Earth Day 2011

On this celebration of Earth Day it is tempting to post about all the sustainability efforts and green productsthat we have integrated into our work.  Here in Boulder, the installation of solar panels, integration of geothermal ground source heat exchange systems, advanced framing techniques, etc. are so commonplace that they have become a standard part of every architect's practice.  Sitting on the Landmarks Board, weekly I hear the stories of homeowners upgrading windows and insulation, caulking and duct-sealing.  A blower-door test is used more frequently than a soils test.

These are all important and necessary techniques and processes that should be brought to bear on every project.  But they do not address the most compelling issues of how we inhabit the land.  Not even the quest for greater density and less sprawl and impact speak to what I believe is the most crucial problem of the built environment.  It is the more subtle and less ostentatious attitude of how a building sits on and within the earth that I believe is the most important problem that an architect can tackle.

When we dig into the earth to make a building, and we almost always start with digging, how do we resolve the desire to make a place on the earth with a passion to protect that same landscape.  How do we honor, and maybe even enhance,  the land we initially dig up, blast out and push around?

We could make no building there.

We could make a beautiful building there.

We could make a building that will last a thousand years.

We could make a building that everyday allows the homeowners to see the landscape as integral and necessary to their lives.  We could make buildings that forever sever the man vs. nature paradigm that has marked so much of our attitude to the land.  We could make a building that makes present the wind and sun, that frames the moon and stars and our place among them.

city of steel - Chicago

I was at a jobsite earlier today and was watching one of the tradesman prepare some raw, exposed steel for final finishing.

steel almost always makes me think of Chicago

tough, uncompromising

city of steel, city of the blues

For some reason I have been thinking alot of Chicago as well.

In the Loop, the curbs are occasionally made of steel.  Those same curbs are granite in Boston, concrete in New York and most other cities.  But in Chicago, especially right out in front of the Inland Steel Building, the curb is steel and the concrete is formed to it.  Straight from the rolling mills of Gary to the Loop, Michigan pig iron, forged and fired in the blast furnaces along the shore of the Lake.  Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.

the deficiency of drawings - a dog's view

in light of that last post highlighting some of the best work of some of the folks here in the studio, I would like to be honest and show some of our worst work to date:

Zeke, the faithful but inpatient studio pup, does not like drawings and especially trace paper.  He really feels that is only with a 3D model can you truly depict the essential nature of archtitecture - space.

And he's a wizard with SketchUp.

materials, construction materials, and house form

In case you were wondering if its true that your building materials go a long way to determining a building's shape, I give you the following:

The 1980's historical pastiche of Po-Mo as rendered in the very appropriate foam blocks (not so far from the EIFS of the time)

the large, rambling suburban "Western" McMansion that pervades the front range here in Colorado, as executed in, of course, Lincoln Logs and their associated plastic cousins

and of course the Flemish, stacked masonry house with Dutch tulip garden out front as rendered in Legos.

All of the above design and construction credited to M. Gerwing Architect's youngest studio assistants.

restaurant design - some basics

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, or a little too far apart, lighting with a bit too much glare or that uneasy floating quality of a table sitting without an anchor in the room - all of these quickly turn even the best food into an experience not worth repeating.

Even though every project, every concept is different, there are some basic design considerations that need to be heeded in every restaurant design problem.  I'm going to lay out some of the most basic:

Work flow:  this is something that is of paramount importance to the restaurant owners but virtually invisible to patrons and most architect/designers.  A restaurant is humming - food, drinks and orders are moving in multiple directions and most likely converging on one or two critical points.  It may be a corner around a wait station or a little area around the slide (more about that later), but there are usually one or two hotspots of activity that need careful attention in the design.  I am not talking about the aesthetics of design, but rather the function and utility of rapidly moving people and plates in a very small place.  It is the most crucial of tasks to properly identify where these hotspots will occur and to make sure the clearances, sight lines and circulation all work together. Do not allow the desires of a cool design and the ego of the aesthetics get in the way of solving this most important task.

The slide - most restaurants have a slide, a simple pass through where orders come out to either expediters or wait staff.  This can be a large, generous opening that allows diners to see into the kitchen and witness the creation or a simple pass-thru to reduce the chances that restaurant goers will here all the sometimes dreadful stuff that is said and done in the kitchen.  In either case, careful consideration has to go into where and how the slide operates and what the movement flow around it will be.  The opposite is also true - how do bused plates and glasses come back into the kitchen and to the dish machine.

I'm not going to talk at all about the kitchen itself.  Every owner, every menu has a different set up.  There are salad units or not, fryers or not, grill stations or not, etc.  There is almost always a bunch of stuff that has to fit under the hood and as that hood is just about the most expensive piece of equipment, its placement is of utmost importance.  You are not going to move it.  Same goes for the dish machine.  Most municipalities also require some kind of hood or vent from dish machines, so accommodating this ductwork is the other large placement consideration.  Every owner and chef will have so many opinions about exactly how a kitchen should run that finding some perfect formula is a fool's errand.

Out front of the restaurant there are the obvious concerns of hostess stations and reservations systems (if required).  What is often overlooked is some place where stemware can be polished.  This is usually done by wait staff but should not be too close to any sink in a wait station as the splashing water will just render all the polishing mute.

Now that we have identified the critical functional task, we can address the look and feel of the place.  Obviously this runs the gamut from the quiet intimacy of  fine dining to the buzz and vibrancy of a club/restaurant.  In fact, this look and feel is the easy part.  The concept and idea of the place is reflected in the choice of materials, the crafting of the spaces and hopefully is reflected in the food, menu and every detail.  The critical role of the architect/designer is to be sufficiently removed from the day-to-day operation of the proposed restaurant to have some perspective on the design/concept.  The Owners are usually too overwhelmed to see past some little functional problem that is frankly easily solved with some patience and perseverance from the designer/architect.

Lighting - not so simple and worthy of a separate post, forthcoming.

Sound - probably the number one complaint of most diners is the noise of the restaurant. However, it is often the quality of the sound, not the quantity that is the root of the problem.  This is also a fairly lengthy discussion that is going to be covered in another post.

Finally, I will say a quick word or two about table placement.  Once again this is something that every owner habors different opinions about and that includes the nuances of table size as well.  The best advice on this I can give is to have the owner layout a double (a deuce in the parlance of the trade) including all the napkins, side plates, plates, stemware, water glasses, table cloth, etc. as soon as possible.  It may seem like a small thing compared to trying to comes to grips with designing the whole restaurant, but this little landscape of the table is the diner's most lasting impression and one that should start the conversation about the whole design problem.

And throw is some banquettes and/or booths.  Everybody loves booths.

Venice, place and memory

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 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. )