New technology and the richness of history

I have been thinking a lot about how to better harness new technology and new media resources to bolster interest in historic preservation and the changing architectural faces of our cities.  I have written before about the potential of posting QR codes that allow visitors to easily access a rich and deep array of information that a typical sign can not accommodate.  This has now been taken into the real world application of a building in Tokyo that displays QR codes on its facade that can be read by a smartphone and that accesses the building users Twitter feeds in  real-time.

I have been very impressed with some recent augmented reality apps, like Sara,  that allow you to use your smartphone and its camera and gps technologies to envision a proposed building on a site.  By downloading the app you can simply point your smartphone like a camera at a specific location and along with the actual building or site that you are seeing, an image of a future project from the same vantage point will appear on your phone's screen.

I have yet to find someone that has applied this technology to envisioning the history of a city.  You may have seen the history slider in Google Earth's satellite imagery that lets you scroll through historical aerial images of a city and gives a great understanding of the incremental development of a given place.  If the 3D buildings in Google Earth were tagged with their date of construction, you could do the same with the 3d imagery, scrolling through the decades, watching buildings rise and fall and new construction rise again.  I think this would be an amazing resource and break the veil of history that often impedes our understanding of time and place.  It is so very difficult for folks to believe that the buildings and spaces around them have not always been that way.  We all know this intellectually, but without visible evidence of previous eras it is impossible to really inhabit the city through time.

Beyond this capability in Google Earth, I would like a developed app that would integrate all those freely sourced 3D buildings built online and place them within an augmented reality app.  Anywhere you walk through the city you could enable the app and hold up the phone and from the same vantage point, be able to scroll through hundreds of years of urban growth and transformation.  The perspective on current projects that that kind of a technology would engender would radically change both architects and the public view of what our places have been and will be.

Locally there are two programs that begin to approach this kind of real time/place historical understanding using current tools.  Historic Denver's Denver Story Trek allows people to choose from a range of designed tours or the ability to create your own.  As you walk, bike or drive around the city, a text message prompts you to information about a given site, both its architecture and social history.  Free audio files can accompany your tour and help bring to life each site.

Another program, run by the Denver Public Library's Western History & Genealogy folks, called Creating Communities, harnesses a vast digitized archive of images and information to map neighborhood histories.  Their work consists of a Google map containing building histories and an iPhone app, Creating Communities, that allow you to search your neighborhood and access information about its city while also on the move.

Can we expect to see my proposed app some time soon?  Well, there's not much money to be made in preservation, so unless there's so nice grant out there for a pilot project, probably not.  If you know of such a thing, let me know.  If you have further thoughts on how to apply this technology to architecture and preservation issues, I would love to hear that as well.

churches, rural south central Virginia

Frank Lloyd Wright's Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan

This last summer I had the opportunity to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of Steelcase furniture, and the magnificently restored Meyer May house.  Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909, the house was designed and built just as Wright's marriage was falling apart and he was soon to depart to Europe to escape the scandal and notoriety.

Like the Robie House, designed in Chicago just a year or two earlier, this house sits on a residential corner lot and shares with as well Wright's signature hidden entryway and layered horizontal composition.  Even though the Robie House is more dramatic, being more decidedly long and narrow, the Meyer May house actually does a better job of addressing the spatial situation of the corner lot.  However, this does lead to a fairly complex interior with spaces driving in two directions, maybe anticipating the more pinwheeling designs of later houses.

You can see many of the typical Wright details here - the flush vertical joints and deeply scored horizontal joints of the masonry, the wide cantilevered, hovering roof planes, the delicate leaded windows.

And, like in some many of Wright's houses built during this phase of his career, a complex and devoted attention to some rather fussy details like these Living Room windows.  One can't help but speculate that this heavy grille work on street-facing windows was as much defensive as decorative, a spill-over from Wright's domestic troubles, keeping the world at bay as much as providing light and views.  I have often thought that his growing predilection for the increasingly hidden and obscured entries of houses of his from this period are also an echo of the growing demand for privacy and avoidance of the public gaze that eventually surfaces in Wright's full retreat from Oak Park and Chicago to rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.

In any case, the Meyer May house is not only an excellent and under-appreciated work of Wright's from this period, it is also one of the very best examples of a period restoration that feels complete and careful without feeling like a museum (even though it is of sorts).  Steelcase purchased the home in 1985 and painstakingly restored the entire structure including sourcing many Wright-designed furniture and textile pieces to fill it.  And best of all and a great testament to the new owners, the house is fully available for tours for FREE, no reservations needed.  Thank you Steelcase for the great renovation and most importantly for allowing it to be viewed by anyone.

brick and sustainability - some places I've lived

Below is a series of photos of some of the places I have lived.  (Thanks to Google streetview for most of these).  Not everyplace is there – a house in Louisville when we first moved there, an apartment in Venice, a couple of places in Lexington, Kentucky – are missing. A question came up regarding masonry houses and the West.  Most everything built here in Colorado for single-family residential work is wood frame construction with wood siding, even though the environment out here is not kind to wood (too much high-altitude sun and snow).  I was wondering how common that was in other places and decided to take an albeit bias survey of a least the places I have lived.

Of the 20 places shown here, there are a couple of brick suburban houses in Louisville, KY; a brick dorm and some brick apartments in Lexington, KY; a couple of brick townhouses in Boston and a couple of brick houses in New Haven; some brick apartments and a converted storefront in Chicago.  The lower images are from Colorado:  a small frame house in Boulder, a log cabin in the mountains above Boulder, a wood-framed townhouse and then a partial brick suburban house in Boulder.

Maybe because I was obviously drawn to apartments in old, brick houses as a young adult, they’re heavily represented.  But overall, I think my experience is probably not that different from many others, moving from suburbs to cities and back to suburbs again.  It may be a regional expression or possibly a recognition of the age of building stock, but the paucity of masonry in the West is striking.  The number of older, quality buildings in Colorado is pretty thin, but this may not be the region as much as the relative youth of most of the buildings here.  I’m afraid in an society with increasing demands to make short-term capital, the idea of creating a building to last generations has simply died away.  Even the older, brick suburban houses that I grew up in Louisville have a solidity and permanence that a wood-frame and sided house can not invoke.  So I think looking at these images, it is not the region nor the suburban/urban/rural nature of the structure, but rather its date of construction that has most influenced the use of materials.  Hopefully with a  renewed interest in the environment, we can recognize that the most sustainable building is one that lasts the longest

on the boards, February 2011

Our workload has started off with a bang compared to the last couple of  years.  We are working on a number of really great projects - a couple of new houses, a couple of renovation/additions, a couple of master plans and a few other things.

As I mentioned in a previous post, a number of our new projects incorporate universal design principals for clients who are either current wheelchair users or anticipate reduced mobility over the next decade or so.

In light of the massive downturn in architectural services that we have all experienced over the last few years, it is thrilling to have the office full of drawings and models of ongoing work.  Along with our office picking up the pace, a number of previously unemployed architect-friends of mine are working again and contractors are no longer singing the blues as fervently as in past months.

It is quite a luxury to be selective about projects again, to engage in projects that are interesting and challenging and not necessarily all about paying the bills and keeping busy.  The recent upswing in inquiries has focused my desire to choose projects based on the site and the client, not the size or cost.  We'll see how they develop ... stay tuned.