I have often written about my interest in regionally specific architecture, especially vernacular forms that derive from local climatic conditions or materials availability. I recently spent some time in the Florida Keys and in my typically geeky architecture fashion, spent almost as much time looking at the local historic buildings as I did relaxing on the beach.
Making a house in the landscape
Many of my projects are located on rural, steeply sloped sites around Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. There are a number of challenges that come with these sites - steep, rocky landscapes with often huge winter snowfalls and intense, high-altitute solar gain. These are harsh conditions, but my clients have bought these rugged sites because they love them. They love the views, the lanscape, the place on the earth that these sites make so starkly real.
perspective v. elevation
all architects are intimately aware of the difference between drawing a building in elevation and seeing it in perspective. The mechanistic elevation drawing renders all the three dimensional aspects of the drawing into a flat, single plane. Perspective is much more closely how we actually see real buildings in space - the structure diminishes as it recedes into space, both horizontally and vertically.
Good Housekeeping - the case for renovation/addition over demolition
It has become an oft-quoted adage of preservationists that “the greenest building is the one already built.”
First stated by Carl Elefante and quantified by the National Trust for Historic Preservations Trust's Green Lab study “The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Value of Building Reuse”, this statement and its implications has taken a long time to filter down to the workaday world of builders and architects. In fact, its opposite, “it would be cheaper to tear it down and start over” still holds sway. I have been hearing some architects, and lots of contractors say this for most of my 25 years of practice.
architecture and truth and miscommunicationd, repost
“TRUTH” AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Of the many things that stand between architects and clients, none is so fraught as the architect's quest for architectural integrity which often masquerades as Truth. Please don't get me wrong, I am not asserting that all architects are questing for Truth while our clients really were only looking for a building. I have rarely experienced that.