after the fire - Sunshine Canyon house completed

SZ LR 01

Eighteen months after the devastating Fourmile Fire swept away so many houses in the western foothills of Boulder, we have finally completed construction on a new home for Lynn and John Stasz.  Like all projects it has been an exciting, frustrating and time-consuming task for everyone involved.  This has been especially true for Lynn and John who did not decide they wanted a new house, but rather that decision was forced upon them.

These images are just some recent snapshots I have taken, not the professional photographs that lends so much to the look and feel of the house.  However, the photos do reveal much of the intentions of the project - to make a home again in the mountains that is simultaneously open and protective, light and airy but also firmly rooted to the earth and sheltered under the sky.

SZ Master Bathroom 03

A couple of weeks ago Lynn and John were able to spend their first nights sleeping up at the house, in the landscape that they have called home for 27 years.  We are really pleased to have been a part of making that happen and look forward to sharing a beer with them on the terrace.  Much thanks as well to Cottonwood Custom Builders.  Marc Anderson, Jeff Hindman and all their crew have taken the care and concern to make a nicely detailed, solidly built house and made the work of me, the architect, a little easier along the way.

SZ Master Bedroom 02

Congratulations Lynn and John and welcome home.

Dakota Ridge Village house, construction progress

MT framing 01

Framing has begun in earnest on a new house we designed for the Dakota Ridge neighborhood in north Boulder.  Weeks of excavation and foundations do not lend much to the physical presence of the building, but in few short days, a flurry of framing happens and the building begins to take shape.

The pace of construction is not apparently consistent.  The largest single physical change happens during framing when the building takes its initial shape and the scale and size of the elements can be clearly seen.  This all happens rather quickly - a few weeks - compared with the overall one year building schedule.  What follows next is the time-consuming effort to put into place all the basic plumbing and electrical and mechanical systems.  This rough-in period often far exceeds the framing and seems painfully slow by comparison.  Weeks go by with very little changes - a pipe here or there, some electrical wires - and the pace seems glacial when set next to the dramatic physical transformation that takes place during framing.

MT white plan

Framing certainly is the most heroic part of the construction phase, when mere lines on paper are transformed into the very solid stuff of beams and rafters, joists and studs.  It is the most exciting for me as an architect as I get to see the first real glimpses of the building on the landscape, the scale and proportion of rooms and the presence of the building.  It comes as a great disappointment to most homeowners that the end for framing is only about one third or less of the project's completion.  It is a marathon, not a sprint.

abandoned buildings

abandoned 01

What is the fascination with abandoned buildings?  There is certainly some attraction to the mystery and faint danger of these places, but I think there are darker forces at work as well.

In abandoned industrial sites, much of mystery of the place has to do with the fearful contrast of the quiet stillness of the place once so vibrant with noise and activity.  Of course this is also a confrontation with the humility of realizing that the promise and productivity of an industry or a hospital can be so swiftly displaced with the simple closing of the doors.  These places do seem so full of ghosts because so often the signs of human activity, the equipment and architectural elements that were designed to be engaged with the body, are still there, echoing the uses that have long since disappeared.  The door knobs and levers, the switches and furniture are all scaled for us, made for us, and are waiting for us to return.  I think this has much more to do with why these places attract us than the recognition of them as B-movie horror sets and gory extravaganzas.

abandoned 03

Of course there is a whole community of folks out there that explore and photograph these places, known as Urban Explorers or Urbex.  Their photos are all over the interwebz and they document more the desolation of these places than their lost grandeur.   These folks and their photos are more akin to dystopian novelists than the pioneering work of the early preservationists who documented the abandonment and destruction of these places as a last desperate attempt to pull the handbrake of so-called progress.

For my part, what is so intriguing about especially abandoned houses are the fading signs of seemingly tranquil domesticity decaying with time.

abandoned 02

These abandoned houses make you feel small, in the way that walking around an unfamiliar city for the first time does.  There is clearly a continuum that you are a part of, that you recognize, but that clearly posits you as just a tiny, maybe unconsequential part of the whole. That is something devastating to the ego and thrillingly liberating, especially for this architect.  It is a kind of existentialism laid bare and maybe even exposed in its own self-importance.

man space

pool-hall-1913-s

The title of this post is not an allusion to a gay bar in Chicago, although I do think there was one with that name.  Rather, I have written in the past about the growing prevalence of and interest in gender specific 'guy spaces'.  I am not an academic and I am wary of stepping into such a dangerous landscape as gendered space, but by coincidence or not, I have been engaged on a couple of projects recently that press the question of male-dominated spaces.

I should say that these are not really "male-dominated" because they are actually male-exclusive places.  One is a fraternal organization, the other is a generations-old hunting club.  Both have that smell of leather and old wood and the unmistakable look of domestic neglect that are tragically stereotypical but abundantly manifest.

Travelers Club London Smoking Room by csabagaba

I have worked for a number of different types of clients for a variety of project types.  As most of my work recently is involved with single-family houses, the majority of clients have been female-male, married couples.  Some have children, some not, some couples are near retiring with adult children, a remarkable number of clients have children during or immediately after construction.  I have had plenty of single clients and recently a number of female-female couples as clients.   In all these cases there have not been any easy patterns or identifiable mechanisms by which you can predict how the interaction of decision-making will take place.  The cultural prejudice has the woman making the aesthetic decisions while the man handles the finances and "functional" issues.  As an architect, that has not been my experience at all, and as a single, hetero-sexual guy with kids, I have empathy with anyone that puts their trust in me to make them a home.  Any attempt to delineate these issues with regard to gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, etc. would have been impossible.  With maybe one exception.

Berghoff, Chicago

Guys seem really embarrassed to say how much they care about how things looks.  They flee from the aesthetic realm with a surprising zeal.  Of course this is not always the case, but as a guy who spends my days and nights designing things, this seems odd and a bit disorienting.  And when your client is a bunch of guys, the owners of a club for instance, and someone has to make design decisions, this can be frustrating.  No one wants to really own these decisions, to strongly come down on the side of sage green in lieu of celadon, or vernacular versus traditional.  A guess it all sounds and feels a bit too fluffy, too close to aprons and doilies and pom-poms for many guys to feel comfortable.

Sorrento mens club, by Lorayn DeLuca

As a result, I have been collecting images of traditional guy spaces that I can show to this kind of reluctant client.  I think it is much easier for them to see an image and say, "yeah, like that", than to talk through the particularities of each material or color and even more elusive quarry like room-feel and atmosphere.  Many of these are old photos, of places long since past:  barrooms and pool halls, club rooms or military institutions.  There is more nostalgia dripping from these images than in any of the countless of magazine photos that other clients send me.  I know it is too simplistic to say it is nostalgia for a by-gone era when men unquestionably and unapologetically ruled the kingdom.  There is clearly a remisniscence of fathers in these places, for fathers maybe more imagined than realised.  You can almost smell the acqua velva, old spice and brill cream mingled with smoke and whiskey.  There is certainly some recognition of these places on my part and that may largely explain my growing collection.  But as a design tool, these photos are invaluable.  And I would never have guessed, back when I was a eager architecture student, that one day I would have a binder in my studio labeled "MEN'S ROOMS".

Pendennis club, grill, 1928

Dakota Ridge Village house, construction progress

Construction is well under way on a single family house we designed for a site in north Boulder.  The lot is on the edge of the city's open space facing west to a series of rolling foothills.  As a corner lot, the house's views are primarily directed toward this westward view with some smaller, more discrete views to the south and east.

As far as the construction progress is concerned, this project started like many with an accurate layout of the house on the property.  Obviously we have figured this all out in the design stages many months ago, but it is always instructive to see the placement stakes on the land itself.  Those simple little stakes lead the way for some heavy-duty work:

Excavation can be a tricky business.  We have a soils report that we rely on to tell us the profile of the subsurface conditions including bedrock and water table issues.  However, only when equipment is actually rolling do we get to see the actual conditions and often have to make revisions on the fly to accommodate conditions or take advantage of opportunities that arise.  In the case of this house, the soil conditions for supporting the house were deeper than originally anticipated so we had to dig a bit further and create taller foundation walls.  Our contractor realized immediately that this deeper foundation could result in more full-depth basement space and less crawlspace.  So after a quick conference with contractor, owner and architect ...

Well, we're still working on it.  The proposed change looks like it makes sense and the cost is not too formidable.  So, while the concrete foundation walls are being poured and slowly coming up to full strength, a lot of phone calls are made, calculators worn down and potential changes are weighed and reconsidered.

It is simple to say that we should just make a really complete and thorough set of drawings and turn them over to a contractor to execute.  In my twenty or so years of experience there is no substitute for being fully involved in the construction process as a reliable partner to the contractor and owner in helping solve issues that inevitably bubble up.  Architects, if you think your drawings alone will get you a good building made, I am afraid you are solely mistaken.  It is the relationships you develop on the jobsite, with your client and with the inspectors, reviewers and every single tradesperson that will result in a building you can truly be proud of.

So the best marker of construction progress is not so much a series of photos or payout requests, but the growing trust and belief in the team itself to execute not just a set of drawings, but a shared vision of a project, a building and a home.