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

SAD 01

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.

SAD 03

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.

space

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As we develop a project we go through a lot of drawings.  Elevations, plans, and details that all describe what materials are where and how they come together.  What we have to try not to loose in this process is the original ideas of the project that are usually more about space than the things that contain it.

I believe architecture is fundamentally about making space.  We compose bricks and steel, wood and dozens of other materials to make a building, but what we are primarily doing is creating space.  Images of architecture tend to highlight materials, colors and patterns and rarely do a good job of depicting the sense of space that is contained.  Imagining, shaping and coaxing that space is a strangely abstract and yet oddly physical task for an architect.  Although space is in a sense the negative of the container, I think for me it has a feel, almost a taste and smell, that I can get hold of, that is separate from the walls and floors, ceilings and windows.

parking lot 01

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.

A Field Guide to Ugly Houses - Gilding the Lily (GTL)

I'm hesitant to even include this category because it seems so mean-spirited.  Gilding the Lily is house-proud gone awry from too much love.  It is  simple said, too much of a good thing.  When I look at these houses I want to go up to them and just snap a few things off, a corbel here, a festooned column capital there.

This a nice house but it careens into the too-cute ditch.  Not to be scrooge, but the holiday wreaths even add to the impression of a house that is a bit too charming for its own good.  A few years from now, if the shingles are allowed to weather to a soft gray, this house may be great.  Right now it's too shiny and new and earnest to feel like a made thing.

This is also a really charming house, a probably late nineteenth century Second Empire building that is a bit too encrusted with multi-painted corbels and trim to allow the original beauty of the house to shine through.  Its not ugly, its just too much.  If you think of a design as a balance between tension and repose, this house is overly caffeinated and is trying too hard to be your friend.

"Old World Charm" is fine enough thing, but it can go too far.  Again the tension/repose balance has been tipped into the overly romantic.  The house seems like it has been staged, not designed and built.  The subterranean drive only conjures up images of tortured visitors sequestered away in the dank dungeon.  "A man's house is his castle" is a a metaphor, not a commandment.

As I said, I feel a little guilty even including this category as each of these homeowners have probably spent considerably time and money on trying to make the best house they possible can.  Who am I to criticize.  But it is a lesson worth remembering, that too-much-of-a-good-thing is an attractive seductress to be avoided.

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)