Haertling's Menkick House for sale

Menkick House 02

An astute client pointed out that the magnificent house on Green Rock Drive, the Menkick House, by Charles Haertling, is up for sale.

Completed in 1970, the Menkick House is among Haertling's finest works and ranks alongside his Volsky House, Benton House and Willard House as one of the finest examples of late Modernist Organic architecture in the United States.  Placed against a large, vertical rock outcrop, the Menkick House dramatically highlights this with its expressive horizontal emphasis.  Heartling wisely located much of the plan of the house on a lower level so that the overall size of the house does not overpower the presence of the rock and from the street a great balance is achieved.

Menkick interior 01

Menkick plan

The plan and building form are reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian work in the middle period of his career and the house's use of the large rock outcrop is a vague allusion to Wright's similar use in Fallingwater.  However, Haertling's house sits rather comfortably within a relatively dense suburban neighborhood on the edge of the foothills.  It is difficult to imagine Fallingwater with any adjacent structures and in fact the later guest house designed by Wright does seem to crowd the expansive plan of the original house.

Menkick House 01

Menkick aerial

One can only hope that the new owners will treat the house with the respect it is due.  As the building sits in Boulder County, just outside of city limits, it does not come under the potential protection of the city's Landmarks Board.  The County's record of preserving Haertling's work is a bit blemished with the allowed demolition of the albeit much compromised house in Eldorado Springs designed by Haertling and Tician Papachristou.

From the street, the house looks to be in excellent condition and I know some work has been done on the interior over the years.  Someone will get to own a really great piece of not only Boulder history, but one of the finest houses of its era in the United States.

Some photos 'borrowed' from the great website on Haertling, Atomix, and ModMidMod.

San Luis Valley - chapels

San Luis chapel 03

I have finally gotten around to processing some more film from a very rewarding trip to the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado last year.

San Luis chapel 04

San Luis chapel 02

San Luis chapel 01

I will certainly be going back there again this year, later in the Spring when the heavy snows have past but before the major snowmelt swells all the local rivers and streams.  I hope to have much more interesting historical and cultural info on the various locales  than in the past.

midwestern vernacular - agricultural buildings

elevator 01

a photographic ode to the grain elevator

elevator 02

ag buildings 01

elevator 03

elevator 04

I

I have written in the past about silos and grain elevators and the attraction of the their stark, pure forms dominating the midwest landscape.  A couple of hundred years ago, English gentlemen would race their horses to the next church steeple poking its head above the lanscape, the steeplechase race.  Driving across the flat midwest, you can almost always see another grain elevator in the distance, like so many grand mileposts or sentinels guiding your way across the landscape.

The cost of building

spreadsheet

Housing construction has been in the dumps in the last few years.  This means that not only the large, market developer home builders are out of work, but so are the small general contractors and all the associated trades - plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc.  Things are pretty dire but they do seem to be picking up a bit as of late.

Not that you would know that here in Boulder.  Our fair city is such an insulated bubble of wealth that regardless of the current economic situation, the dominant paradigm is still to place as many roadblocks to development as possible.  There seems to be an attitude here that any development at all, even small, carefully sensitive growth, will destroy the high quality of life that is so prized.  You may not have much sympathy for wealthy Boulderites looking to build multi-million dollar homes, but remember that most of the money that is expended on that kind of a project stays here in the region in the pockets of tradespeople.

The dominant anti-growth agenda is of course reflected in the permitting and review process.  The folks in the various City departments are all doing their jobs administering the code to the best of their ability but the extraordinarily high cost of a permit is the most transparent indication of this anti-growth agenda.  If you aren't particularly welcoming to new construction what better way to demonstrate that than to set the fees for building permit at an astronomical cost.

To demonstrate:  building permits and fees for a single-family, 3800 square foot, new construction house on an empty lot in Boulder as evidenced by one of my current projects:

• Building Permit fee: $3,439.oo

• Growth Management Allocation fee: $26,000.00

• Plan Check fee: $860.00

• City Sales Use Tax: $8,525.00

• Electrical Permit fee: $232.00

• Mechanical Permit fee: $1,115.00

• Plumbing Permit fee: $119.00

• Residential Energy fee: $84.00

• Capital Facility Impact fee: $6,028.00

• Utility-Water, Irrigation & Fire: $300.00

• Water Meter: $544.oo

• Water Tap fee: $222.00

• Wastewater Permit/Inspection: $296.00

• Wastewater Tap fee: $201.00

• Plant Investment fee, Water: $10,602.00

• Plant Investment fee, Wastewater: $4,136.00

• Plant Investment fee, Stormwater: $5,603.00

• Grand Total: $70,306.00

I don't know what permitting costs are in other places.  I do know that it varies widely from small rural towns to larger cities.  I even know that many cities and towns, in the light of the recession and as impetus to create jobs, have temporarily suspended permitting fees.

This permitting cost total is approximately 6% of the hard construction cost and you will notice that the single largest item, the Growth Management Allocation, is alone $26K.  Pretty effective growth management I would say, not dissimilar to a country club where the buy-in cost is enough to keep out the riff-raff.

Fortunately there is still work being built in Boulder and of course I am part of that process in a very small way.  In general I rarely work for large developers and for my projects, for individual families, this cost is staggering.  The high cost of entry into the Boulder market has lead most development in the direction of large, expensive speculative projects that can effectively recoup some of those fees in a way that smaller, more moderately priced projects can not.  Most Boulderites lament the few large houses that do get built but they have created a system that nothing small and modest can be built as an alternative.

Midwestern churches

midwest church 02

As I have talked about in a couple of recent posts on the flatness of the Midwest, a simple building standing in that relentlessly horizontal landscape is a powerful, singular moment.  This is even more apparent when it is a church, rising upward to heaven, a determinedly vertical building contrasting the vast horizon.

midwest church 03

Unlike other parts of the US and Europe, in the Midwest, the steeples of the surrounding churches are not the dominant markers of the landscape.  The grain elevators and silos far surpass the height of even the most ambitious chapel.  But what these local churches lack in the hierarchy of height, they make up for with a kind of bold simplicity and frank determination.  Wind-swept and storm-battered, the verticality of the church buildings is defiant, taking on the rain and wind and marking a place of gathering.  Though the Midwestern houses may seem to hunker down below spreading roofs, the churches make a claim for community, tethering a point on the ground to changeable cloudy skies above.

midwest church 01

The church is a fixed point in an otherwise often endless landscape, without definition.  These churches have no desire to "work with the topography" or "meld with the surrounding landscape" or any of the other tropes of place-making architecture. The grain elevators and silos may be taller and more audacious, but the steepled church has a dogged, determined optimism to make a place, to gather a space around it, and hold it for a community to gather around.  They don't so much work with the landscape as define it.

midwest church 04

mississippi river mansions

Cairo map

On a narrow spit of land, at the confluence of two mighty rivers, lies ancient Cairo.  Not the one in Africa, with pyramids and camels, rather the one along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Cairo, Illinois.

Cairo has seen better days, the 1920 population of 15,000 having dropped below 3,000 souls.  Once a shipping center strategically located at the two rivers, the city later developed as a rail center, consolidating its status as a bustling nexus of commerce.  During this period of prosperity, merchants and shippers built themselves grand mansions and protected them with ever-increasing levees.  However, as commerce increasingly hitched a ride on trucks and roadways, ever more efficient and larger bridges were constructed across the Mississippi River, by-passing Cairo.  This loss of trade and a history of violent racial interactions isolated the city and like many cities in the turbulent late 1960's lead to white flight and subsequent further loss of businesses and population.  Rapid economic decline soon followed and with it came its usual fearsome playmates, crime and poverty.

Cairo mansion 02

Cairo mansion 03

Cairo now is a shell of its past former glory and the old mansions and former Custom House still haunt the city's architecture and memory.  Even when restored and blessed with careful stewards, the grand houses of the wealthy businessmen only accentuate the despair of the place.  Hundreds of years after the Fall of Rome, when cattle grazed in the Forum and moldering ornate capitals and pediments lay half-buried, what did the contemporary Romans imagine of their past? Were they proud of their heritage crumbling under their feet or burdened by it, unable to synthesize their current plight with the desperate melancholy of a past long since gone.  And once mighty Cairo, by-passed by technology and progress, torn apart by race intolerance and violence, has to live with the mocking edifices of past glory glaring with unapproving eyes, fully restored in body but not spirit.

Cairo building