industrial space into a Modernist home with a ground floor sculpture studio. They filled the house with their extensive art collection, including important American paintings by Marsden Hartley, Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery, and Jacob Lawrence, as well as African, European, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art displayed throughout the living spaces.

RC Gross Foundation

Gross's first floor studio is preserved with its wood floor, skylight, and over fifty of his major sculptures. Unfinished works still sit on pedestals alongside his tools and workspace exactly as he left them. After Gross died in 1991, his wife Renee worked to open the Foundation to the public, which she did in 1994 with a memorial exhibition of his work.


The Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation now offers tours exploring three floors of the historic building. The first floor features his studio and gallery, the second floor hosts rotating exhibitions, and the third floor houses their living and dining spaces with hundreds of works from their private collection, all installed as they were when the Grosses lived there.

CHAIM GROSS HOME & STUDIO

The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, also known as the Matisse Chapel, was built and decorated between 1947 and 1951 by Henri Matisse for the Dominican Sisters. It was his final project and what he considered his masterpiece.

The story began in 1942 when Matisse, seriously ill after surgery for cancer, was cared for by a young nursing student named Monique Bourgeois. She became his friend and model, and when she joined the Dominican Sisters in 1944, taking the name Sister Jacques-Marie, their friendship continued. In 1946, she told Matisse about the chapel the nuns wanted to build in Vence, and he agreed to take on the project. At 77 years old, he began what would become a four year obsession.


Father Marie-Alain Couturier and Brother Louis-Bertrand Rayssiguier, both passionate about modern art's place in religious spaces, persuaded Matisse not just to decorate but to design the entire chapel. Working with architect Auguste Perret and master glazier Paul Bony, Matisse conceived every detail from the architecture to the stained glass windows, the interior murals, the furnishings, the bronze crucifix, and even the priest's colorful vestments.

Chapelle Matisse

Despite his limited mobility and illness, Matisse worked intensely from his studio, often from bed or a wheelchair. He used a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm to draw on construction paper placed on his walls, creating life-sized designs that were then transferred to tiles by skilled craftsmen. The three large murals painted in black lines on white ceramic tiles evoke Saint Dominic, the Virgin and Child, and the Way of the Cross.

The stained glass windows use only three colors: an yellow for the sun, a green for vegetation and cactus forms, and a blue for the Mediterranean Sea and sky. These windows flood the otherwise all white interior with colored light that constantly changes with the sun's intensity and angle, creating what Matisse called a space of calm and light. The colored reflections animate the white walls and black ceramic murals throughout the day.

The chapel was inaugurated and consecrated on June 25, 1951, though Matisse was too weakened by illness to attend. He died three years later at age 84, immensely proud of what he had achieved. The chapel was classified as a French Monument Historique in 1965 and received the label Patrimoine du XXe siècle in 2001. It remains a working chapel for the Dominican Sisters who continue to welcome visitors.

CHAPELLE DE ROSEAIRE DE VENCE

The Eames House, also known as Case Study House No. 8, is a landmark of mid-20th century modern architecture located in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was designed and constructed in 1949 by husband and wife design pioneers Charles and Ray Eames to serve as their home and studio, and they lived there for the rest of their lives.

The house was commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine as part of its Case Study House program, an influential series of experimental houses in California that challenged architects to design progressive yet modest homes in the post-war era. The idea was to showcase inspirational houses that could be both affordable and easily available through industrial methods of production and off the shelf materials.


Charles and Ray first sketched the design with architect Eero Saarinen in 1945 as a raised steel and glass box extending over the front yard. However, by the time materials arrived three years later after wartime shortages, much time had been spent exploring the 1.4 acre wooded site. After intense collaboration, Charles and Ray radically redesigned the scheme to sit more quietly in the landscape and preserve the meadow. The new design tucked both a residence building and a studio building into the slope with an eight foot tall concrete retaining wall, separated by a courtyard. Remarkably, this complete rethinking required only one additional beam.

Eames Foundation

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Design Curial

The 17 foot tall facade features a geometric composition of brightly colored panels between black steel columns and braces, with a gold-leaf panel marking the entry door. An existing row of eucalyptus trees was preserved along the exposed wall. Inside, the Eameses filled the space with their eclectic collection including Isamu Noguchi lamps, Japanese kokeshi dolls, Chinese lacquered pillows, Native American baskets, folk art, and found objects from their travels.

Charles and Ray moved into the home on Christmas Eve 1949 and never moved out. Charles died there in 1978 and Ray in 1988. The residence is presented as it was at the time of Ray's death, with all their original collections and furnishings intact. In 2004, Charles's daughter Lucia Eames established the non-profit Eames Foundation to preserve and share the house. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Of the twenty-five Case Study Houses built, the Eames House is considered the most successful both as an architectural statement and as a comfortable, functional living space. The Foundation now offers exterior and interior tours by reservation, and in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute, has developed a Conservation Management Plan to preserve the structure, landscape, and spirit of Charles and Ray's life and work for 250 years into the future.

CHARLES & RAY EAMES

Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer, and is considered a pioneer of modernism. Brâncuși was born in Romania in 1876 and arrived in Paris in 1904, where he found a community of artists and intellectuals. He was invited to work for Auguste Rodin, but allegedly stated that nothing can grow under big trees, choosing instead to forge his own path.

From 1916 until his death in 1957, Brâncuși worked at 8 and then 11 Impasse Ronsin in Paris's 15th arrondissement. He eventually expanded to multiple adjacent spaces, knocking down walls to create interconnected rooms where he exhibited his work. His sculptures are made mainly from materials such as metal, plaster, stone, and wood, and he left the original material intact so you could see its connection to natural origins.

For Brâncuși, the relationship between sculptures and the space they occupied was crucial. In the 1920s, the studio itself became an exhibition space and a work of art in its own right, a body of interconnected cells that all generated each other. He would revise the positions of his works almost daily, constantly seeking the most harmonious relationships between them. The studio became his preferred place for presenting his art, and the whole space functioned as a unity.

Centre Pompidou

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Magnus Photos

Towards the end of his life, Brâncuși stopped creating new sculptures and concentrated entirely on perfecting the relationships within the studio space. This became so important that he avoided exhibiting, and when he sold a piece, he would replace it with a plaster replica to preserve the unity of the group. The pedestals were not assigned to specific sculptures but moved from one to another depending on the relationships he was exploring.

When Brâncuși died on March 16, 1957 at age 81, he bequeathed his entire studio to the French state on one condition: that his workshop be rebuilt exactly as it was on the day he died. After an initial partial reconstruction in 1962 at the Palais de Tokyo and a second in 1977 opposite the Centre Pompidou, flooding in 1990 forced it to close. The present reconstruction, built by architect Renzo Piano, opened in 1997 in a museum space on the piazza adjacent to the Centre Pompidou.


The collection contains 137 sculptures, 87 original pedestals, 41 drawings, 2 paintings, and over 1,600 glass photographic plates and original prints, along with his furniture, tools, and personal belongings. Piano's challenge was making the space open to the public while respecting Brâncuși's wishes. He preserved the idea of a protected, interiorized space through an enclosed garden, from which part of the studio can be seen through glass walls. It remains a gem in the museum's collection and offers visitors an intimate glimpse into how one of the 20th century's most important sculptors lived and worked.

CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUŞI STUDIO

The Cranbrook Academy of Art was founded in 1932 by Detroit newspaper magnate George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth as an experiment in art education. The Booths had purchased the land in 1904, spending the first years landscaping the property and building their family home. After visiting the American Academy in Rome in the early 1920s, they were inspired by its master-apprentice model and began envisioning a similar school at Cranbrook, their 260 acre estate in Bloomfield Hills, about 20 miles north of Detroit.

In 1923, Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen immigrated to the United States with his family after winning second place in the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition. The Booths engaged him as chief architect for the campus, and he ultimately designed nearly every building, including the Academy of Art and its museum and library, which he completed in 1942 as his last major project on campus. Saarinen also served as the Academy's first president from 1932 to 1946 and head of its architecture department until 1950.

The Academy's educational philosophy centered on self-education under good leadership rather than formal classes or requirements. Saarinen described it as not an art school in the ordinary meaning, but a working place for creative art where contact with other artists and discussions provided sources for inspiration. Students were encouraged to envision, create, and understand all aspects of design, from architecture to furniture to metalworking, and to engage freely in experimentation. This openness was shifted slightly in 1942 when Michigan chartered the Academy as an institution with the privilege of granting degrees.

Cranbrook Art

The academy attracted master artists-in-residence who maintained studios at Cranbrook. Saarinen's wife Loja founded and directed the Department of Weaving and Textile Design from 1929 to 1942. Swedish sculptor Carl Milles served as artist-in-residence in the sculpture department from 1931 to 1953. The roster of students and faculty reads like a who's who of American modernism, including Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia, Jack Lenor Larsen, and Eero Saarinen, Eliel's son.

Cranbrook had a particularly large impact on American modernism from 1937 to 1941, earning it nicknames like America's Bauhaus and the Cradle of American Modernism. The connection to the actual Bauhaus was direct: many faculty members, including Josef and Anni Albers, came from the German school after the Nazis shut it down in 1933.

The Cranbrook Art Museum, designed by Eliel Saarinen and completed in 1942, remains the physical center of the Cranbrook Educational Community. The 319 acre campus is now a National Historic Landmark and includes not only the Academy and museum but also a contemporary science museum and a college-preparatory school.

CRANBROOK ART MUSEUM

Cy Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928. Twombly was a sensitive soul who showed great promise in art from an early age. After studying at Black Mountain College, he made his first trip to Europe with fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1952.

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome and made it his primary city, where he met Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti. They married in 1959 and bought a palazzo on Via di Monserrato in Rome. In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta, who became his longtime companion and assistant for nearly half a century until the artist's death in 2011.

In the late 1970s, Del Roscio brought Twombly to Gaeta, an ancient coastal town between Rome and Naples overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The landscape, with its green grasses, fishing boats, and sunsets, captivated Twombly. Gaeta's rich history, with connections to figures like Hadrian and Cicero, resonated with his fascination for antiquity.

In the early 1990s, Twombly bought a centuries old house on a hillside in Gaeta. The property spans six acres with a garden boasting a collection of 142 palm species from around the globe. The main house dates from around 1000 AD and features 18th century frescoes thought to be by artist Sebastiano Conca.

The New York Times

Gaeta became Twombly's main base in Italy and where he painted most of his late works, including the series Quattro Stagioni (Four Seasons) and the Bacchus series. He also rented a warehouse studio in nearby Itri, where he created the Green Paintings between 2002 and 2003.

In his last interview, Twombly stated he was "a Mediterranean painter." Twombly died in Rome on July 5, 2011 at age 83. The Gaeta property remains under the stewardship of the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, which preserves Twombly's legacy.

CY TWOMBLY'S STUDIO

Eileen Gray was born in 1878 in Ireland and became one of the most important designers and architects of the modern movement, though her contributions were long overlooked. She moved to Paris in 1902 and established herself as a successful Art Deco furniture designer and interior decorator before turning to architecture at age 48.

In 1926, Gray purchased a plot on the Côte d'Azur in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin with a beautiful view over the Bay of Monaco. She designed and built the villa with her lover Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect and editor of L'Architecture Vivante. The house was completed in 1929 when Gray was 51. The name E-1027 is a code of their intertwined initials: E for Eileen, 10 for J (the 10th letter), 2 for B, and 7 for G.

The modernist villa is a white concrete structure with a flat roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. L-shaped and compact, it features a spiral staircase linking the spaces and leading to a rooftop garden with sunbathing area. Gray spent three years designing not just the architecture but every piece of furniture and lighting, creating a total work of art. Her innovative designs included the iconic Non Conformist chair, a dining table with built-in electric light, and a foldable corridor table that transforms into a bar.

The house has a clinical white exterior but is unexpectedly dim inside, with dark blue and black in the most intimate corners. Gray once wrote that a house is not a machine to live in but the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation, a direct critique of Le Corbusier's famous phrase.

Arch Eyes

Badovici, visited the house several times. In 1938 and 1939, while staying as a guest, he painted bright murals on the plain white walls, sometimes painting in the nude. This infuriated Gray, who considered the murals outright vandalism. Le Corbusier later bought property just east of E-1027 and built his Cabanon, where he would swim daily. He died swimming at the beach below E-1027 in 1965 at age 77.

Gray was so slow to put her name forward as architect that for many years E-1027 was mistakenly attributed to Le Corbusier. The house endured Nazi occupation, neglect, and even a murder of one owner within its walls. After falling into severe disrepair, the house was acquired in 1999 by the Conservatoire du Littoral. A lengthy restoration began in 2015, and E-1027 finally reopened to the public in July 2021, restored to its 1929 state. Gray died in 1978 at age 99, finally receiving recognition late in life as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.

EILEEN GRAY E-1027

American architect John Lautner, a former apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, completed the Elrod House in 1968 for interior designer Arthur Elrod, who furnished the home himself. Lautner was the son of parents interested in design and had helped his father build a cabin on Lake Superior when he was just 12 years old, an experience that sparked his lifelong interest in reflecting nature in architecture.

The modernist building sits on a hilltop in Palm Springs' Southridge neighborhood, overlooking the Coachella Valley with views of Mount San Jacinto and Mount San Gorgonio. The house is centered around a dramatic circular living room measuring 60 feet in diameter, covered by a concrete sunburst canopy with sections cut out for skylights that provide indirect light throughout the day. Curved concrete walls protect the house from the intense desert sun, while the dome seems to float above the space.

When Lautner saw rocks exposed during grading, he directed the contractor to dig 10 feet deeper, uncovering massive boulders that became an integral part of the interior design. These rocks run straight through the walls and windows, bringing the outside inside as Lautner intended. When the house was built, the soil was excavated but the rocks were kept in place, creating a seamless integration between architecture and landscape.

Dezeen

Just off the living room is a indoor-outdoor pool and terrace. Lautner had initially installed glass panes in the living room, but after they were broken by a sandstorm, he replaced them with 25 foot wide glass curtain walls that open the living room to the outside with the touch of a button. The 8,900 square foot residence holds five bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms, with a spiral staircase leading to a guesthouse and gym.

The Elrod House's most notable appearance was in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, where Sean Connery's 007 is thrown into the pool by bikini-clad bodyguards Bambi and Thumper.

Although critics were initially unsure about the exceptional design, contemporary architects now consider it one of Lautner's most important works. Fashion designer Jeremy Scott purchased the house in 2016 for $7.7 million and has overseen its restoration. The house is occasionally open to tour during Palm Springs' annual Modernism Week, offering visitors the chance to experience this architectural gem.

ELROD HOUSE

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, about 30 miles north of Manhattan. He would become known for his paintings that capture the loneliness and isolation of modern American life with his signature use of light and atmospheres.

The Edward Hopper House is a two story Greek Revival style dwelling built in 1858 by Hopper's maternal grandfather, John Smith. This was where Hopper was born and spent the first 26 years of his life. As a child, Hopper displayed a talent for drawing early on, creating hundreds of drawings that demonstrated he was already a keen observer of people, places, and activities in his hometown.

After graduating from Nyack High School in 1899, Hopper commuted to New York City to study illustration and then fine art with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. He made the first of three trips to Europe in 1906. In 1908, at age 26, he moved from the family home to New York City to pursue his career full time. However, the house remained the Hopper family's primary residence until the death of his sister Marion in 1965.

Edward Hopper House

Hopper was frequently inspired by two locations: downtown New York, where he lived and worked in the same apartment on Washington Square from 1913 until his death, and Cape Cod, where beginning in 1934, he and his artist wife Josephine Nivison maintained a second home and studio.

After Hopper's death in 1967, leaving all his works to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the house in Nyack was at risk. In 1971, a group of local citizens established the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation to save the birthplace. The house opened as the Edward Hopper House Art Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

Today, the museum features early Hopper works, memorabilia including model boats he built, his self-portrait, personal bicycle, and family photographs. The ground floor serves as a gallery space with rotating exhibitions.

Edward Hopper House Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator who designed over 1,100 buildings in his life. When he was hired as Fallingwater's architect in late 1934, he was 67 years old and had designed only two buildings in six years. His career desperately needed reviving.

Wright designed Fallingwater in 1935 as a private residence for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., a Pittsburgh department store owner, and his family. The Kaufmanns had purchased land at Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania as a weekend retreat, and they expected Wright to design a building across from the waterfalls where they could be enjoyed from afar. Instead, Wright placed the residence directly over the waterfall itself, allowing the family to not only view nature but actually live in its midst. By situating the house this way, the Kaufmanns would always hear the movement of water and be aware of the waterfall's presence.

Built partly over a waterfall on the Bear Run stream, the three-story house exemplifies Wright's philosophy of organic architecture, which sought to integrate humans, architecture, and nature so that each would be improved by the relationship. Construction began in 1936 using local craftsmen and laborers, with materials excavated directly from the Kaufmann's land. The house was mainly complete in 1937, with the family moving in that fall. Wright added a guest house in 1939 to accommodate the Kaufmanns' curious visitors after the house quickly gained fame when Time magazine featured Wright and a drawing of the building on its January 17, 1938 cover.

Fallingwater

The Kaufmanns quickly noticed that the main terrace was beginning to sag, later recognized as the result of Wright's refusal to use additional steel despite his contractor's suggestions. The terrace was repaired decades later by adding steel cables. After Edgar Sr. and his wife died in the 1950s, their son Edgar Jr., acting on his father's wishes, entrusted the building and 469 acres of nearby land to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963.

Fallingwater opened to the public as a museum in 1964 with the Kaufmanns' thoughtfully selected furniture and curated art collection intact. Since then, it has welcomed over five million visitors from around the world. The conservancy continues to maintain the building, welcoming about 150,000 visitors per year. In 2019, Fallingwater was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with seven other Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

FALLINGWATER

The Edith Farnsworth House, designed and built between 1946 and 1951 by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is recognized as a masterpiece of the International Style of architecture and has National Historic Landmark status. The single-story glass and steel house was Mies's first residential commission in America.

Dr. Edith Farnsworth was a wealthy and accomplished nephrologist from Chicago who had graduated from Northwestern University's School of Medicine in 1938, one of four women in her class. She was also an accomplished violinist, poet, and conversant in multiple languages. In 1945, she commissioned Mies, then head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, to design a weekend retreat near Plano, Illinois, about 58 miles southwest of Chicago. She gave the architect a free hand and a generous budget to create a significant modern home.

The 1,500 square foot house is located on a wooded property along the Fox River. Mies had been refining his designs for decades before this commission, and the glass pavilion takes full advantage of relating to its natural surroundings, achieving his concept of a strong relationship between the house and nature. The house consists of two horizontal slabs, roof and floor, supported by eight white-painted steel columns, creating the impression that the building floats above the ground. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, with the interior as a single open space subtly divided into functional areas.

Farnsworth House

Architectural Digest

The significance of the house was recognized even before it was built. In 1947, a model was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where curator Philip Johnson noted that the Farnsworth House, with its continuous glass walls, went further than previous designs in expressing the floating volume.

Construction began in 1950 with Mies as general contractor, meticulously controlling every detail. However, the collaboration did not end well. Before the house was even finished, Mies and Farnsworth had fallen out over escalating construction costs, which ultimately reached $74,000, a significant overrun. Farnsworth sued, but Mies won in court and eventually received a small settlement. Despite the dispute, Farnsworth continued to live in her house until selling it in the early 1970s.

British art collector Lord Peter Palumbo purchased the house in 1972 and opened it to limited public tours. In 2003, he put the house up for auction, and fears that it might be relocated spurred a massive fundraising campaign. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois acquired the property through the generosity of several private donors. The Edith Farnsworth House opened as a public museum in 2004, and in 2021, it was officially rededicated with Edith's name to elevate her story as a visionary patron of the arts.

FARNSWORTH HOUSE

Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl was born in 1903 and became a leading figure in the Danish Modernism movement from the 1930s until the end of the 1960s, alongside names such as Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner, Poul Kjærholm, and Børge Mogensen. This movement became the foundation for the massive international export of Danish architecture and design.

Juhl built his home in Ordrup, just north of Copenhagen, in 1942 when he was just 30 years old. Although he studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he designed only a handful of houses, focusing instead on interiors and bold, pioneering furniture. His own house was built from the inside out, on the premises of the interior rather than the architecture. The furniture shaped the rooms, and the rooms shaped the facade.

The L-shaped house consists of two blocks standing at right angles to each other, covering 180 square meters and later expanded to 207 square meters. One block contains a large living room and a small study, while the second houses the kitchen, dining room, bedrooms, and bathroom. The two blocks are joined by an entrance hall that opens to the garden. For Juhl, the relation between the rooms and the influx of natural light from the surrounding garden and woods was crucial. The ceilings are painted in pale light yellow, and when they reflect the light from outside, they resemble the roof of a tent with light shining through.

Ordrupgaard

Phaidon

From the completion of the house until his death in 1989, Juhl continuously refined its interior down to the smallest detail. He had a clear ambition to furnish his home entirely with objects of his own design. The house served as his personal laboratory, where every prototype was tested before being exhibited or produced. He explained that his own house had always been the starting point for his furniture, and he designed both houses and interiors.


Throughout the home, visitors can experience some of Juhl's most iconic designs, including the Chieftain Chair, the Poet Sofa, the FJ45 chair, and the FJ46 chair. His furniture serves as both sculptural forms that define space and integral parts of a larger whole, enhanced by his pioneering use of color as an architectural device and the play of light from large floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden.

Art occupies an equally central place, with works by leading Danish artists such as Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Asger Jorn, Erik Thommesen, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba carefully selected by Juhl. The house constitutes a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, where architecture, design, and art come together in harmonious totality.

After Juhl's death, his partner Hanne Wilhelm Hansen continued to live in the house until 2003. Birgit Lyngbye Pedersen purchased and donated the house to Ordrupgaard Museum, and it opened to the public in 2008. The home is now a permanent part of the museum, located just steps from the museum's buildings designed by Zaha Hadid and Snøhetta.

FINN JUHL HOUSE

Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. His work has been connected to Surrealism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. His distinctive visual language featured biomorphic forms, celestial symbols, and playful use of primary colors.

After extensive traveling, Miró settled in Mallorca in 1956. His wife Pilar Juncosa was from the island, and they had spent summers there since the 1930s. Miró's friend, Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, designed a studio for him in Palma de Mallorca in 1956. Miró and Sert had met in the early 1930s in Barcelona and connected over simplicity and their mutual desire to integrate art with architecture.

The Sert Studio was designed to provide Miró with the large, light filled space he needed for his ambitious paintings and sculptures. The building features high ceilings, north facing skylights for even natural light, and whitewashed walls creating a Mediterranean atmosphere. This is where Miró worked until his death in 1983, creating many of his late masterpieces.

Miro Mallorca

Albright Knox

In 1959, Miró purchased the nearby 18th century Mallorcan farmhouse called Son Boter with prize money from the Guggenheim International Award. Son Boter became his second painting and sculpture studio, a more intimate workspace. Miró decorated the ancient stone walls with charcoal sketches, transforming the farmhouse into an artwork itself.

Miró died on December 25, 1983 at age 90 in Palma de Mallorca. The Fundació Miró Mallorca was created in 1981 by Miró and his wife Pilar to preserve his legacy. The foundation opened to the public in 1992 and comprises a main museum, a library, a sculpture garden, both the Sert Studio and Son Boter Studio, and temporary exhibition spaces. The studios remain as Miró left them, with his tools, unfinished works, and personal objects.

FUNDACIÓ MIRÓ: SERT STUDIO AND SON BOTER

George Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington to Japanese immigrants. After earning degrees in architecture from the University of Washington and MIT, he traveled the world, working with Antonin Raymond in Japan and Le Corbusier in Paris.

Shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, Nakashima, his wife Marion, and their infant daughter Mira were forcibly relocated to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. There, he met Japanese carpenter Gentauro Hikogawa, who taught him traditional Japanese woodworking techniques. After Antonin Raymond successfully petitioned for his release in 1943, the Nakashima family came to live on Raymond's farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

In 1945, Nakashima opened his woodworking business in reaction against twentieth century modern architecture's functionalism. He believed that the inherent beauty of natural materials like wood should be studied, understood, and respected, and that products should retain their individuality. As his daughter Mira describes, he couldn't afford lumber, so he started using boards with raw edges. These natural edge pieces became his signature, influencing generations of furniture makers to embrace wabi-sabi aesthetics.

Nakashima Woodworkers

Depasquale Maffini

Nakashima purchased land along Aquetong Road in 1945, and as his business grew, he acquired more property and designed all 21 buildings on the eventual 12 acre complex, each facing south to maximize sunlight. The grounds include the iconic Conoid Studio with its dramatic curved roof, the Showroom, the Finishing Room, the Chair Shop, the Reception House, the Arts Building and Cloisters, the Pole Barn, the Lumber Sheds, the Pool House, and the Main Shop. He had deep respect for the natural landscape and use of regional materials while experimenting with new innovations.

The back of the property houses a remarkable collection of wood slabs Nakashima accumulated over his lifetime, some from trees now extinct or nearly impossible to find in larger sizes. His most significant commission came in 1973 when Nelson Rockefeller ordered 200 pieces for his house in Pocantico Hills, New York. Nakashima also designed furniture lines for Knoll, including the Straight Back Chair still in production today.

When Nakashima died in 1990, his daughter Mira continued both his woodworking practice and his tradition of opening the studios to visitors. Today, Mira and her team of craftsmen continue creating what Nakashima called the antiques of the future. The George Nakashima Woodworker Complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014 and remains a working studio where handcrafted furniture is still made using his methods. The grounds are open to the public during designated Studio Hours on Saturday afternoons from 1 to 4 pm.

Nakashimas's unique bathtub has his kids and grandkids names written out in mosaic. 

GEORGE NAKASHIMA WOODWORKERS

Georgia O'Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in the summer of 1929 and was immediately captivated. The dramatic landscape with its endless sky and unique light would inspire a new direction in her art and eventually become her permanent home.

O'Keeffe discovered the house in Abiquiú in the early 1930s during one of her frequent visits from New York. The 5,000 square foot compound was in ruins, but she was drawn to one particular feature: a patio with a long adobe wall and a door. After years of attempting to purchase it, she finally acquired the property from the Catholic Church in 1945 for $10. The oldest rooms of the house were probably built in 1744 and expanded in the 19th century with rooms organized around a common courtyard.

For the next four years, O'Keeffe supervised the restoration, working closely with her friend Maria Chabot to transform the ruin into a modern home. She updated the traditional adobe structure with natural light, midcentury modern furniture, and contemporary amenities while respecting the Native American and Spanish Colonial building styles. She was particularly attracted to the property's large garden which provided food for her and her guests.

O'Keeffe

Domino

O'Keeffe made Abiquiú her permanent home in 1949 after spending summers at her smaller house at Ghost Ranch twelve miles away. In New Mexico, she experimented with fresh colors, forms, and compositional strategies. The house inspired many of her paintings, including the famous door through the patio wall, the trees growing in the Chama River Valley below her studio, and the view of the road visible from her bedroom window.

She decorated the home with rocks and bones from her collection. Her carefully curated interior featured warm touches alongside works by other artists. The studio's large floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the surrounding landscape.

O'Keeffe lived in the Abiquiú home until 1984, when she moved to Santa Fe two years before her death on March 6, 1986 at age 98. In 2014, her 1932 painting "Jimson Weed" sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. The home was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and is now part of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Tours of the home and studio run from March through November and begin at the Welcome Center in Abiquiú, about 52 miles northwest of Santa Fe. The rooms remain much as they were when O'Keeffe left.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE HOME AND STUDIO

Walter Gropius was the founder of the German design school Bauhaus. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Gropius fled Germany, first to London, then to the United States in 1937 to accept a teaching position at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Gropius, his wife Ise, and their adopted daughter Ati arrived in America with little more than their Bauhaus furniture, books, and personal belongings. They initially rented a Colonial-style house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, but as Ise later wrote, their Bauhaus furniture looked strange in the small rooms of this little house. When architect friend Henry Shepley learned that the new German professor was desperate to build a house but lacked the means, he approached philanthropist Helen Storrow. She believed newly arrived immigrants should always be given a chance, offering Gropius a building site and financial resources.

Working with local builder Casper J. Jenney and approximately $18,000, Gropius designed the house in 1937 and completed it in 1938. He carefully chose a modest hill in the middle of Storrow's apple orchard. The design combines traditional New England materials like wood, brick, and fieldstone with industrial materials rarely used in domestic settings: glass block, acoustical plaster, welded steel, and chrome banisters.

Modest in scale at 2,936 square feet, the house was revolutionary in impact. Gropius gave his 12 year old daughter Ati substantial input in designing her bedroom, including a warm color palette and furniture he had designed at the Bauhaus in 1922. She had three wishes: to sleep under the stars, to come and go from her own private entryway, and to have a special play space. The outdoor spiral staircase leading to her room with its private roof deck fulfilled these dreams. The house features a flat roof with a slight tilt to drain water to a center pipe and dry well. Gropius's vision attracted other modern architects to the area, including Marcel Breuer, who built on nearby Woods End Road. Today, Lincoln has over 300 modern movement homes.

In keeping with Bauhaus philosophy, every aspect of the house and surrounding landscape was planned for maximum efficiency and simplicity. Large plate glass windows bring the outdoors in while permitting solar gain. The house contains furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. Guests at the Gropiuses' dinner table included Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Igor Stravinsky, Henry Moore, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Walter Gropius died in 1969, leaving Ise a two-sentence will stating that he loved her and trusted her with his legacy. Ise donated the house to Historic New England in 1974, though she continued to live there until her death in 1983. The home became a museum in 1984, and in 2000 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. The house now features one of the largest collections of Bauhaus-related materials outside of Germany and is open for tours.

GROPIUS HOUSE

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Yorkshire, England. After serving in World War I, he studied at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He became known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures of the human figure, particularly reclining figures, mother and child groups, and internal/external forms.

In 1940, during World War II, Moore and his wife Irina moved from London to Hertfordshire to escape the Blitz. They rented Hoglands, a farmhouse in the small hamlet of Perry Green, about 30 miles north of London. What was meant to be a temporary refuge became Moore's permanent home and workplace for the next 46 years until his death in 1986.

Moore initially worked in a small cottage on the property but soon needed more space for his increasingly large commissions. In 1965, he converted several farm buildings into studios, including a large top studio with massive sliding doors and an overhead crane for moving heavy sculptures. The property eventually expanded to 70 acres of gardens and fields where Moore could site his monumental works.

Henry Moore Foundation

The studios reveal Moore's working process. He would begin with small maquettes working out compositions and forms. These would be scaled up in plaster before being cast in bronze at nearby foundries. The property contains three main studio buildings: the small studio where he drew and made maquettes, the large top studio where he worked on full-scale plasters, and the tapestry studio where he created prints and drawings.

Moore designed the landscape around Perry Green deliberately, placing his sculptures throughout the grounds so they could be experienced in dialogue with nature. He believed sculpture should be viewed in natural light and landscape, not isolated in white cube galleries.

After Moore's death in 1986, his daughter Mary established the Henry Moore Foundation to preserve his legacy. The estate opened to the public in 2007 as the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens. Visitors can tour the studios.

HENRY MOORE STUDIOS & GARDENS

Isamu Noguchi first visited the Japanese island of Shikoku in 1956, searching for stones for his garden at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The small stone-carving village of Mure, famous for its granite masonry, would become his spiritual home for the last two decades of his life.

STUDIO AALTO