Author and illustrator's studio addition

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We finally have some initial photos of the author and illustrator's studio we completed earlier this year.

The project consisted of the demolition of an older studio building - small and poorly constructed - and the creation of a new studio with an elevated reading loft.

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One of our goals of the project was to open the studio to the rear yard, infusing the space with light and landscape.  The flood of reflected green light from the lush vegetation spills into the studio and manifests the nature-inspired children's books that are created within.

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The reading loft is a bit of a refuge, a passive space connected to, but somewhat separate from, the more active space of the studio.  The cork flooring of the loft and spiral stair treads lends a delicate, warm atmosphere to the loft contrasting the radiant heated concrete floor of the studio.

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One of the challenges of the project was to make a largely blank wall against the street and express the studio as  distinct from the existing 1890's house.  The old house's porch was greatly compromised by the old studio and the new design pulls the studio away from the house, letting both the new and old construction establish a dialogue of equals.

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The new studio has three large, high clerestory windows which act like dormers, articulating the mass of the studio and echoing the form of the mansard roof of the old house.  The new exterior siding delineates the new from the old, but subtly recognizes the dimension of the mansard shingles with the syncopated rhythm of the new siding.

JP exterior siding detail, square

The new connection to the old house was a peeling open of the existing plaster to reveal the massive stone exterior wall on the interior, re-emphasizing the transition between old and new, literally framing the new with the existing.

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This studio is phase one of a multi-phase project that will include a new interior hall and kitchen/dining extension from the old house into the rear yard.  The completion of the second phase will result in a more compact and intimately scaled courtyard space between the studio and the house, realizing a more complex relationship of live-work that is the day-to-day life of this creative couple.

This project entails a lot of the complexity of issues that we are increasingly attracted to in our work - preservation and new construction, live/work environments, interior/exterior relationships.

Designed by M. Gerwing Architects

Mark Gerwing, Project Architect

General Contractor:  Cottonwood Custom Builders

Structural Engineering:  Gebau, Inc.

"Do I look fat in this house?" Hyper-Attenuated Building Syndrome

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One of the sure-fire ways of designing a cool looking building in graduate school was to be infected with the Hyper-Attenuated Building Syndrome (HABS).  Any project can be made absurdly long and skinny and by violating any notion of “pleasant” golden-section-type proportions, it instantly propels a project from everyday to extraordinary.  Mind you, this was simply grad school students messing around.  However, the Hyper-Attenuated Building Syndrome is no laughing matter:

Japanese architects are particularly susceptible to HABS but it was not uncommon in nineteenth century Europe:

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The most marked sympton is a building  exceeding a 10:1 length or height to width ratio.

In increasingly dense cities, every little sliver of available space is ripe for potential building.  These skinny buildings have room proportions that are a far cry from the typical American suburban house (14' wide rooms with 8' tall ceilings) or even Palladian villas (room ceiling heights equal room widths).  Rather, the HABS spaces are taller than wide - maybe more appropriate for a standing population, on the go.  Maybe not so good for an overweight generation.

I am currently working on a project with an available building envelope of 20' wide by 127' long on the main level and an incredible 9' wide by 127' long on the upper level.  These long, skinny spaces inevitably conjure up vaguely militaristic architectural terms like the shotgun house or enfilade. Or maybe a bowling alley or a house for an archer.

A Field Guide to Ugly Houses - Style Abuse Disorder (SAD)

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It can be hard to decide - this or that, one or two, artisan whole wheat or quinoa spelt (hey, I live in Boulder).  Hopefully there is not a lot riding on those decisions and a mistake can be revisisted or disguised as toast.  A house it not such an easy fix.

I am not an advocate for building in a "style".  Thinking of buildings as simply constructions that you can hang different style clothes on runs counter to my work as an architect.  However, if you don't have an architect or don't want one, maybe the nineteenth century idea of pattern books is a good idea to help you avoid Style Abuse Disorder (SAD).

SAD houses simply can not make up their minds.  Are they Victorian or Craftsman? Ranch or chateau? Let's call it eclectic.

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Even if you are finally building your own house, and you've saved your whole life to do it, it is not an opportunity to put into it every design idea that you have ever fallen victim to.  A bit of discipline is a good thing.

Again, I am not advocating some simplistic, reductionist idea of architecture.  I don't think you should be able to walk down the street and easily categorize Victorian, Modernist, Bungalow, etc. like so many products on a shelf.  In my practice we design each project examining its site, its context, the client's desires, etc. to make a building that inevitably has its own style.  Sometimes this is a bit of a mashup, but I hope one that displays its own kind of inner logic and sits comfortably along its peers.

Ugly by SAD

So, go ahead and throw in that Gothic turret, the Victorian porch and Craftsman trim.  But then take another pass through the whole project and let it simmer a while until these flavor meld a bit.  Or, go over the top and add even more to the point of absurdity, a style all its own.

Fourmile Fire, one year later

A year ago today, the Fourmile Fire was raging in the foothills just west of Boulder.  It started on Labor Day and I was in the studio, working, with the door to the balcony open when I started to smell smoke.  That first hint of smoke grew and when I finally went out on the balcony and looked west, a huge plume of smoke was rising up and beginning to drift into town.  Over the next couple of days, the smoke filled the studio as it did most of Boulder, its acrid presence pervading every nook and cranny.

A year later, we are building a new house for a couple who lost their house.  They have wrangled with their insurance company over the course of these many months and construction only started in earnest a few months ago.  As we are seeing their house go up, the news of many hundreds of homes lost to an ongoing fire down around Austin, Texas is on the news.

Maybe it is the dryness and heat of global warming, or the increased pressure on the urban/wilderness interface, or just a fluke, but these fires seem to be growing in number and intensity.  As the east coast was just pounded by Irene, it strikes me that wildfire is our natural disaster to deal with, like every region has to grapple with their own potential for disaster.  All those small miner's cabins made of stone with tin sheeting for roofs begin to look pretty good compared to the popular image of Western architecture with its exposed timbers and log siding.

This new house, though held aloft by heavy timber beams, is largely inflammable from the exterior and surrounded by hardscaped terraces and courtyard. All these efforts might not have prevented the intense heat of the fire from taking the house, but anything less seems a bit foolhardy at this point.

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.)