in Louisville

I am spending a week in Louisville with family and I slid out for a bit to take a look at a couple of buildings that I remember fondly from growing up here. The first building is really only a small structure, a park gateway that was located across the street from my Dad's office when I was little.  We only had one car, so on occasion my sister, Mother and I had to come downtown to pick up my Dad.  If we were early or he was still on the phone, we would spend time in this small park across the street, it would be called a pocket park in today's parlance.  The entrance to the little park was on the corner created by a small, white hyperbolic paraboloid.

hyper01

Of course for the early 1970s, this was pretty cool stuff for a kid, sort of space-age and strangely naturalistic at the same time.  It is surprisingly small, maybe 15 feet across and most intriguing for a small boy, you could scramble up is two dropped vertices and sit up in the saddle.  I don't how often we visited this park, but this simple structure made a strong impression on me and I was very glad to see it is still there, a bit in need of some fresh paint, but still gamely holding down that little corner as larger hospital buildings arise across the street.

Hyperbolic paraboloids are particularly fascinating from a construction point of view as these double curving surfaces can be made up from all straight members rotating around a pair of axis.

Hyperbolic-paraboloid

I'm sure I didn't know that then, but when it came time in an architectural structures class to write a research project about a specific project type, in typically geeky fashion, I jumped at the chance to learn a bit more about the shape of the little park sentinel.

image

The other building in Louisville that I felt I had to visit was the downtown main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library.  In fact, it was probably on trips back from the library that we were sitting in the little park waiting on my father to finish something up.  The library looms large in my memory not just as an institution with a world of eye-opening books and an especially fascinating globe in the children's section, but also as a building itself.  Even though a much more modern addition had been added on moving the main entrance away from this neo-classical facade, my memories are filled with hanging out amongst these fluted columns.

lfpl02

Like fluted stone columns anywhere, they are oddly hard and unforgiving and yet smooth and tactile sensuous.  But just looking at them reminds me that it was the coolness of the stone, especially in the concave shadowy flutes, that I found most satisfying.

The interior of the building has changed a lot, the children's section sensibly moved to ground level.  However, with that move kids no longer have to tread up the cool marble stair, holding on to the over-wrought iron rails and gaze incomprehensibly at the frescoes of Froebel and Herodotus.

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I guess this made a trip to the library a fairly solemn affair, but I don't remember them as such, maybe their frequency muted the stoic marble and vaguely military iron railings.

Of course it only occurs to me now that these two structures were in some ways so different and yet so alike.  I could write a number of comparisons and contrasts, metaphors of their style and construction that were so instructive to a budding architect or subconsciously absorbed to later bloom in drawings and models.  That however is mere projection, more an outcome of too many seminars and graduate school presumptions.  These buildings were part of a weekly circuit of my family, encountered by chance and remembered through repetition.  In my own self-absorbed way however, I am awfully glad they are still with us.

Colorado

Barn interior 01

house interior 01

house exterior 01

house interior 02

thru window 01

Photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

warmer climes

sky and sea

As the weather in Colorado is heading toward more much-needed snow, I am longing a bit for the sun and warmth of warmer climes.

These photos were taken by me over the holidays in the Florida Keys.  The Keys are a stringy set of islands connected by the Overseas Highway, like so many necklace beads.  Each island is just barely over sea level and the buildings are predominantly one- and two-story piles.  Consequently it is a landscape dominated by the horizontal layers of sea and sky.

wall

You might imagine that this would inspire similarly horizontal architecture, not just low and single-story stuff, but an architecture that celebrates the horizontal planes like the Prairie School work in the Midwest.  Alas, quality architecture has not really arrived in the Keys.  With the exception of the older parts of Key West, the built environment is uniformly cheap and composed largely of inexpensive variations of painted concrete block.

sea and sky

I'm sure there are architects and property owners down there trying to up the game a bit, but it will be a long task.  Unlike the almost limitless prairie, the potential of building down in the Keys would inevitably face the pressures of expensive and scarce land to build upon.  The dueling pressures of a relentless horizontality of the landscape and the efficiency of vertical building would be a rich conflict from which a quality architecture could grow forth.  As the old cliche' goes, difficult sites make for good architecture.

photos by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

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

JD

 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.

IBS

 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.

RPW

 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.

EBW

 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

description of place - Cheever

sangre de christos 01

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.

venicealley01

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.

barn03

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.

parking lot 01

Architects of days gone by

Lundberg

Overly fussy designs:  check

Haughty pose: check

Little glasses: check

Lots of attitude: check

Some things never change.  Mr. Lundborg's visage was found in a 1908 newspaper down at the Carnegie Library for Local History here in Boulder, Colorado when I was doing some research on a project.  The buildings shown above are still standing, although greatly modified.  Mr. Lundborg shall stand forever I believe.