LEED

I just successfully passed the LEED AP (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) exam.  After days of my head swimming in tables and thresholds, statistics and calculations, it is gratifying to pass the test but a bit daunting to now be a part of yet another heavily bureaucratic process separating us from making buildings.

Increasingly as municipalities pass ever more stringent and complex codes and ordinances governing building, the job of the architect becomes further removed from the tasks of construction on the jobsite.  Far from being the master-builder, the architect is the master-planner.

I feel like most of these new requirements, especially those encompassed by LEED, make for smarter, better buildings and certainly a better environment and future.  Juggling the various possibilities and trade-offs of codes, requirements, ordinances, and community standards, the architect is responsible for a vastly increased range of issues.  As architect’s fees have traditionally been tied directly or by association with the cost of construction, they are not reflective of the current range of responsibilities.

It has been probably our own egos that have pushed us to take control of all of these processes as well as the traditional role of designer and building expert.  The egos of architects are for another discussion, but the ego of architects having been usually placed in the realm of design and aesthetics, that part of the task of the architect has become one of the least time-consuming parts of the project.  I find myself jealously guarding the time spent on primarily aesthetic design, trying to ignore the growing and looming library of code books, city and county ordinances, and technical bulletins.

Diana F+ with fisheye lens

I recently received another toy camera, a Diana F+ copy, with a fisheye lens.  The circular vignette within the square format of 120 film is certainly as interesting as any image that shows up within the frame.  And I think for me, having grown up in the 1970’s, any fisheye image has strange allusions to NASA images and the Apollo flights.

The clear warping of linear perspective is pretty compelling, especially when still contained with the Euclidean circle and square.  A bit like peeping out the motel doorviewer to see what that strange sound was.

Photos by Mark Gerwing

Longmont, Colorado

as seen in Longmont, earlier this week

Bloomsday, June 16th

June 16th 1904 is the day that James Joyce set his novel Ulysses, traveling Mr. Bloom around Dublin in a day.  So, have a good fry-up for breakfast and certainly a mustard and gorgonzola sandwich for lunch with a glass of wine,

“Mr. Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese.  Sips of his wine soothed his palate.  Not logwood that.  Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.”

There are a number of road races to celebrate the day, the Lilac Bloomsday run in Spokane being the largest and most well known.  I can’t think of a worse way to honor the day.

Ulysses is not an easy book to read to say the least.  In college I tried moving through it many times without success.  Finally, on the eve of my prolonged trip to Venice, I threw it in my luggage – surely when it’s your only book, you’ll read it through.  And I did, after a bit.  So, for me the book is inextricably tied with that briny town.  The challenging, circuitous text melds in my memory with the labyrinthine city, the language of the novel becoming clearer with distance.

So, raise a glass to Mr. Bloom, he has a helluva day in front of him.

Hey, and its my birthday.

“…yes I said yes I will Yes.”

a reading of the text, by Joyce himself:

http://www.ubu.com/sound/joyce.html

Walnut Creek homes, ongoing progress

All of the recent local rain notwithstanding, progress is being made on the construction at 20th and Walnut on the Walnut Creek Residences.

A collection of single-family, duplexes and historic renovation, the project is a careful in-fill of an existing large, dog-leg shaped site near downtown Boulder, Colorado.

Originally designed at Arcadea, this project was re-designed by M. Gerwing Architects and is being built by Coburn Development.  After a long city approval process, construction is proceeding and realtors are making site visits as these units will soon be available for view and sale.

Each building is a clarified and simplified version of the original 1890’s house on the property.  The duplexes along Walnut will fill-in the gap-tooth aspect along the street and the single-family homes within the property are smaller, more cottage-like buildings nestling along the creek.

Aqua Tower, Chicago

Currently under construction is Studio Gang’s Aqua Tower in Chicago.

As you can see, each floor has a cantilevered floor plate undulating across the surface of the building.  As the plate approaches the curtain wall it makes the building appear to pool like water.  So while the the spatial morphology of the building is still the usual, developer-driven series of flat floor plates, the building’s surface achieves a curving skin appearance without the use of curving the panel surfaces themselves.  This is really rather remarkable, although a bit of a one-trick pony.  

I think the aspect that most intrigues me about this building is its design process.  Clearly in a day of hand-drawn elevations or even crude computer models, this design solution would not have seemed so interesting.  With the explosion of powerful modeling and rendering techniques, including especially the ability to render reflections and shadows with accuracy and nuance, this kind of design can be presented to a client with all the ‘reality’ of the final building.  However, for as sensuous as the building may look in its overall form, it is strangely dematerialized.  The disjunctive appearance of an almost aqueous surface as the vertical face of the building clearly opposes an architectonic understanding of the building as a construction bound by gravity.  Even the almost anti-gravity projects of Constructivism were clearly operating in the realm of gravity, even if defying it.  This tower is more of a painting, a decorated surface, albeit a beautiful one, with changing light and reflections.  

It may in fact be a really great expression of its place, being very close to the shore of Lake Michigan, which, through much of the year, shimmers off the edge of Chicago, blurring the eastern horizon with a indeterminate edge of water and sky.  And at the same time, the building is a clear, relentless division of architectural space, ignoring interior function and space, much like the early steel framed towers of LeBaron Jenny, the Chicago window, and the dauntless grid of the Loop itself.  If Chicagoans had no problem with reversing the flow of the Chicago River to better drain the city, why not turn the river up into a building?

Phipps Tennis Pavilion, Denver

A number of weeks ago Open Doors Denver hosted an event allowing access to a number of buildings throughout Denver.  In addition to the Clock Tower (http://mgerwing.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/behind-the-clock/) the Phipps Tennis Pavilion at the Phipps Mansion.

In addition to the large, enclosed tennis court, there are changing rooms and a lounge including an old fashioned soda fountain.

At 8,000 square feet, the building is dominated by its glass roof held between the gothic arch beams.

Often overlooked, the Entry is a brick-paved long gallery that looks down on the enclosed court and is approached across a beautiful courtyard.

Overall the building, like the mansion, is a strange melange of building styles and materials, much of it brought over from Europe during the construction in the early 1930’s.

certainly one of the most interesting spaces in Denver and well worth a visit.

John Singer Sargent in Venice

Venice has long been a subject for painters and writers, its beauty and decay.  I spent a number of months there many years ago and I think the paintings of John Singer Sargent capture the city in a way that I remember the place.  The languid, dense paintings come close to depicting not just the look and feel, but the smell and sound of the canals and calles.

Although the paintings are devoid of the tourist throngs that choke the city, they do evoke the romantic decay of Venice that the morning sunlight reveals.  Early in the morning the city has none of its glittering storefronts or jams of people.  Unlike the golden light of central Italy or the sharp, metallic light of the Dolomites, the briny air in Venice softens the focus and reveals an astonishing variety of black-brown shadows that occasionally let the sunlight in.

Maybe because most of the time I spent there was in winter and spring, but it is the dampness and smells of Venice that I remember best.  The smells of the city weren’t the nasty putrid smells of the canals in summer, but rather that musty, slightly bitter smell of rust and moss, slimy bricks and molding stucco.

Walnut Creek homes, in progress

Framing is fully underway at the Walnut Creek project at 20th and Walnut in Boulder.

This photo is of three of the single-family homes tucked into the heart of the site, along the creek.  

For as many times as I have designed a project and then seen it through construction, there is always a surprising realization as the building takes form.  Of course it looks like I imagined it, having drawn and redrawn it many times over many months.  However, the physical mass of the reality of the building is still thrilling to see, the size and scale of the spaces exciting to walk through the first time.

This project creates a number of different small single-family houses and duplexes, each as a specific theme-and-variation working off the existing 1890’s house at the front of the property.  

This project was originally designed by Mark Gerwing while principal at Arcadea.  Through subsequent site and code changes, it was then completely redesigned by Mark at M. Gerwing Architects.  Now finally under construction.

Highlands Farmers Market Competition

These are some images from our recent submittal to the Highlands Farmers Market Competition sponsored by Sprocket Design/Building in Denver.  

Our take on the project was to make the market secondary to a more general community-use building.  While adaptable for use as a market, the building is more of an open market-hall that can host art classes, shows, etc. beyond the seasonal and weekly market.  A long, narrow site along 32nd Avenue, just east of the Highlands retail district was the chosen site, spanning from the street to the alley. 

Our project posited a curving, cantilevered, plywood-clad box that houses the community meeting room and office functions creating a covered ‘porch’ for the neighborhood.  The jury clearly picked schemes that put a more dominant emphasis on the farmer’s market with the winning scheme particularly elegant and minimalist.  There are many very interesting submissions, some more or less conventional, others pushing the boundaries of what a market might be and how urban space is formulated.

http://www.sprocketgallery.com/index.php?page=first-place

Thanks to Kate Iverson for her help in formulating the design and program and to Susan Everett for her logo and identity contributions.