Tricky things these resolutions.  They are really just a list of more things that I am probably going to feel guilty about in a couple of months.  So sure, along with losing another 10 lbs, let’s put keeping up better with our accounting, slowing down a bit more, and working out more often on the list.

From our architect-geek point of view, resolutions are more like yearly reminders of a re-dedication to our work.  Not more hours or more projects, but more rigor, more contemplation, and more thorough integration of materials, design, construction and budgeting.  That’s a bit generic for all architects, so while laudable, it is also good at this time of the year to reflect on why we became architects in the first place.

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

Lego city

castle/house by Elli Gerwing

snow fort, from E-How (how to build a snow fort, really?)

You could saw that most of us architects have stayed dedicated to the pursuit and never given up on our dreams.

But really there are just some things we never really got over.

It would be nice that for every wall, ceiling, etc. we design, the color is an integral part of the genesis of that part of the work.  Ideally we don’t design and then think about the colors later, rather we think in terms of a green wall or a blue ceiling as a starting point.

Boulder condo renovation, by M. Gerwing Architects

The reality is often quite different.  For many surfaces, the choice of color comes much later.  Sometimes as the painter is showing up on the jobsite.  I think as architects and designers we want to see more of the assembly of the final finishes to tailor that choice of color.  I usually know what walls or ceilings I want to be more or less neutral, but I don’t always know the precise colors until the rooms are built, tile and cabinetry, and sometimes exterior landscape, is installed.

Beartooth Ranch house, by Mark Gerwing at Arcadea, Inc.

For every architect or designer you can probably find another color theory that informs these decisions.  From simply choosing chromatic opposites from the color wheel

standard color wheel from ArtFactory.com

or the infinitely more complex and subtle work of Albers

Sometimes the color that needs to be there to complete the space sits hidden and it takes time and patience to finally scratch that itch and decide that the beam really wants to be red:

Boulder condo renovation, by Mark Gerwing and Amy Kirtland, at Arcadea, Inc.

more often than not the problem requires a more nuanced hand, a more gentle approach

Arugula Restaurant, by M. Gerwing Architects

In the end, the color can be chosen to bend to the other materials, advancing or receding as needed, in support of the guiding ideas of the project.  Until you can stand in the constructed spaces and feel their relationships, their connections to outside colors and reflected sunlight, the choice of the paint colors may have to wait.

before the dominance of gypsum board or drywall, the building of a simple interior wall was a layered construction.  On top of the studs, thin strips of wood lath were installed, usually with gaps.  On top of these strips a brown coat of plaster was applied and roughly smoothed out.  After drying and sometimes a bit of sanding, a final coat of fine plaster was troweled over the brown coat.  Often this final coat had pigments mixed in giving the wall an integral color.

The advantages of simple sheets of drywall notwithstanding, plaster construction was a kind of weaving – vertical and horizontal lines of support and strength.  The gaps between the lath strips allowed the plaster to push through and around the strips, holding it more consistently to the wall.

When we work on older buildings, we end up demolishing a lot of these walls.  The detritus of a plaster wall is piles and piles of broken wood and crusty plaster, clouds of dust.  But after the plaster and lath comes down, the echo of its life remains in the staccato pattern of marked studs, rafters and joists.

These marks speak of the former woven, layered walls and ceilings – a construction laid on by hands, of a liquid turned to a solid, of a phase-change from houses made by hand, to houses assembled from goods.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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!)