Stones, boulders, crags … Perhaps they were

fragments of a deafening explosion.  Or stalagmites that were

once submerged, or hostile fragments of the full moon, or

quartz that changed destiny, or statues that time and the wind

broke into pieces or kneaded into shapes, or figureheads of

motionless ships, or dead giants that were transmuted, or

golden tortises, or imprisoned stars, or ground swells as thick

as lava which suddenly became still, or dreams of the previous

earth, or the warts of another planet, or granite sparks that

stood still, or bread for furious ancestors, or the bleached bones

of another land, or enemies of the sea in their bastions, or

simply stone that is rugged, sparkling, grey, pure and heavy so

that you may construct, with iron and wood, a house in the

sand.

Pablo Neruda, The Stone

from The House in the Sand

translated by Dennis Maloney & Clark Zlotchew

Project photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

“I look at these photographs with a prurient interest, the way that I might look at the beds of notorious courtesans.”

 John Updike, in the Introduction to Jill Kementz’s The Writer’s Desk

 Joan Didion

We have worked on a number of rooms that are creative work spaces.  Some of these have been as “home offices” located within a house or condo, and some have been stand-alone studios or buildings.  In each case, we hope to find something intriguing about the nature of the work that can help inform the design beyond the simple functional requirements of light and space.

 Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Writer’s Desk, by Jill Krementz,  is a series of brief glimpses into the natural working habitat of a number of noted writers.  Each entry contains a single photo of the writer at their respective work spaces along with a short comment from the authors on their writing spaces or process.

 Robert Penn Warren

As someone who designs these spaces for creatives, these are fascinating insights.  I think you have to avoid the too-easy temptation to analyze the rooms and contents, the arrangement of furniture and objects, as some kind of treasure map to the author’s meaning and muse.  Working with clients over the years has shown that these spaces are far more complex in their relationship to the work than a brief visual survey reveals.  However, in the quotation above from Updike reveals, our fascination is not easily assuaged.

 E. B. White

I have to also admit that I have spent time changing, altering and modifying my studio space far more than any other room I have occupied in a lifetime of houses and condos and cabins and apartments.  It is true that you can create almost anywhere – so many designs have  come to life on my dining room table between the saucers and plates.  But you can only push aside your drawings at dinner time so many times before your  need for that other space, that small creative retreat, becomes a necessity.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

This little sequence, where Max’s room turns into a forest, is one of the reasons I became an architect.

Thank you Mr. Sendak.

“That very night in Max’s room a forest grew

and grew-

and grew until his ceiling hung with vines

and the walls became the world all around”

This is still basically what I do everyday – imagine another world within the world.

Where The Wild Things Are

Story and Pictures by Maurice Sendak, 1963.

Happy New Year everyone

“It was beautiful in Longmont.  Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station.  I asked the the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and with one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment.   I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant.  And here I am in Colorado!  I kept thinking gleefully. Damn! damn! damn! I’m making it! And after a refreshing sleep filled with cobwebby dreams of my past life in the East I got up, washed in the station men’s room, and strode off, fit and slick as a fiddle, and got me a rich thick milkshake at the roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach.”

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The gas station with the lawn was Johnson’s Corner.  This is not the same cinnamon-roll-laden Johnson’s Corner truck stop on I-25 outside of Loveland, but the cast concrete art deco inspired filling station that faced demolition in 2002.  As it was threatened because of road expansion, the building was moved to its current location on the edge of the new urbanist community of Prospect just south of Longmont.

As you can see, though not demolished, the building was preserved but not renovated and it is slowly falling apart inside its protective fence.  The plans are to create a small cafe and hopefully, a small patch of lawn-grass.

Moving a building to save it is a dubious proposition at best and especially so if the move requires as much demolition as this one did.  Generally, removing a structure from its context also means that it is no longer eligible for National Register status as well as some much-needed federal grants for renovation.  I hope that funds are found soon and this building can find a new use and it does not suffer the same fate as the Boulder Depot which has moved twice and is still waiting for some new use to bring it back to useful life.

Ah, I’m hungry.

He entered Davy Byrne’s.  Moral pub.  He doesn’t chat.  Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygraff?

- Hellow, Bloom! Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

- Hello, Flynn

- How’s things?

- Tiptop … let me see.  I’ll take a glass of burgundy and … let me see.

Sardines on the shelves.  Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendents mustered and bred there.  Potted meats.  What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it.  All up in a plumtree.  Dignam’s potted meat.  Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty.  Like pickled pork. Expect the chef consumes the parts of honour.  Ought to tough from exercise.  His wives in a row to watch the effect. There was a right royal old nigger.  Who ate or something the somethings of the reverend Mr. MacTrigger. With it an abode of bliss.  Lord knows what concoction.  Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up.  Puzzle find the meat.  Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now.  Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow’s digestion.  Religions.  Christmas turkeys and geese.  Slaughter of innocents.  Eat, drink and be merry.  Then casual wards full after.  Heads bandaged.  Cheese digests all but itself.  Mighty cheese.

- Have you a cheese sandwich?

- Yes, sir.

Of the many photos I took over the course of  many months in Venice, very few have ever been printed.  In that student year I took not individual rolls of film, but one long roll of 400′ of black and white film that I rolled into canisters as I needed it.  What came out is also many hundred feet of negatives, cut into single shooting days, as grainy and occasionally damaged as my self-processing would allow.  But as avid a photographer as I was and still continue to be, it is the hand drawings that evoke not just the place, but the weather – mostly the damp and cold of a Venetian winter and spring.

Not to sound too cliche’, but I drank up Venice.  Its sights and sounds, smells and textures.  No place has ever insinuated itself in me more nor does any place reside so strongly in my memory.  I’m sure in some latent way that waterborne city makes its way into every building I design.  Living now in the arid American West, damp and slimy Venice seems even more of a dream than ever.  Even its name, La Serenissima, is the stuff of late night imaginings, not so much a city as a place/memory, equal parts fairytale and nightmare.  I have never doubted that I will go back there, that its sharp canal smell and filtered light will once again be the stuff of sense and not of memory.

(These sketches, now a bit faded, are from a twenty year old sketchbook -the first sketchbook I carried in Venice and the beginning of a drawing habit.  Some decades later I see these clumsy early drawings with some affection as the first sketches in the first sketchbook in a collection that now has over fifty sketchbooks and folios. )

Bryson has written a number of books, most of whom I would classify as armchair travel lit.  In this case, the territory to be navigated is the house as conceived and formulated in Western Civilization over the last few hundred years.  The book’s chapters are based on the rooms of a typical house – kitchen, dining room, etc. – and plumb the often odd history of the use of the room and its accompanying embellishments.  This kind of gentle deconstruction of the house, room by room, through history, is interesting even if it does, in its own form, reinforce the functionalist view of the house.

The most interesting section so far has been only a brief mention of an aspect of “house” design that I keep finding myself pondering over and is a subtext in a current project of mine.  In Renaissance villas and houses, the drawings rarely define rooms by their function.  Rather than labeling and defining a room for dining or a room for studying, a house is a collection of larger and smaller spaces.  The Italian word for furniture, mobili, gives us a clue about this lack of functional definition – furniture was meant to be mobile and so was one’s occupation of the house.  Rooms were used for reading or sleeping or eating depending on the season and the time of day and the house was not a series of defined stage sets but rather a landscape to be traversed throughout the day and year.

“People moved around the house looking for shade or sunlight and often took their furniture with them, so rooms, when they were labeled at all, were generally marked mattina (for morning use) or sera (for afternoon).”

I admit that I have not yet finished the book, but I think I can recommend it to any one interested in what we mean by a house and how our patterns of using houses are embedded with a fascinating history.  I would especially recommend it to architects making residential projects as both an interesting read and a necessary perspective of the house from beyond the myopic view of the profession which tends to frame a house as merely a aesthetic object.

Part 2 starts with three essential texts on the nature of cities.

Urbanism’s Essential pre-requisites

Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The romantic view of the city. Jacobs is our finest observer of what constitutes a city.

Manfredo Tafuri Architecture and Utopia

The marxist view of the city.  This is a bit pedantic, but still worth slogging through as a companion to the above.

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities

The poetic view of the city.  This is really not about urbanism at all, but is a beautiful, enthralling narrative of the imagination with the city as a character.

and now two other companion pieces, this time on the nature of meaning in architecture:

the meaning of architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz Intentions in Architecture

Like Tafuri’s work, this can be also be tough going but it is the standard Modernist take on architecture and its embodied meaning.  All of Norberg-Schulz’s works are excellent and if only architects could stay focused on these issues instead of being overwhelmed by budgets, schedules and frankly trivial questions of style and language then our built environment would be one we could be justly proud of.

Robert Venturi Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

In all ways the opposite of the above, especially in tone and writing style, Venturi writes largely in response to the cold clarity of Modernism worst reductivist tendencies. It is not as opposed to Norberg-Sculz as you might at first suspect, for each author’s obvious passion for architecture and its meanings is thrillingly evident.

THE ESSENTIAL

Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture

This is the granddaddy of architecture books.  Every architect in the Western tradition has read this.  As there is so much bad architecture, maybe it is the catalyst to all this crap but I don’t think so.  Reading this book connects us all to a tradition of architects from Ancient Rome to Dubai.  You can skip the chapters on how to make bricks or the quality of lime, but you probably shouldn’t.  This is not of practical interest, but it drives home the message that along with knowing which way to site a building to take advantage of amenable winds, an architect’s range of necessary knowledge and hopefully curiosity is both wide and deep.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Natural House

FLW is maybe the only real architectural genius of the last couple centuries.  His list of great works is long and varied, his inclusion and invention of technologies is staggering, his formal and practical inventiveness is greater than a dozen star-itects combined.  His writing however is not so good. But seriously you can’t possibly be an architect, and certainly not an American architect, without at least cracking this book open.  For that matter you can probably substitute a number of other works by Wright: The Future of Architecture, The Living City, or the wonderfully-dated Genius and Mobocracy.  Wright always felt slightly overlooked by the East Coast architecture luminaries, many of whom were European exiles like Gropius and Mies.  If you can get your hands on a copy, take a look at Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio, the book that established his genius and that so strongly influence those same European architects that later shunned him. (I say “shunned” because Wright was such a prick to these guys that they didn’t want to have anything else to do with him.)

LeCorbusier’s Towards a New Architecture

This is probably the best primer in what is Modernism and LeCorbusier, in his stridently ego-maniac way, meant it to be so.  He sets out some rules, describes some influences, shows some lessons.  He doesn’t not so much teach as scolds and this burns with the absolute assuredness and righteousness that makes this a book-long manifesto.  If architecture in the twentieth century has a relentless, avenging angel it is LeCorbusier and it is raw here in the book, much more so than in the frankly more humane buildings he managed to get built.  There is a relatively more recent translation by John Goodman, actually titled Toward An Architecture, that is much better than the older version I read in school and chock full of better notes.

Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows

If you haven’t read this or if it has been a long time, you really should take a look at it.  For us trained in basically the American/European world, just Tanizaki’s insights into his own culture are illuminating.  But it is his humanity, his humble observations of the qualities of man-made spaces and objects that hold the deepest lessons.  If nothing else, re-read the chapter on the Japanese toilet – a far cry from the high-tech, spectacles of modern Japanese toilets.

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

This is as more about literature than architecture, but Bachelard’s thoughts about the memories of spaces and how they effect us have lingered longer in my memory than anything else I have ever read.  In my quest to make a poetic architecture, this is the foundational text.

and a couple of well-worn essays:

Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin is at his best here in this thoughtful, complex study of what makes a work of art, or architecture, worthy of appreciation.  The writing is a bit stiff and you owe it to yourself to not stop here in your reading of his works.  Both collections of essays, Illuminations (with the intro by Hannah Arendt) and Reflections are great starters.  I highly recommend Hashish in Marsailles in Reflections as a wonderful and humorous insight into one of the most interesting intellectual characters of the twentieth century.  Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project may be the world’s most influential, not-completed, work to fascinate architects.

Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime

Absolutely essential reading and absolutely hilarious.  Okay, maybe not in a laugh-out-loud, milk-out-the-nose way, but this may be the funniest painfully-serious essay about architecture ever written.  Especially noteworthy are Loos’ thoughts about tattoos and criminals – take note before you get inked – this is what your grandmother will think.

Next week:  Part 2, with some guest commentary.

If you have any suggestions and thoughts, send them in and we’ll see how they parallel.

Vertical libraries are the humanistic analogue of the Gothic cathedral.  The stacks of books rise up to the heavens, knowledge infinite and divine.

These libraries make the most of the stacked ranks of shelves, one upon another.  There are steps, ladders, stairs distributed around for the use of the small and insignificant humans.  The books are increasingly out of the reach of people and become their own luminous stars, more rising up to the sky than weighted down to the earth.

I especially like the way there are always step ladders in these libraries to reach the upper part of shelves.  These have some nostalgic cache but their need is curious.  I am just over 6′ tall and I need to use these in many libraries.  Like building shelves only as high as someone could reasonably reach would be out of the question.  It is not like a home library where you only have space for one set of bookshelves.  Clearly the uppermost shelves must contain the “best” books.  I think this “larger-than-life” shelving is yet another way that books are arranged to overwhelm and impress, not provide access.

In the end, it is these vertical libraries that intrigue me the most.  I have often thought that Wright’s Guggenheim would be best as a library, a continuous spiral of books, ascending or descending, stretching from the earth to the heavens.