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.

Loveland, Colorado

A bit north of Boulder is the lovely town of Loveland, Colorado.  I have often driven through town heading to some local fishing rivers and have recently begun stopping off in town.  The downtown area is a remarkable collection of small town commercial buildings, some renovated, some in bad shape, many empty.  We all have some reliably American nostalgia for "small towns" and that knee-jerk romanticism often blinds us to the very really quality of design of these places.  We tend to see the picture postcard version, with kids on bikes and the local ice cream shop.  Rather than simply driving through and "admiring" but not engaging, I would encourage everyone to actually walk the streets and see and feel the simple design genius embedded in this places.

These commercial buildings are significantly more complex than they seem at first.  The usual relationship of store front, with its lower panel, shop windows and transom windows are surmounted by heavy masonry with punched openings.  But these openings lend an architectonic quality to the building with clearly delineated sills and lintels.  The building is usually topped off with some kind of cornice, completing the building against the sky.  Those simple relationships are so much richer and simultaneously simpler than so many modern commercial buildings or worse yet, the bad pastiche contemporary buildings that try to replicate this pattern without careful study.

Loveland is also home to the Feed & Grain building, which I wrote about in a previous post.

Loveland Feed & Grain

Just off downtown Loveland, Colorado  is the ancient and intriguing Loveland Feed & Grain building.  A many-year preservation and restoration effort has been taking place to find new uses for this magnificent building, expertly documented and researched in Christopher Th0rp's report and headed up by a non-profit and Novo Restoration.

I believe that we should all take extra efforts to try to find ways to save these agricultural buildings from the nineteenth century.  Loveland's thriving arts community has taken a kind of stewardship of this building and there are plans afoot to transform it into an arts complex with adjacent live/work artist's housing next door.

I have written quite a bit about trying to find a Colorado vernacular and folding this in to the making of a kind of critical regionalism for the Front Range.  I can think of no better example of a building to start with and a potential to fulfill.  A semi-public Request for Qualifications went out for the making of the live/work residences and we passionately submitted our team and hope to be involved.  Stay tuned.

(all photos by Mark Gerwing)

Valmont Mill

The City of Boulder owns a significant portion of Valmont Butte, east of town, including the abandonded gold and fluorspar mill.  The entire property is in the County and as part of a intergovernmental agreement, the City has been asked to grant landmark status to portions of the mill and associated buildings.

The City conducted a tour of the facility for Landmark Board members and we got a brief glance into the history of the place.  Walking through the building was fascinating and frightening as only dark, abandoned buildings can be.  Even in the middle of the day in the company of others, this place, with its obscure machinery, broken glass and menacingly dark corners is daunting and a bit thrilling.

Once a Landmark, what will happen with the mill?  To clean it up and secure it for public tours will rob it of its mystery and power.  It is decidedly too dangerous in its current condition to allow access.  Every passage holds dangling wires, shards of glass and rusty metal flanges ready to pounce on the unwary visitor.  The roof is coming off in sections and the entire place is probably a heavy metal contamination nightmare.  To leave it as is, mothballed but beautiful in its decay and abandonment, would shut it off from the citizens who now own it.  Any thoughts on what to do with these monuments to both an industrial past and the notion of the past in itself?

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.

neighborhoods

About a week ago I moved from far south Boulder to far north Boulder.  Not a great distance, but a big change. Most mornings I walk or run with my dog for about 3 miles.  In south Boulder that meant a meandering course through a never-ending succession of suburban tract houses on winding streets to a small lake and then back.  In north Boulder, on the ragged edge of town, the same distance is quite different, in a land with variable zoning and development over many years for many uses.

Starting in our little New Urbanist neighborhood of "mountain Victorian" houses and condos, we travel first past

and even more dense neighborhood, down-right urban in feel, of three-story masonry buildings with residential units above commercial spaces below and then along a creek to a trailer park with its chaotic arrangement of streets and fences.  That trailer park gives way to

an open space buffer of tall grasses with magnificent views of the foothills just west of Boulder to

another neighborhood of little houses and courtyards,  along a paved open-space path.  After a brief sojourn into the dog park, we make our way north through the open space past a few blocks of large, single-family houses in the typical suburban, detached, wide-lawn arrangement.

Our next change of scene takes us past some small warehouses and the city's lost bicycle depot and then

the oddest collection of buildings - a Holiday Inn Express, the domed storage building of the Transportation Dept and the now-abandoned fire department training tower.  From there it gets maybe stranger still as we pass

the National Guard site with its collection of buildings and fighting vehicles which is across the street from the non-profit low-income housing organization and a series of more sheet metal warehouses and garages.  The sheet-metal-shed tour continues as we move

along by the organic peat moss provider, the warehouse strip that contains a dry cleaner, winery and floor finishers, and ends with the kid's fun park.

And then back again to the Holiday neighborhood of new urbanist houses and condos surrounding little courtyards,  founded on the site of the former Holiday drive-in movie theaters.

There are sections of this walk that are undeniably scrubby.  But the vibrancy of all this disorganized flotsam is interesting and makes my small new section of town feel like a city.  And, like nature, the most interesting and vibrant life is found at the edges.