At the corner of Tarpis and Erie Avenues in Cincinnati, Ohio, sits a house that looks plucked out of a children’s fairy tale. Porthole windows are inset against a swirling, cedar-shingled exterior, while a glass room juts from a cone-shaped addition to the main structure, and an orange metal staircase winds up to a breezeway between the home’s two parts. This is the Mushroom House, a product of late architect Terry Brown’s lifetime of design and inspiration and more than a decade of construction. What appears to passersby as a magical sort of flowing structure is actually the result of meticulous drawings and hard geometry. With help from a team of metalworkers, glass artists and his architecture students from the University of Cincinnati, Brown reworked what was once a Midwestern cottage into a studio of unique components, from the layers (in some places 10 inches thick) of hand-cut shingles to bright swatches of stained glass. After Brown’s death in 2010, the privately owned property became a Cincinnati landmark.
