"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.

navigating bureaucratic waters

In case you had any doubt about the role of the architect and how that has changed over time, below is a partial list of the items turned in for a building permit for a recent project: the drawings

Plumbing Fixture Count Form

Greenpoints Application

HERS report (Home Energy Rating System)

ACCA Manual J & D (for proper HVAC duct sizing)

Solar Shadow Analysis

Bulk Plane compliance information

Floor Area & Building Coverage Worksheet

Lot Area Declaration Form

Landscape Plan

Demolition Plans

Soils Report

Engineered Trusses manufacturer's drawings and information

Stormwater & Flood Management Plant Investment Fee Calculation Form

IECC Code Compliance

Growth Management Allocation/Compliance with inclusionary zoning

Development Excise Tax Form

Impact Fee Form

Existing PUD Approvals (Planned Unit Development or platted suburb)

Floodplain/Wetland Development Permit

Steep Slope/Geological Constraint Information

and finally the Building Permit Application

(this amounted to 58 pages not including the drawings)

Needless to say, the drawings represent the design of the project and, with some additional information, will be used to create a Construction Set that will guide the making of the building.  Everything else is the result of good intentions exercised as bureaucracy.  I'm not necessarily opposed to completing all these forms and checklists, but love of this kind of administration is not why I went to architecture school.

All of these submittals certainly do constrain the worst projects from getting built, but not the ugliest or most insensitive.  Unfortunately the worse actors in the residential building game, the bottom-line house speculators, have so dumbed down the making of buildings that the planning and building departments feel they need to babysit every project and try to ferret out the misrepresentations and outright lies embedded in a set of crappy drawings.  It never occurs to code officials that the work that I and many other architects do, is of a higher quality than they can imagine.  Unfortunately, getting there includes more hoop-jumping every year and makes a disincentive for truly imaginative and unconventional work.

In some places, like Chicago, registered, licensed architects, upon passing additional tests and with extensive experience, call self-certify that a single family house meets all codes and will be a safe and efficient dwelling at the very least.  The code officials don't have to act as policing agents for these professionals and it is reassuring that the state that grants us a license to practice actually recognizes that this license actually means something.  That program is not in place here in Colorado and all of our projects and work, and by extension our experience and very selves,  will have to continue to be scrutinized and examined like disobedient schoolboys.

(sorry for the rant. I usually try not to infect the website and blog with these thoughts, but this is really getting a bit out of hand.)

On the drawing board: some recent work

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We are really excited to be working on a number of great projects - good clients, interesting sites.

One of projects in the design phase is a new house for a young couple in Pine Brook Hills just west of Boulder.  The very steep site is challenging and our past experience designing and building on this kind of sloping property is definitely being utilized.

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The design as developed so far, has the majority of the house, the main and upper levels, cantilevered out from a much smaller garage and lower level.  This allows us to build as small a foundation as possible on a site that is fragile and where the cost of foundation construction is very expensive.  The sequence of spaces is slowly revealed as you progress vertically from the entry to the main level, alternating foreground views of the near hillside with dramatic panoramic views downhill of the distant mountains and plains - rocks to mountains, trees to forests, land to landscape.

We have quite a lot of County approvals to get through - Transportation, Site Plan Review, Fire Dept, etc.

Stay tuned.

Robert Adams, images of the American West

New Tracts, west edge of Denver, Colorado, 1974

Currently at the Denver Art Museum is an exhibit of the photographic work of Robert Adams.  Robert Adams grew up in Colorado and is best known for his photographs of the New West - the human impacts on the landscape.  Unlike Ansel Adam's stunningly beautiful images of western landscapes, Robert Adam's images are a combination of the joy and beauty of the west alongside its degradation and exploitation.

Many of Adam's most arresting images are those of the new housing encroachments on the landscape throughout the 1960' and 70's.  The stark, high-altitude light of the Front Range puts into sharp focus the stark isolation of the suburban dream contrasted against the expansive emptiness of the western sky.

Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968

I first ran into Adam's work through the many books of photography that he produced.  The New West, Summer Nights and West from the Columbia are but a few of the more than twenty books of thoughtful, sometimes disturbing, but always beautiful  images.

From the South Jetty, Clatsop, County, Oregon

I strongly recommend the exhibit.  It is simply presented and the images are arresting and intriguing in a way that the books can only hint at.

North of Keota, Colorado, 1969

Robert Adams

The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs

Sept 25 - Jan 1, Denver Art Museum

(all photos by Robert Adams, from What Can We Believe Where? )

the most foreign of cities - Venice

Turner Approach to Venice

Many years ago I lived in Venice for a time.  I was an enthusiastic architecture student from the rolling hills of central Kentucky and my arrival in Venice still resonates with me.  Not so much the first impression or even the first day or two, but that growing feeling of unease and intrigue upon slowly realizing that I am in a place utterly foreign to me.

My travels in the Third World have been few and brief, and I understand folk's descriptions of those environments and their sense of "foreign-ness" when confronted with those cultures.  My fascination with Venice comes not from that kind of cultural displacement, but rather the uncanny feeling of simultaneous comfort and unease that waterborne Venice seeped into me.

I arrived in Venice from land-locked central Kentucky, with its clear blue skies, rolling bluegrass and crisp buildings.  The hazy atmospheres of hot and humid Cumberland summer afternoons were temporary and seasonal.  When writers describe Venice as the floating city, they don't just mean its position in the middle of the Lagoon and its water courses.  Most of my early mornings in Venice were spent wandering around the labyrinthine city through an air thick and redolent with sea.  This seemed not so much as fog, as the sea itself, still sleepily gathering itself from a night dispersed in the air.

This ambiguity between sea and sky was all the more strange to me for the lack of land that in my experience defined each of the other.  There is no land in Venice, not in the sense of land as I knew it.  You may walk on stones or bricks, but this was not the earth.  The built environment of Venice was not carved out of the wilderness nor did it exist as an antidote to the agricultural fields that make so much of Kentucky.  Venice is built from tiny islands, out of the sea itself, to the point where no notion of those islands exist. It is not of the earth.  For me, that was about as foreign as a place could be.

Venice Looking East from the Guidecca Sunrise

Walking around Venice it suddenly occurred to me that all the buildings that I was seeing, the houses and churches, squares and bridges, all of it, was from someplace else.  All of this stone and marble and brick is from another place.  The link between the materiality of buildings and a place didn't exist in this marine world.  I live in Colorado now and unsurprisingly we build with a lot of timber and stone.  The color of the brick in Louisville where I grew up is the same as the local mud on the banks of every stream.  Venice is built out of solid stuff, heavy cut stone and thick courses of brick.  And it sits improbably on the water.  I now know where all these materials came from but you don't feel it as you live and breath in that place.

Turner The Grand Canal

I have written quite a bit about my studies in vernacular architecture and how the buildings of a place are influenced by the materials and climate and terrain of that specific locale. But what makes Venice?  You can trace the historical forms of the buildings and research their origins in form and material, but they do not feel natural to that place.  Venice truly is other-worldly in that sense and that may go along way in explaining my love and unease with the place.  In all its peeling stucco and crumbling masonry, it is a perfect jewel - of this world, but apart from it.

preservation paradox

"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future."Winston Churchill

The City of Boulder's Preservation Guidelines, like those of most municipalities, contains an interesting paradox that is the bane of many a project.  All new construction in historic districts is required to meet two seemingly mutually exclusive thresholds - they are to be compatible with the historical structures of the neighborhood and yet be distinct and clearly architecture "of its own time".  As a member of our local Landmarks Board, I am often in the position of describing this paradox to frustrated architects and owners.  Most often I try to posit this as a spectrum, with complete, accurate mimcry at one end and violent, contrasting opposition at the other.  I think one of the most difficult jobs of the Landmarks Board is to try to find out where along that spectrum any given project should dispose itself within its context and the owner's desires.

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The basic conundrum - distinct, yet compatible - exists in almost every significant preservation ordinance and guideline across the county.  It is an attempt to make sure that new construction does not so slavishly re-create historical styles and details that the new is no longer distinguishable from the old.  That kind of conflation, where the very new and the very old are identical, is thought to make  a mockery of the past, with the new imitating the old, reducing the old to merely a style.  It makes a district and the notion of preservation more about the preference for a specific look rather than a reverence for the past and respect for history.

There are a number of scenarios where this paradox plays itself out as confrontation, usually when an architect or owner is not aware of this funny conundrum and what it means to work along this spectrum.  Owners occasionally put forth designs that "look just like the old houses on the street", either because they want a guarantee that the building will fit in or because they moved to that old neighborhood and want to build a new house that respects that context.  In that case the staff and volunteers of the historic district or planning department have to coax the building away from exacting details and form and toward a possibly simplified, more contemporary reinterpretation of the architecture of the neighborhood.  This is often met with incredulity as owners are flumuxed by what seems like an arbitrary and contradictory regulation.

The other scenario which often arises is usually architect driven, with a proposed design that radically challenges the architecture of the neighborhood with a design that clearly  is "of its time" but not a very nice playmate along the street.  These projects are about standing out of the crowd and making extremely self-conscious decisions about the role of the individual versus the neighborhood.  In these cases, the local review board has to try to nudge the project back toward the historical imitation end of the spectrum by appealing for a design that will respect the scale, size, and massing of the other buildings in the block.

As both an architect and as a member of a preservation committee, I would strongly encourage every architect and building owner to carefully think about this spectrum and the meaning accrued by a building by that project's position on the spectrum.  So many of the conflicts that arise over historic districts and new construction come from the disputing parties impression of this spectrum and a loose association of meanings that are the inevitable baggage of this self-perception.