Photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

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

Photo by Boulder architect Mark Gerwing

M. Gerwing Architects has been in existence for six years as of April 1st. No foolin’. In that time we have executed a number of interesting projects, ones that benefited from that remarkable alchemy of open-minded clients, intriguing sites and managed budgets.

(Photos of projects by Boulder architect M. Gerwing Architects)
Of course, along the way, like most practices, we have seen a few projects that did not get built. This is sometimes due to the vagaries of the national economy, sometimes a change of mind on the client’s part, but most often it is evidence of never really finding the proper alignment of a property owner’s goals and their budget. Nine times out of ten we can identify this within the first week or so of a project, but at times it is more elusive and only reveals itself further down the line.

So while I am proud of our achievements over the last six years, it is difficult for me to simply shake off the vision of the projects that might have been.

It is however in the nature of architects to look to the future. We are charged with imagining a thing-yet-to-be, a vision of not just a building, but the lives lived within it, the human drama that our buildings set the scene, draw out the landscape, create the stage for the action to ensue.

For a house there is almost always a simple division between public spaces and private spaces that can be established. Conventionally the bedrooms and bathroom and sometimes office are more or less private and kitchen, living room and dining room are more or less public.  For each client, there will be a different attitude toward the relative public/private aspects of these spaces with some clients drawing little, or no distinction between these categories.  These relationships are also of course influenced by fashion, family structure and the shifting relationship of parents to children, and family to society.  In his Ten Books on Architecture, Alberti spoke of these same relationships and the nature of the public/private distinction.

Of course what begins to make a project particularly interesting is when the client’s notion of this public/private relationship is altered in some way.  I have had clients that consider the family room very private, a sanctuary for only the immediate family.  Other clients consider this a party room for all comers. (After Frank Lloyd Wright’s very public marital scandals, it is probably no coincidence the entries to his houses become increasingly hidden and private).

For as much as different forms of media have possibly broken down and subverted a sense of privateness within a home, the distribution of relationships between rooms still remains a fundamental architectural problem.  That wireless communication has become so dominant only increases the tension of public/private as media devices and computers are no longer confined to a single office or study space.

Increasingly the spaces we design are in private/public flux.  There are many larger rooms that have smaller niches and little window seats where a child can be doing homework online while other siblings are watching a DVD and parents are emailing the office. What is striking is how similar this kind of room reminds me of  the Victorian era parlor where an open rooms contained a piano in one corner, a window seat for reading and a small setee for conversation, all simultaneously occupied.  The mid-century house with a single room dedicated to table or a television seems to be fading in favor of the room whose space is not dedicated to single function.

a window seat/bench as a part of the larger room

The above photo is from a large renovation and addition we did a few years ago and is a bench over storage drawers, projected outward to the view of the mountains.

Like sitting in a coffee shop and reading the paper, the house is increasingly becoming a place to be in private while in public.  I almost always try to find opportunities within the structure of  the house and family to find smaller, more intimate spaces that are still open to the larger room.  The best place to study these relationships may be not a house at all, but the design of restaurant booths and banquettes.

Arugula Restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, designed by M. Gerwing Architects with a long, open banquette in the main dining area on the right and smaller, more intimate booth seating closer to the bar on the left.  You might be able to see that the booth tables and booths are also up one step from the rest of the restaurant, making a bit more compression and giving a better view over the other diners.  The booths here project inward from a smaller, more protected edge.  This private-while-in-public situation is very popular with restaurant patrons, although the lack of flexibility is often frustrating to the proprietors.

As I mentioned, the conventional notion of a room dedicated to a single use – dining room, bedroom, etc. – seems to be withering as we find ourselves multi-tasking in every room.  In a sense, this makes for more responsive, multi-tasking rooms, not unlike the frontier cabin where a single room served every family function, public and private.  With an open mind and a willingness to challenge conventional notions of domesticity, homeowners may embrace these concepts and simultaneously build smaller, more sustainable buildings that better reflect the multi-dimensional lives that we increasingly inhabit.  The public-private binary gives way to a more subtle crafting of a full spectrum between those extremes lived out is a single room.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

The tried and true (and not so efficient):  forced air systems.

These systems are really centered around their ductwork.  Of course there is a furnace and air handler or fan, to push the hot or cold air around the house.

Pros:  This system uses the same air handler to push both the cooling and heating requirements around the house in the same ducts.  This greatly decreases the cost of  the system and this lower cost is what makes these systems the default solution for most houses.  And all the floor-mounted grilles are a great place for losing stuff.

Cons:  maybe too many to list.  There is draftiness with all the air blowing around and the noise of fans and heat exchangers cycling on and off.  Multi-speed fans and zoned ductwork greatly increase the efficiency of these systems but come with often considerable cost increases.  The ductwork running around the house has to be coordinated with the structure to avoid too many unsightly dropped soffits all over the house and the proper sealing of ducts is critical to maintaining the systems functionality.

The luxe (but with some complications):  radiant heating

Hydronic radiant heat and fresh air systems with something for cooling (see cooling systems below) are quite nice and deliver heat to the lower half of the room via the floor, where most activity occurs.  The system combines a boiler, usually gas-fired, and an extensive system of plastic tubing embedded in the floor to heat up the floor surface.  This heating is greatly enhanced if the floor’s mass is increased by encapsulating the tubing in a bed of concrete.

Pros:  the system is quite efficient and perfectly quiet.  It retains its heat well and nothing feels quite so nice on a cold day as warm floors.  The system of tubing can be zoned without too much trouble.

Cons:  the initial installation cost, especially with the concrete subflooring, can be considerable. Accommodation has to be made for small manifolds that usually mount in wall cavities with access panels for each zone.  The overall system can be slow to heat up and cool down depending on the thermal mass of the flooring system.  The performance of the system is also a bit dependent on floor surfaces and finishes.  And of course this is a heating-only solution to the HVAC problem.

The alternatives:

1.  air source heat pumps – inexpensive and a bit loud, they are good for moderate climates, not so good when temperatures drop below 40 degrees F.

2.  ground source heat pumps – not dependent on outside air temperature, but relatively expensive to install and often slow to respond to changing temperatures.

3.  solar panels – hydronic and photovoltaic – these are really energy systems not truly HVAC equipment, but their use along with radiant flooring or other systems can greatly reduce purchased energy usage.  These vary widely in costs with changing rebate programs and can have significant visual impacts.  And of course to be efficient you need to have good year-round solar gain.

4.  evaporative cooling – in low humidity areas, simply blowing air over water and into the house will drop interior air temperatures.  They are very inexpensive and provide a steady stream of fresh air into the house and are very energy efficient.  However, they need to be properly placed, usually high up on a building (for the cooler, denser air to fall in the house) and have significant visual impact.  And, obviously on days when the humidity might spike up, these systems may hardly work at all.  A fairly good cooling-only option in Colorado.

5.  wood and pellet stoves – Clearly these have become more efficient with the recent introduction of catalytic converters to reduce pollution and quiet fans to distribute heat.  However, they are usually single location devices and do not distribute their heat evenly around a house.  They are also take up space and need more constant attention for fueling, including the associated mess of pellets and wood.

6.  ceiling mounted electric radiant panels – this is basically electric resistant heating and works the same as the electric baseboard listed next.  However, these panels are ceiling mounted and do not pose the same furniture placement issues as baseboard heaters do.  Another advantage of these panels is that they can be easily zoned so that each room can be efficiently and individually heated.  However, as most electricity is still produced by coal-burning plants, they efficiency of these panels is greatly compromised.  And, of course, this is a heating-only solution.

7.  baseboard heating – hydronic and electric – these can be relatively inexpensive and easily zoned but as they run around the room typically create problems with placing furniture.  Recessing them in the wall makes for a very clean installation but may compromise the amount of wall insulation.  Of course, like the radiant panels above, they are a heating-only solution.

8.  passive solar heating – If you live someplace with sunny but cold winters it certainly would be dumb not to take advantage of some of that winter solar gain.  How much you do so may be very dependent on your house’s orientation and views.  At the simplest, the use of passive solar techniques can provide summer shading of windows which allows winter sun to heat floors and walls and decreases the heating load required of other systems.  Very aggressive use of passive solar means creating thermal mass inside the house to absorb heat during the day and then release it at night.  These are “systems” that require some interaction with the homeowners to open and close windows and ducts and at their most efficient drive the basic form and shape of the house into a solar machine rather than a home.

9.  natural cooling techniques –  this is really a series of techniques and design considerations that can be combined to greatly reduce or eliminate the need for energy-input cooling for your house.  They do not work for all houses in all locations and, like passive heating, can begin to determine the physical shape of the house.  At a minimum, natural cooling lets in cool air at the bottom of the house and evacuates it at the top with either passive cooling towers or whole house fans.  The key to all these techniques is good air circulation throughout the house and the ability to move hot air out of the house. And, like the passive solar solutions above, these techniques usually require the active, daily participation of the homeowner – opening and closing vents and window and transoms – to operate the system.

The Big Problem

The nasty secret about all these methods is that calculating precisely the potential energy use of the building for heating and cooling is notoriously difficult.  Much of this stems from the base assumptions of the calculations and the use of degree days.  Degree days are the historical number of days when a building will need either heating or cooling multiplied by the difference between the outdoor air temperature and the ideal indoor air temperature (usually 65 degrees F).  It does not take into consideration the level of relative humidity on comfort nor the solar gain inside the house from the sun.  Obviously with our conditions in Colorado these two omissions are a major problem.  But what is worse is that the historic degree day data that is relied on by design professionals does not take into consideration a very common climate condition in Colorado – warm days that may need air conditioning coupled with cool nights that may need heating.  The degree day takes the average high and low for the day and compares it to the ideal temperature and assumes that difference for a full 24-hour period.  This greatly underestimates either potential heating or cooling loads required for a building to maintain the indoor ideal temperature.

This inherent flaw in the degree day methodology does not mean that every energy design professional’s recommendations are void, but it does mean that a lot more work has to go into the design of a given building than might be otherwise needed for other areas of the country.  In the past, the most common flaw associated with HVAC design for houses we have worked on has been the under-calculation of solar gain within the house.  This has occasionally come from the lack of window shading – an architectural problem.  However, due the desire of a client to have a certain view, predominantly western views, no amount of window shading via overhangs will suffice to cut out all late afternoon direct summer solar gain.  Only adequate cooling methods will help overcome this intense solar gain.  These may be any of those listed above, but they will be needed for short periods of time and the beauty and drama of large panes of glass capturing spectacular views must be offset aggressively or the heat build up over the course of the summer will drive the indoor temperature gradually and inescapably upward.

Some Recommendations:

The first is to recognize that knowledge is power and that you should not skimp on purchasing good monitoring and control equipment.  I don’t mean that you have to have expensive computer programs with sensor modules, but certainly a 24-hour, 7-day, multi-event programmable thermostat is an absolute necessity.  These are less than 50 bucks and will go a long way to help you customize your heating and cooling based on occupancy and will certainly save money on energy bills.  A step up from this would be to install a real-time electrical usage monitor which will show you your energy usage of your HVAC system along with all the other sources of electrical usage in the house.  Multiple studies have shown that just knowing what and how you are using energy will change behavior and save energy.

So, what to do about choosing an HVAC system?  This is an impossible question to answer in general and depends very much on the type of building, its orientation, energy costs, and perceived comfort level.  A good architect ought to walk you through these options and the many other systems and hybrids available.  Ideally a mechanical engineer is brought in to figure out the costs/benefits of each of these systems for your application.  However, as this is often prohibitively expensive, a well-qualified installer may be able to be a good team member along with the architect and a HERS rater to help you to determine the best approach for your house.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

These photos were taken by me over the holidays in the Florida Keys.  The Keys are a stringy set of islands connected by the Overseas Highway, like so many necklace beads.  Each island is just barely over sea level and the buildings are predominantly one- and two-story piles.  Consequently it is a landscape dominated by the horizontal layers of sea and sky.

You might imagine that this would inspire similarly horizontal architecture, not just low and single-story stuff, but an architecture that celebrates the horizontal planes like the Prairie School work in the Midwest.  Alas, quality architecture has not really arrived in the Keys.  With the exception of the older parts of Key West, the built environment is uniformly cheap and composed largely of inexpensive variations of painted concrete block.

I’m sure there are architects and property owners down there trying to up the game a bit, but it will be a long task.  Unlike the almost limitless prairie, the potential of building down in the Keys would inevitably face the pressures of expensive and scarce land to build upon.  The dueling pressures of a relentless horizontality of the landscape and the efficiency of vertical building would be a rich conflict from which a quality architecture could grow forth.  As the old cliche’ goes, difficult sites make for good architecture.

photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

New houses and restaurants are projects that allow for the most creative freedom, but it is these difficult spatial re-ordering projects that pose the greatest challenges and result in our greatest satisfaction.  Most of these projects are hemmed in with zoning constraints and building restrictions, but the single largest constraint is often in the minds of our clients.  Very often they have lived in the house for a number of years and although they are frustrated with it, it is very difficult for them to conceive of moving a critical function like the kitchen from one space to another.  They have developed habitual patterns of use that make seeing the forest through the trees extraordinarily difficult.

I found this to be true in my own home renovation.  Even as an architect, while living in the house it was difficult to imagine such a radical notion of demolishing and moving a kitchen across the house.  Sitting with the drawings in front of me it was clearly the right move to make, but standing in the house it seemed daunting.  And not just because of the associated cost and complexity that such a move would add to an already trying project, but because I had frankly become so used to getting my coffee and cooking so many meals there.

It is our habit that whenever we are faced with this kind of project we always run through a few exercises that test the possibilities of just these kinds of moves.  What if the dining room flipped positions with the living room?  How about if the entrance was on the other side of the house?  Or, as in a recent project, what if the kitchen moved into the master bedroom?

I make it a practice not to talk about the potential changes to a house when I visit the property for the first time.  For myself, it is the space and distance created while working in the studio that will most likely generate the most interesting solutions to a project, not walking around the house.  It seems a bit counterintuitive, but going to the actual site often makes the possibilities of a project less real, the potential of a project diminishes with the distance to the actual building.

In the end, it is a balanced attack on a project that provides the best answers and brings up the most interesting questions.  As an architect, you have to go to the building and study it, but you also have to go to your studio and take it apart in your head.  Architecture is practiced in the real world of walls and floors and dense materials, but it is best conceived in the imagination with paper and pencil, cardboard and glue.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects