Boulder renovation

We have just completed a partial renovation of a 1970’s modernist house in Boulder.  Originally designed by Jeffrey Abrams, the house had suffered from a few ill-conceived renovations and the simple passage of time.

Much of our work concerned demolishing a series of interior walls to create a larger, brighter kitchen that captures views of the Boulder flatirons through a series of new curving glass windows surrounding a built-in breakfast bench.

The kitchen is divided into distinct cooking and cleaning spaces, with the countertop materials, tile and cabinetry colors changing for each area.

Many thanks to very engaged and energetic clients and all the folks at Blue Spruce Construction.

cabinets by Kerf Design and Foothill Joinery,  Silestone and stainless steel counterops, Hakatai glass tile

design by M. Gerwing Architects, Mark Gerwing, AIA, principal

different cities, different art?

This is a quick watercolor sketch I did last week of the Chicago skyline from the north side of Belmont Harbor.

this view is always interesting early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is shining on either the left or right side of the buildings.  The distant view is possible because of the distance that the harbor entrance creates, making a layer of Lincoln Park trees run along below the layer of tall buildings.

Different cities inspire people in different creative mediums.  I think of New York as a writer’s town.  By far the most sketching I have ever done was a two-year stint working in Boston.

Maybe the picturesque plazas and squares in Boston establish those views for sketching in a way that the grid of streets in New York and Chicago doesn’t allow.

The watercolor above  is a bit unusual in that most of my looking around Chicago has been done with a camera.  The hard, straight rationality of Chicago’s grid of streets and the regularity of office windows may lend itself more to the shifting light and perspective best captured on film.

I’ve now lived in Boulder longer than I did in Chicago.  And so, Boulder’s medium of expression?  I guess I’m still working on that.

what makes an architect?

This is the house I grew up in:

It is a pretty boring, little brick, builder house from the early 1960’s.  It sits in St. Matthews, a pretty boring little suburb on the east side of Louisville Kentucky.  The entire neighborhood is made up of these houses or the ranch- or tudor-variant.  At the time I lived there it was a solidly middle/working class neighborhood full of kids, many around my age, mostly catholic.  The only buildings that were not houses were a few churches, a small single-story commercial strip of stores and a few local elementary schools.

So, what about this environment makes a kid want to be an architect?  I can never remember wanting to be anything else.  Maybe it’s just me.  Or maybe not.

I have worked a few years in Boston, more in Chicago, and now, yet more in Boulder.  In each of these places I have met a number of fellow architects who not only grew up in similar neighborhoods, but actually in St. Matthews.  This always slightly stuns me and leaves me wondering that same question.  We had no experience in “architecture” in our various public schools, no great local buildings, not even a number of nearby buildings under construction.  We did have a strange misstep in planning.

Many parts of this neighborhood were designed to have a continuous alley running behind all the houses, much like a typical city/suburban layout.  However, in my St. Matthews, for whatever reason, they did not install the paved alleys.  Instead we had a 10-12′ wide, continuous grassy strip that ran behind all the houses.  And this strip belonged to us kids.  No adults ever ventured back into this area of overgrown grass and honeysuckle, rusting bikes and broken-down sheds.  We moved through the neighborhood along this strip, learned to smoke and had fights back there.  It linked every house and made an alternate kid-universe to the tidy lawns and neat sidewalks along the street.  Maybe that was the place that a little kid could go to make their own kinds of spaces, where boys and girls could dominate space and transform it.  It definitely became a place for daydreaming, if not a few budding criminal careers as well.

grass strip behind Nanz Avenue, St. Matthews, Louisville, from Google Earth

Probably every neighborhood has that kind of special kid-centered geography.  Maybe not so consistently linear and parallel with the streets of the adult world.  Does that stir the geometric imagination and begin one down the path of making spaces and making buildings?  Maybe it did for a number of us.

think global, design local – architecture

It seems that time and time again, as I get hit by images of new buildings in magazines, blogs, websites, etc., the finest architecture being built over the last ten years or so is what I would call critical regionalism.  Taking a cue from Kenneth Frampton’s essay of the same name from 1979 and the work of Tzonis and Lefaivre, these are buildings that allow the immediate topography, region and culture to influence the design more than a formal or theoretical premise.

house by Glen Murcutt, Australia

 

These buildings are undeniably Modern, but also local, celebrating the particulars of time and place.  They often partake of a kind of vernacular architecture (which hopefully, is also formed by a specific climate, availability of materials, etc), but, to use Frampton’s term, are also “disjunctive”, clearly demonstrating a connection with, a brief ancestry of, Modernism.

house by Lake Flato Architects, Texas, USA

 

For as thrilling and as exciting as some new tower in Dubai or Chicago might be, once you leave the confines of a large, cosmopolitan city, the influence of the land, people and place, should probably play an ever-increasing role in the making of a building.

house by James Cutler, Washington state, USA

 

house by Brian McKay Lyons, Nova Scotia, Canada

 

I think there are clients and patrons who don’t want to associate with their immediate locale, but rather are looking to say something about their connection and association with an international, cosmopolitan society, eschewing any regionalist influences.

Denver Art Museum, Daniel Libeskind, Denver, Colorado

 

house by Thomas Phifer, Boulder, Colorado, USA

 

It is an old adage in architecture that bad sites make for good architecture.  It may be that school-trained architects working in more remote areas, feel like their sites are already ‘challenged’, in that they are not in the glossy capitals of architecture.  However, the architects that I have met and worked with in smaller cities, towns and the country, have a remarkable interest in, and respect for, the local climate, traditions, materials and building history of their chosen place.  It is more likely, that in fact, the slightly generic nature of the buildings in the increasingly generic international cities drove those architects away and into the arms of places and people slightly more humble, certainly more interesting.

house by Antoine Predock, Arizona, USA

 

house by Sam Mockbee and Coleman Coker, Mississippi, USA

 

house by Rick Joy, Arizona, USA

 

house by Turner Brooks, New England, USA

 

so, when you hear about everyone buying local and supporting local farmers, think about why that is.  Think beyond the rationale of sustainability and the transport of goods and materials.  

Think of what the the local farmer or artisan brings to their work, and the rejection of the generic goods produced faraway and distributed by Walmarts and McDonalds and SOM.

Remembrances of things past

often the difficulty of trying to repair or fill-in a masonry door or window is too great to get a seamless match.  Other materials like metal siding or wood can be replaced in kind or painted to match.  Masonry, and especially brick, leaves an echo of its former self, of windows and doors, changing uses recorded like a palimpsest.

architecture juries

The basic process for eons for educating architects has relied heavily on the jury system.  About once every six weeks or so, every student is asked to pin up their work in a semi-public place and a panel of jurors, usually other instructors and architects, are each given time to comment on the work after the student’s brief description of the project.  Sometimes this can be very public and as a student you might look up to see 6 or so very dour jurors staring at you along with dozens or more of your fellow students.  To say that it can be intimidating is a gross understatement.

jury at Yale, in 'the pit'

However, as someone who was very shy and frequently terrified by this kind of public speaking and criticism, I do believe that is one of the very best ways to educate an architect.  Through this often-fraught crucible, every student has to become sure of their ideas and committed to their projects.  It is a very real and early reminder that architecture is not a pursuit practiced only in isolation, but a public art, with all that that entails.

In undergraduate and graduate school I took part in and was a victim of an awful lot of juries.  (It is not really a ‘jury’ of your peers by the way – it is experienced instructors and architects that have been down the same path and know all the tricks to reveal you and your project’s shortcomings)

I have seen crying, screaming, panic and the occasional fist-fight break out.  I have seen instructors tell students that their work is so dreadful or incomplete that they should just pack it up right now and leave, and never, ever return.

jury in 'the pit' at Yale

I  mention all of this because I have heard of disturbing trend of the diminishing use of public juries to evaluate student work.  I hope I am not being an old curmudgeon, but I really do think this is a great loss.  Each year as a student the process became a little easier to the point that I looked forward to the criticism and advice in graduate school.  Now, as a working architect, I have to present my designs to my clients.  I could simply present the projects and tell them to take it or leave it.  However, the jury system has convinced me that to make really good buildings it is best to describe the projects simply and briefly and then listen.

some juror’s comments collected on the Politically Incorrect blog:

http://politicallyincorrect007.blogspot.com/2008/12/architecture-jury-critique.html

photos from the Yale School of Architecture website

God is in the details?

Mies van de Rohe famously said, “God is in the details”.

I hope He is okay with changes in the field:

some sketches done in the field to change and clarify details

Despite our best efforts to figure out everything prior to construction, changes have to be made, especially with renovations and additions where existing construction turns out a bit different than we thought.

Field Notes brand notebooks – I keep a separate one for each project under construction

new photos of Hurricane Hill house

I recently took some new photos of a project we finished a few years ago, a major renovation of a house on Hurricane Hill in Nederland, Colorado

designed with my friend Jim Walker

built by Cottonwood Custom Builders

green dyed ash cabinets by Wedgewood, purple/black concrete countertops by Fisher Concrete (including acid-etched grasses motif)

 

Pops and Scrapes, Boulder’s Compatible Development regulations, Part III

In an ongoing series of a cursory analysis of Boulder’s new Compatible Development regulation slated to take affect January 4th, here is another set of consequences of part of that regulation – bulk planes.

This study was looking at a generic south Boulder Ranch located on a north-south street.  It assumes flat topography and a fairly standard size lot and existing ranch type house.

Prior to the regulations, any second floor addition was limited by the solar shadow (see the diagram below).  This is not a particularly beautiful addition, but it is the simplest kind of construction – building a simple addition that mirrors the roof of the existing ranch, has an 8′ high ceiling and is built as much as possible over the existing exterior walls.  (new bulk planes shown in red, existing house is green, addition in white)

You can see the shadow cast to the north has limited the location of the north wall of the second story.  The south gable end of this typical type of addition is in violation of the new bulk plane.

To bring this kind of addition into compliance, the south side of the second story addition would have to be move to the north by approximately 5′, resulting in:

a strange little addition

To more easily comply with the bulk plane regulations, a gable-fronted second story addition could be added on:

a bit of a monster on top of the original ranch house and very different kind of style

There is an exception to the bulk plane rule that would allow a larger, second story addition that still mirrored the roof line of the ranch.  It has to be at least 40′ long to allow for the exception to violate the bulk plane, resulting in:

a frightening looking thing – note that a significant portion of the second story at the back of the house is hovering above the ground.  The width of the allowed second story has to be 40′ – deeper than the typical ranch it sits on.

In part IV we will look at the part of the new regulations that will restrict the length of the new side walls and their articulation.  (In the example diagram above, the second story addition has to be 40′ exactly, not an inch less or the bulk plane exception would not be allowed, nor an inch more or the wall articulation regulation would be violated!)

Pops and Scrapes, new Boulder regulations, Part II

Side Yard Bulk Planes

As part of the recently passed Compatible Development regulations, the City of Boulder has included a bulk plane restriction.  This regulation limits any new construction or addition from building beyond a projected line starting 12′ above the property lines and sloping inward at 45 degrees.

As a real-world application, the impacts to possible second-story additions are significantly more restrictive than those imposed by the previous set of regulations.  As mentioned in the first post about these regulations, the devil is in the details, or more specifically in the combination of the new regulations with the existing solar shadow ordinance.

For so many homes in the affected areas, one side of the house is within 5′ of the property line in accord with the setback regulations.  This means any possible second story addition would be limited similar to the above diagram.  The available interior space of this addition is significantly lower than previously allowed as the head height at the edge of the room is now under 6′.

Under the older regulations, Boulder pop-tops tended to be partial extensions of the floor below, weighted to the south side of the property to avoid the solar shadow restrictions.  As in the photo above, the addition to the original ranch created a distinctly either right-sided or left-sided house depending on what side of the street the property was located (again, driven by shifting this mass to the south side of the property).

The new bulk plane regulations will either shift this kind of the addition down, making it more like a series of dormers sticking out of a new roof, or shift the south side of the addition closer to the center creating a kind of bubble addition sitting on a ranch house.  There are some exceptions allowed for penetrating the bulk plane, however, most of the existing houses are not of a size to take advantage of some of the them.

So, the regulations may encourage more wedding-cake style houses with reducing layers as the building moves upward.

The former regulations lent to additions that created a kind of asymmetrical balance – playing the long, low horizontal lines of the ranch house against the vertical lift of the addition.  Weighted to one side, this composition often closely paralleled the plan of the house, with public rooms of living room, dining room, kitchen, etc. on one side of the house and bedrooms on the other.

The wedding-cake style of house creates an entirely more complex composition, being neither predominantly horizontal or vertical.  The local architects, and especially builder/designers, will need to work harder to make each house or addition sympathetic to its neighbors and architecturally worthy.