The Writer's Desk

"I look at these photographs with a prurient interest, the way that I might look at the beds of notorious courtesans." John Updike, in the Introduction to Jill Kementz's The Writer's Desk

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 Joan Didion

We have worked on a number of rooms that are creative work spaces.  Some of these have been as "home offices" located within a house or condo, and some have been stand-alone studios or buildings.  In each case, we hope to find something intriguing about the nature of the work that can help inform the design beyond the simple functional requirements of light and space.

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 Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Writer's Desk, by Jill Krementz,  is a series of brief glimpses into the natural working habitat of a number of noted writers.  Each entry contains a single photo of the writer at their respective work spaces along with a short comment from the authors on their writing spaces or process.

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 Robert Penn Warren

As someone who designs these spaces for creatives, these are fascinating insights.  I think you have to avoid the too-easy temptation to analyze the rooms and contents, the arrangement of furniture and objects, as some kind of treasure map to the author's meaning and muse.  Working with clients over the years has shown that these spaces are far more complex in their relationship to the work than a brief visual survey reveals.  However, in the quotation above from Updike reveals, our fascination is not easily assuaged.

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 E. B. White

I have to also admit that I have spent time changing, altering and modifying my studio space far more than any other room I have occupied in a lifetime of houses and condos and cabins and apartments.  It is true that you can create almost anywhere - so many designs have  come to life on my dining room table between the saucers and plates.  But you can only push aside your drawings at dinner time so many times before your  need for that other space, that small creative retreat, becomes a necessity.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Lebbeus Woods, 1940 - 2012

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Lebbeus Woods passed away last week.  It is almost impossible to overemphasize the impact that this "paper" architect has had on the world of architecture.  A long-time professor at Cooper Union, he directly influenced generations of students at one of the most important schools in the world, during its most profoundly influential period.  But it was his publications with their hauntingly beautiful images that have become some of the most seminal works in post-Modernist era.

His drawings of re-imagined urban landscapes are stunningly beautiful even in their dark, vaguely dystopian vision. His most widely read work, Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act, is so visually striking that its message is easily lost amidst the revery of the drawings and models on display.  But make no mistake, Woods' work was not just so-much eye-candy.

Crucial question - what is an inconsistent pattern? The cities of an experimental culture will be formed on inconsistent patterns, and will produce them. These will be their chief products, the result of a way of living driven by the need for clarity on shifting landscapes of the ephemeral.

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I attended undergraduate and graduate schools of architecture during the height (or maybe bottomless, self-flagellating, pit) of post-structuralist architectural theory.  Architects, insecure in their creation of forms, looked under every academic, esoteric rock to find some secure impetus to justify the nature of the work - imposing forms upon others.  I won't go on about the absurdity and idiocy of the near-abandonment of 3,000 years of architectural history and practice for the tawdry attractions of French philology.  It happened, I witnessed it, even dipped a toe in it.

"Politics of construction: who designs, who builds, who owns, who inhabits?"

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Woods' work shattered it.  He, among others, placed architecture back in the realm of buildings, the act of building, and the meaning of actually making buildings.  And the images he produced cemented that argument with an outrageous glorification of forms, color, plasticity and imagination.  Though his vision of shattered cities and expropriated spaces were often dire and almost always devoid of people, what comes through is the joy and beauty of making.  That may sound contradictory to what I said above, but it is not.  Great architectural ideas have never been planted so firmly as when they are not merely texts or images, but the synergistic amalgam of both, like LeCorbusier's Toward an Architecture and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

I would avidly place Woods' Anarchitecture in that lofty neighborhood.  He was the most important and influential unbuilt architecture of the last century.  Not too bold a statement I think, and not befitting enough of his animating vision.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Container House Taking Shape, by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

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The shipping container house that we have been working on for quite a while has finally started to take shape.  The first box was delivered on Wednesday, lifted high above the neighborhood and swung into place on the second story.

Another container will be set in a few months immediate to the north of this one, making a long line with a small terrace between.  A very challenging building site, hemmed in with zoning requirements to a maximum building envelope of 20' wide by 145'  long, suggested the use of these long, narrow boxes.  The homeowner's desire for a eco-conscious house, including these re-purposed containers, drove the much of the design as well.  The restrictive solar shadow ordinance here in Boulder allowed us to build up to only 10' wide on the second level.

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The final outcome will be sustainable design that incorporates the owner's solar panel array and stretches north to south over 140'.

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The lifting and setting of the first box was quite an event, bringing out curious, and somewhat concerned neighbors.

The amazing views from this new second level will reveal Boulder's famous flatirons to the south and the city dropping off to the northeast.  The neighborhood of two- and three-story homes will be joined by this construction, long and narrow, of shipping containers anchored in their new port.

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by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Las Mesitas, southern Colorado, photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

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These are images from a roofless church in Las Mesitas, in southern Colorado on the western edge of the San Luis Valley.  I have been going there over a few years now and I am hopelessly fascinated by the stark simplicity of the place and its robust, stoic presence.

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Photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

Some Pretty Homes of Boulder

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While doing some research for a new project, I ran into a these photos of some of Boulder's older houses in a weekly newspaper called the Daily Herald.  This article is from 1908 and is really more of an advertising/marketing piece for the local realtors than an actual act of journalism.

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"Boulder is not a manufacturing  town - it's  just the place to live, a deslightful city with admirable schools, several sanitaria, a great university, a fine theatre, admirable sewer system, fine churches representing all denominations, a Carnegie Library, a $40,000 YMCA building and $125,000 hotel, provided with the purest water known, a most equable climate, an electric street car and lighting system and five newspapers (two of which are dailies having their batteries of linotypes) and several college publications to tell the story of her wonderful prosperity and to give that publicity without which no community can prosper.  Boulder has six trains each way to and from Denver and is in close touch with her neighbor towns of the north."

As most current local know, the regional transportation provider, RTD, has promised a Boulder-Denver train over the years and taxed the residents mightly for its eventual construction.  That date of completion is now something like 2035, where we will be back to the original route of 1908.

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"The city is not only building rapidly, but it is building well. Many beautiful residences are being erected. Retired capitalists are choosing this ideal little city and building magnificent homes with the intention of enjoying the remainder of their lives in this ideal garden spot."

"...settle here to enjoy the superb school and health advantages of a modern up-to-date, beautiful little city, whose boast that it is "The Place to Live" seems to be accredited by a never ending tide of immigration from the great West. The say the county could be walled in and become a self sustaining community with all the creature comforts."

The above quote is as true today as when it was written in 1908.  Boulder has indeed become a beautiful spot where retired capitalists choose to enjoy their remaining years. And our "wall" is an expansive green space ring around the city, making an ideal natural setting, but also limiting the housing supply and driving up the costs to lofty heights only retired capitalist can climb.

Daily Herald real estate office

Realtors in Boulder no longer sit around in smoky offices, in fact they are more likely to be seen pedaling around the city with their prospective clients.

As you can see from the images above, many of Boulder's older homes have been wonderfully preserved and at least from the outside, seem remarkably unchanged. That is certainly the case for the two houses shown and undoubtedly have benefited from a robust preservation code and historic district designation.  For as much change as Boulder and every town has seen over the last 100 years, so many things remain the same - the marketing of the city's real estate and the endless attraction of a beautiful home on the hill.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

description of place - Cheever

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Most writing about architecture, beyond the usual documentary descriptions in professional magazines, involves the kind of communication that is broadly encompassed by the term criticism.  It is the stuff of professional critics, some good, some not so much, and leans toward the academic.  Most of its best examples are engaged with writing about cities - their history and future, how they work and what they mean.  Inummerable books and articles by Jacobs, Goldberger, Sorkin, Lange and so many others are thoughtful descriptions of buildings and most often the cities in which they reside.  I read a lot of this stuff because I am an architect, a particularly geeky one when it comes to my own profession.

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However, as an architect, I find that precious little of this kind of writing relates to what I do as a designer of spaces for people to inhabit.  I don't design cities and have a fair skepticism about the hubris of anyone who wants to.  For the most part I am interested in how a space feels, about how it will become the stage of events yet to play out, of personal dramas both joyful and tragic.  To communicate this to my clients I use all the tools that architects have at hand - models, both physical and computer, drawings and sketches.  However, with even all of these mediums employed, I do far more verbal descriptions of future spaces than anything else.  I try to describe the spaces, how it looks and feels when you walk in, when the sun dips below the horizon, or how room sits in winter and summer.  My clients listen to me far more than they review drawings and peruse models and they form their impressions of the nascent building largely from these verbal descriptions and their trust in me.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"

attributed variously to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Miles Davis. (My bet is on Zappa, but I'd love to hear it in Miles' gravelly voice with a few expletives thrown in.)

Maybe the same can be said about writing about architecture, or at least the kind of verbal description of a place that I am talking about.  Maybe it is doomed to failure.  Or maybe, in the hands of the best writers, the description of a place can be such a rich evocation of both the physical setting and the psychological landscape, that architects ought to pay attention.

Chapter 5, The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever

"The heart of the Wapshot house had been built before the War of Independence, but many additions had been made since then, giving the house the height and breadth of that recurrent dream in which you open a closet door and find that in your absence a corridor and a staircase have bloomed there.  The staircase rises and turns into a hall in which there are many doors among the book shelves, any one of which will lead you from one commodious room to another so that you can wander uninterruptedly and searching for nothing through a place that, even while you dream, seems not to be a house at all but a random construction put forward to answer some need of the sleeping mind."

I don't know about you, but I have been in that house, that imaginary place that is both very precise and detailed, but generic enough to connect to the memories and imaginations of so many readers.  In my mind I can place this house in New England, Cheever's landscape, and smell the slightly briny air and moldy books and drying boots.  I can place it in the arid West, and hear the warp of dry floor boards and the hum of crickets outside beyond the lawn once-tended.

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So much of the task of architect, if not engaged in the purely ego-driven game of  "making architecture", is in a sense trying out these descriptions on our clients and seeing how they react.  How do the descriptions of the spaces of the building evoke the memories and imagination of the clients and mesh with their expectations and desires.  I think most architects do this unconsciously, reading the client's reactions, judging their responses and readjusting the spaces in their heads in a series of rapid tweaks and revisions.  I think we would do it better if we read a bit more and were more conscious of how great writers evoke the same responses in ourselves, to give ourselves over to the descriptions of someone else of other places and our own tugs of memory and desire.

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