Construction progress - up the canyon, August edition, part 1

The majority of the heavy framing is done on the new house construction on our project up Sunshine Canyon.

As every architect knows, the project, while decidedly unfinished, may never look so good again.  When a building is no more than its simple framing, the rafters, joist, beams and posts artlessly revealed, it displays a purity and clarity that is only sullied as the construction progress further.  To leave it like this would be a kind of beautiful testament, but would result in a folly, not a house.

And of course, at this stage, the house is still becoming.  It is slowly transforming from some lines on paper and a vision in the architect's head, to a thing of weight and heft.  The wood studs and rafters smell of the material's origins, most likely the forests of Canada.  The beams are still a bit rough, not yet sanded and finished they are are much still the product of a tree as a part of a house.

With each passing day, the structure rises and the spaces take shape.  Each new element lends scale to the house - a window opening, a door threshold that will become the portal of so many comings and goings.

From the ashes of their beloved house, the new house slowly comes into being, one piece at a time. Down in an instant of fire, the house will take about a year to build anew.

A Field Guide to Ugly Houses - the taxonomy

I look at a lot of ugly houses.  No one who has a really beautiful house needs my help as an architect - they are willing to live with a too small house or a dysfunctional house because it is so well-suited to its site and well-composed.  No, as about half my work is in renovations and additions, I see awkward houses with garage snouts sticking out front, Cape Cods with a cornucopia of bad additions, and lots and lots of ranchburgers. What has struck me over the years is that house-ugly comes in distinct forms.  There is a veritable taxonomy of classification for the types of ugly, bad, horrible and embarrassing houses.  So, having reviewed a few years of work and observation, I am putting together

The Field Guide to Ugly Houses

a compendium that will hopefully answer the age old question, "I know my house is ugly, but how is it ugly?"

Ugly comes in many forms.  There is ugly by design, which has many subcategories, like ugly by designer's ego over reaching their talent:

Or ugly by design as identified in Style Abuse Disorder (SAD):

There is also of course ugly by neglect.  This can be the common neglect of maintenance or the more exotic ugly by way of codes and zoning (the sidewall bulkplane requirments and solar shadow restrictions lead to a kind of lopsided wedding construction):

And there is the ubiquitous neglect by way of finances that allows for only the most basic enclosure without any attempt to be even vaguely appealing:

As I said, there are many types of ugly, in fact a kind of Seven Deadly Sins of Ugly or maybe a Period Table of Ugly Houses.  Over the next few months I am going to post various chapters in this taxonomy, copiously illustrated with houses from around my town, Boulder, Colorado.  Below is a quick sketch of the evolving classification.  Feel free to send me your suggestions on what I have missed.

Ugly by Neglect

This is probably the most common of all forms of bad housing.  The reality is that housing is a commodity and there has always been a lot of money to be made by skimming on the bottom and providing only the most essential shelter.  The cost of a house is "location, location, location" as we are repeatedly told, so anything beyond that like scale, proportion, color, massing, style, etc. can be left on the cutting room floor.  And when the most base builder model house is then left to linger without even minor upkeep and repair, the problem is compounded.  Taken to the extreme, this kind of ugly becomes its own kind of beautiful, but that discussion may be for another day.

• Financial
• Maintenance

Ugly by Ambition

• Architect's Ego:  We have all seen this and some of us architects may be guilty of it.  It is especially the case with young architects that a great commission early in one's career can end up being a design dumping ground for all those thoughts and ambitions left unresolved from architecture school.
• Owner's ego: a corollary of the McMansion syndrome, this class of ugly is the Sin of Lust - for more, for fancier, for a kind of over the top extreme that doesn't coalesce into magnificent atrociousness, but sits uncomfortably on an embroidered velvet cushion, with a lace border, and a ruff.
• Scale: the McMansion syndrome.  Usually executed by builders "responding to the market", these houses sprout 30' high atrium entries and more roof forms than you can fit in a bag of ugly.

Ugly by Material Abuse

• Fake materials:  artificial stone, thin-brick, plastic wood, the list is almost endless of the ways we have "improved" traditional building materials.  Their uses can be carefully concealed or awfully exposed, and when combined a dangerous alchemy can take ugly to new places.
• Not-understanding-the-problem:  Using materials in unconventional ways can be thrilling and lend a kind of meaning to house.  Done in a slap-dash way by inexperienced hands or, more likely, a late-in-the-game material substitution can send a house careening off course.
• Priorities - perfume on a pig.  Sometimes it is best to just leave ugly alone.  Powerful ugly, really big, overwhelming ugly, can not be bought off with trinkets and flattery.

Accumulated Addition Syndrome (AAS)

Many simple middle-class, turn of the century houses have a kind of builderly charm.  They are unpretentious and finely scaled and now too small.  So, over the years a kitchen was expanded, a bedroom was added, then the kitchen was expanded again, until the original house is laid seige with poorly conceived and ill-fitting additions.  It looks like Accumulated Addition Syndrome (AAS).

Ugly by Laziness

• The laziness of low expectations.  Build it quick, build it cheap.  If the windows don't align or if a part of the roof crashes into another part, just do it.  And fill it with caulk.
• The laziness of architects and/or builders is notorious for a lot of houses that are really, really close to being lifted out of the realm of ugly, but a little more time and care were not extended to the project.  Another pass at the window schedule or another review of the drawings could have resulted in small changes, changes that don't cost anything, that would have elevated the house from the B-list.

Style Abuse Disorder (SAD)

Tuscan/Tudor or maybe contemporary/farmhouse/traditional.  The marketing slogans of housing developments often portend the ugly to come.  In an attempt to appeal to many, multiple styles are thrown together.  I know mash-ups can be fun and often liberating, but they can equally be a mess.  This is fusion cooking architecture gone bad.  Often this is the fault of builders and developers, but architects are guilty as well.  If a client wants a contemporary house with a Tudor tower, a few long nights in the studio may be required to meld these ingredients.

Beautiful Ugly

Minor infractions can be corrected.  Even fairly large flaws can be accounted for.  But really ugly can occasionally slip into beautiful.  Of course, one person's Beautiful Ugly is another person's nightmare neighbor.

As I said, if you have any thoughts about categories and perspectives that I have overlooked, send them my way and I will see how we can fold them into the taxonomy of

The Field Guide to Ugly Houses

(by the way, if I have used your house to demonstrate ugly, I sort-of apologize.  As an architect and former owner of an ugly house myself, I realize that sometimes you just own an ugly house and that's all there is to it.  You could make it better, but you don't.  It's okay, its not your fault.  Or maybe you love it. Either way, to illustrate my points here I had to use someone's house and if it's yours I apologize. Just one man's opinion anyway.)

Construction progress - up the canyon, July edition

The beginning of every construction project starts with destruction.  We demolish or excavate before we build.  The first signs of progress are large piles of deconstructed lumber or mountains of dirt that have to get trucked off or re-used in some way.  Foundations are poured and drilled, some framing is done, but nothing really strikes you as 'beginning' like the erection of the first walls of the project.

Slowly, over a number of days and weeks, walls are framed, tilted up into place and secured, gradually forming the spaces of the building.  The syncopation of the studs, the clear expression of the structure becomes apparent.  Often the building framed looks better than anything else that is to come.

When enough walls are finally put into place, you can begin to feel the space for the first time.  Architecture is as much or more about that enclosure of space - its proportions and energy - than it is about what the building looks like.  At this early stage, with all the studs exposed, the building often feels smaller than its finished descendant.

And of course, the views from the rooms are framed.  Before windows, before sashes and glazing, frames and thresholds, there is the pure framing of the view that is revealed in the simple structural frame of the house.

Construction progress - up the canyon

One of my ongoing projects is the construction of a new house up Sunshine Canyon just west of Boulder, Colorado.  My clients, long-time residents, lost their house in the Fourmile Fire last Fall and we are trying to replace the spirit and energy of that house while making a new design that is better suited to aging in place concepts.

With most of the home's spaces located on the main level, the spaces flow into each other and connect the interior and exterior in a seamless panorama.

I will be posting construction photos as we progress over the next year and add some thoughts about the design process and the techniques involved in building in such a fire-prone area.

Architecture:  M. Gerwing Architects, Mark Gerwing project architect

Construction: Cottonwood Custom Builders, Marc Anderson project manager

Structural Engineering:  Gebau, Inc.

what a house should be - part five - or what it's not

First, it is not a product.

Second, it is not a function of the architect's ego.

Third, it is not a function of the bank's commodification

And last, it is not a machine. When LeCorbusier first said "a house is a machine for living", machines and technology were seen as liberating, not the soulless leviathans that they have come to be in popular imagination.  He didn't mean by this that it should look like a machine, even though his early designs certainly had a marine- or machine-like imagery.  He meant that it should be designed to exactly meet its function.  A blast-furnace looks the way it does because it makes steel.  No added flourishes, no anachronistic stylings.  His manifesto was likewise one of liberation, shedding the baggage of so many Victorian drapes and over-wrought iron.   So a house is not a machine, because "machine" has become too loaded a word.  But it should be as liberating and certainly as finely crafted as LeCorbusier's original humanistic vision.

what a house should be - part four - it should be fun

Architecture is serious business.  Not only because architect's take themselves painfully serious, but because for folks who choose to go down the path of designing and building a custom house, it is probably the most money they will ever spend.  Tends to be a bit sobering.

A house is the daily landscape of your life.  You wake up to the walls and ceilings, floors and doors, that are your house.  You go to sleep under the stars, but under that ceiling as well.  Your house ought to be fun.  I don't mean funhouse fun, although that can be done.  I mean that as much as we often endeavor to create a house that is a safe refuge in the world, it should also be a place of joy.  We don't have a lot of tools in our belts to pull this off as architects - the sun streaming in a window, the smell of blooming trees wafting through a kitchen, the solid satisfaction of a door closing.

A house can be whimsical.  We have all seen those crazy structures, hobbled together by some singular, driven, local wacko made of license plates or aluminum cans or auto tires.  But that ephemeral whimsy can be made of simpler stuff - a series of little ledges that hold glistening snow or scuppers that cascade the occasional shower.

A house made of only those things would be tiresome in short.  But without these little moments, designed lightly, a house is not much more than a big motel room without even the magnificently awful painting over the bed.