The Great Gear Dilemma

mudroom_garage

Boulder is known as an outdoor enthusiast's kind of town.  Almost everyone I know has a plethora of outdoor gear - multiple bikes, skis, helmets of every configuration, packs and bags, tents, stoves, and the occasional kayak and canoe.  Largely this equipment has usurped the car from its usual haunt in the garage.  It is a rare Boulderite who can actually fit their car in their garage because of the ever-expanding collection of bikes if nothing else.

Inevitably all this gear starts to overwhelm the garage and starts to slowly make its way into the house.  It starts with a few pairs of ski boots in the mudroom, which is already choked with daypacks, dog leashes and coats and jackets in every configuration of breathable, wicking, wind-stopping fabrics.  This is especially true for families with school-age children and their additional collections of school packs, musical instrument cases, sports gear bags and the odd science fair project that can't find a home.

For additions and renovations we are always directly engaged with providing space and corralling all this gear and making not so much a mudroom as a tack room.  The Colorado mudroom is minimally 10' x 15' and consequently larger than some bedrooms.  It certainly is not the quaint little niche just inside the door of a Midwestern house designed to hold a pair or two of wet galoshes.

All of this however does not save the garage and we increasingly are discussing with clients the real function of these spaces.  You can store a lot of bikes in a garage but you certainly can't get to the townie when you want to take a quick trip to the store because it is buried behind a peloton-worth of other cycles.  We are talking about adding doors to garages, lots of doors, on every side of the space, to access all the stuff.  And, for that matter, really changing the nature of the room from a garage-converted-to-gear space to its own dedicated room with its own requirements.   This room can access outdoors in a couple of locations, is probably heated, certainly has a floor drain and most likely a work sink.

If we can get this all figured out for each homeowner and accommodate the average 2.5 bikes/person storage requirement, we might even be able to give the garage back to the car.  As long as you still remember you have the bikes on the roof before you try to pull inside.

loads of new construction

It has been a very busy number of weeks here with quite a few projects in construction and a few in development stages.  The postings to this blog have been few, but the activity here has been breakneck. The project shown above, in South Boulder, has been moving along and is another joint venture, design/build effort with ACI.  The project consists of the almost complete renovation of the main level and the addition of a second story.  An extremely tight set of constraints from our local Solar Shadow ordinance and Bulk Plane requirements largely determined the only possible location for the second story and we worked diligently to integrate the new and old and avoid the "wedding cake" look of stacked levels so common with second story additions.

Mintzer 01

Shown above, the new house we have under construction in North Boulder's Dakota Ridge neighborhood has passed the half-way point.  Built by Cottonwood Custom Builders, it is coming together nicely and with the installation of final finishes we are getting our first glimpses of final building held in our imaginations for so long.

Simmons 01

Simmons 02

The model images above are from a project in development as we are getting ready to submit documents to the County for approvals.  It is a cabin renovation and addition in the mountains west of Lyons, Colorado for a couple's use as a vacation home.  The new work on the existing building consists of a series of slightly skewed additions and a writer's shack that re-orient the building to views of the Twin Sisters mountains outside of Estes Park.

Battaglia 01

Also in development we have a new house for a young couple in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado.  Facing the challenges of an extremely steep site, this project's design has been a careful study in carving out space for living on the slope while minimizing impacts as much as possible.

HLF 01

The interior model view shown above is for a project with the exact opposite site conditions as the previous project.  This project is a newly constructed hunting lodge on the flat, damp banks of a large lake in southern Minnesota.  We have been studying old photos and documents to glean the essential characteristics of these traditional hunting camps and the vernacular architecture of the prairie.

Gelband 01

The last update I will throw at you is the recently commenced construction for a house in Boulder, Colorado partially constructed from shipping containers.  This project has just broken ground and delivery of the first 53 foot long container will soon take place.  Our client's desire to build as sustainably as possible along with severe site constraints suggested the use of the shipping containers and it is very exciting to see this innovation finally get a try-out here in Boulder.

Gelband 02

The London Olympics and the clubby NBC set

NBC Olympics Set

I have admittedly been spending entirely too much time watching the Olympics in the past few days.  And, once again, I am distracted by the little in-studio vignettes that run between the actual sporting events where Bob Costas sits and talks with various guests.  These are endlessly aggravating as we all know that we are missing significant portions of the athletics we are really tuning in for, not to mention that the whole time-delay issue makes these wee, precious chats particularly annoying.  And, like the past Winter Olympics, the set is more interesing than the folks parading around in front of it.

After looking at these staid bookshelves and comfy club chairs, my conclusion is that NBC said, "hey, the Olympics are in London, let's make the set into something old schoolboy Englishy" and hence the television studio is formed into a kind of London Gentlemen's Club.

Brooks's

Bob is sitting around making small talk with his colleagues (how did they let a woman in here anyway) in the library of the club.  I'm surprised not to see some stolid waiter with glacial but velvety quiet pace walking around with a silver tray of drinks.  Or at least some dear-old-boy octogenarian snoozing quietly in some massive wing chair in the background dreaming of Empire and the white man's burden.

Of course this is all more reflective of what some tv execs think Americans need and want Britain to be rather than what it actually is.  These gentlemen's clubs still exist, but I think the images referenced by the set designers have more to do with televised portraits of Sherlock and Watson sitting around Baker Street or something out of Downton Abbey or Brideshead.  In fact, if you look closely, you will see a decanter of something amber sitting next to Bob on a small table.  Mind you, no open books on the table, just laid aside as someone pops in for a chat, just the prop tomes on the faux mahogany shelves.

Architects of days gone by

Lundberg

Overly fussy designs:  check

Haughty pose: check

Little glasses: check

Lots of attitude: check

Some things never change.  Mr. Lundborg's visage was found in a 1908 newspaper down at the Carnegie Library for Local History here in Boulder, Colorado when I was doing some research on a project.  The buildings shown above are still standing, although greatly modified.  Mr. Lundborg shall stand forever I believe.

architect's pet peeve no. 16 - mansard roofs

bad mansard 2

It is probably unfair to throw all of these in a single despicable category, but the abuses in the last 40 years are so egregious that only a complete moratorium on all mansard roofs will suffice to still the repulsion of most architects.

A mansard roof is unusually a full story of a building masquerading as a part of a roof.  It is a gambrel/hip roof hybrid that brings the apparent mass of a building down a story or two by letting the "roof" start much lower down than the interior floor levels would typically indicate.  Handled well they are a pleasing architectural solution to a vexing problem.  Most often however, they are not so deftly deployed and instead of reducing the apparent mass of a building, they increase it with a gargantuan, bulbous forehead. These are not attics with quaint dormers sticking out, but rather  massive toques with eyeholes sitting on top of otherwise rather elegant buildings.  Or maybe not so elegant.

Eisenhower Executive Office Building

The term come from French Baroque architecture as often conceived by Francois Mansart, however many of the best examples come from the Second Empire period.  Its popularity may stem from attempts to copy those examples or as a tax/code dodge - many municipalities tax a building based on the size from the ground to the base of the roof.  Building height limitations also occasionally measure to a roof's midpoint.  In both cases, the definition of "roof" is pressed with a mansard, arguing that the sheathing in roof materials meets the requirements.

bad mansard 1

The pet peeve stems from the truly horrible examples foisted upon the public in the last few decades.  Mansards are almost always incompatible with more modernist design language and they take a very able hand in any scenario.  So, for the sake of the collective built environment, I am going to advocate for a moratorium on mansards until at least 2020.  By then maybe we will have figured out how to use them to enhance a building, not draw attention to its flaws.

Unless of course, you can make it over-the-top mansard-awesome:

mansard modern

Loveland Feed & Grain, interior

fg01

I have written in the past about the efforts to save the Loveland Feed and Grain building.Novo Restoration, the group trying to save the building, sponsored some tours inside the building this last weekend and I took the opportunity to climb through this hulk, dragging my kids along for the ride.

The building was used initially as a flour mill and later as a grain storage facility.  Surprisingly, its massive exterior bulk did not hide an equally massive interior space.  The inside of the building is a labyrinthine collection of bins and chutes, vertiginous stairs and rusting augers. The walking space between the bulky wooden beams and bins was minimal as befits a pre-OSHA era building.  The inherently explosive nature of so much dust and milling makes the continued existence of this kind of building a rarity.  There was rudimentary safety system with a series of dead-man pull wires running through the various rooms and process rooms, but the ability to quickly navigate out of the wooden maze in case of emergency makes you think the safety system was there more for the equipment and building than its inhabitants and operators.

fg int 01

All of this is to say that the plans for renovating this building and finding new uses for it will require significant, drastic changes to the interior.  This is also the case with the City of Boulder's Valmont Mill buildings.  Both of these buildings were formed to execute industrial processes that are largely extinct.  Preserving the shell of the building without its inner workings seems like hollowing out its past, leaving only a slight echo of its once vibrant past.  However, a cursory tour of the interior of these places quickly demonstrates their near-incompatibility with anything approaching public uses.  Should we mothball these places, equipment and all and allow only restricted access?  Should our desires to preserve the past include spending public money to save buildings that, if made safe for the public, no longer exhibit the vitality of the place?  Are we preserving what the building looks like or what it is?

Valmont mill 05

I love the idea of making art and exhibit spaces, black box theatres and performance venues in these structures, but to do so may eliminate so much of the buidling's essential inner workings that we ending up preserving the building shell like so many oddities in formaldehyde-laden jars.

Valmont mill 09