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Archive for March 2011
We have all been to plenty of places with good food but somehow dining there just isn’t particularly fun or relaxing. The experience of eating at a restaurant is such a simple, singular affair that even the smallest, most subtle oddity can easily tilt the whole moment out of kilter. Tables a little too close, [...]
It’s been over twenty years since I was in Venice. That sounds inconceivable to me as that wonderful and awful city sits in such a dominant and insistent place in my memory. I haven’t visited except in the dozens of drawings in now faded sketchbooks and hundreds of film negatives tucked safely away. Of the [...]
In the previous posts I have remarked on the drama of stairs. That drama is certainly reinforced by the actual design of the stair – its details and materials, certainly its shape and how sharp or relaxed the descent or ascent. Unfortunately, as architects love stairs, we can get a bit carried away with this [...]
In the last stair post I talked about private stairs of a type. This post continues that same theme but extends it out to the public realm. There are certainly a lot of nightclubs and restaurants that have taken great advantage of a descending stair entry. Watching someone enter, survey the crowd, and then slowly [...]
Stairs are inherently dramatic. As the transition from one level to the next, they break the plane of the ceiling or floor and immediately engage the psychological territory that Gaston Bachelard so elegantly describes in The Poetics of Space. Going up is to climb toward the sky, going down is to delve into the earth. [...]
A number of months ago, immediately on the heels of the Fourmile Fire, I was hired by a couple who just lost their house to design another. It has been a great process even in the face of that tragedy, with clients who reaffirm why I do residential design. Their thoughtfulness and commitment to the [...]
I have been thinking a lot lately about vernacular architecture and indigenous responses to local climate. By that I mean how a building and design practice, over time, has found architectural solutions to solve some of the problems posed by heat and cold, sunlight and shadow, aridity and humidity. Reading through some older posts on [...]
In the last few days, I have received, along with the usual breathless announcements from the architectural press, images of a number of new, modern houses that share a disturbing characteristic. What so many of these houses have in common is their disdain or outright contempt for their more mundane neighbors. I am a strong [...]
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