This is a custom house that I designed when I was a principal with Arcadea in Boulder. I have been overseeing the construction for over a year now and we still have a year to go. It is a large, courtyard-centered design on a steeply sloping site along Sunshine Canyon just west of Boulder, Colorado. See the earlier post called “Timely” for some discussion about the design influences and intentions.

The masonry is coming along quite well and the mechanical and electrical work is about to begin. The contractor is Cottonwood Custom Builders, project supervisor is Scott Reardon.

Photo by Mark Gerwing, 2007.

This is a project currently under construction up Sunshine Canyon, just west of Boulder, Colorado. It is part of an ongoing interest of mine in time and building, a kind of phenomenal temporality. By that I mean that the rather than trying to design a project that is “timeless” or certainly that has faux finishes and materials to make it artificially aged, I designed the house to be a series of linked buildings that are individually simple, vernacular forms but in combination raise questions of their making. Each building’s details and forms are not strictly consistent but rather make a theme-and-variation syncopation. Making a building with the capacity, maybe the insistence, for multiple readings and interpretations lends a layered identity to the project. Taking cues from the owners and the basic phenomena of the site, the project steps down a steep, rocky hillside, part village, part house. The courtyard creates a internalized, domestic landscape that then extends and projects itself out to the site and the world beyond.

Computer model by Mark Gerwing, 2006.