Clifford Still Museum, some thoughts by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

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Siting quietly amongst its more noisome arts neighbors, the relatively new Clifford Still Museum in Denver is a wholly different kind of museum. Designed by Allied Works Architecture, the museum was designed to house explicitly the work the abstract expressionist painter.  Instead of the generic and changeable nature of the galleries of a typical museum, the architects have crafted a design that directly responds to the work of the artist.

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The entire first floor houses the administrative and educational functions as well as the main entrance located along the side of the building facing a small park space. The entry sequence this sets up - street to park to entry to lobby, up stairs to galleries - creates a pleasing rhythm from outdoor sunshine to darkened lobby to top-lit galleries.  Along the way, the predominantly horizontal emphasis of the overall building gives way to a pronounced vertical articulation in the materials and detailing.

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This vertical emphasis, found in the interior rails and details as well as the vertically-ribbed concrete, echoes the vertical lines found in so many of Still's paintings.  This synthesis of building elements with the specific artworks is the sensitive study of an architect taking full advantage of designing for a specific artist and is a far cry from the more generic gallery space of most museums.

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However, what is most striking about the gallery space is the slightly labyrinthine arrangement of spaces with wide diagonal views between rooms.  As the galleries offer a roughly chronological procession through Still's career, these openings allow you to view each period in the context of the preceding and future work.  This lends an overall dynamic spatial quality to what might be an otherwise boring, unilateral maze-like march.

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The top-galleries pull this assembly all together and clearly concentrate the viewer on the works of art rather than the museum itself, a not-so-familiar trend in cultural institutions these days.

I highly recommend a visit, both for the artwork and the museum, a paired ensemble that like any great performance, makes it look easy.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

enter ACI - architecture, construction, integration

We haven't added new blog posts in quite a while as we have been more than ordinarily busy with a new joint venture - ACI design/build. Jim Walker and I have been friends since our Chicago-days, now almost 16 years ago.  Jim is also an architect and he has spent many years with New York architecture firms doing design/build work as the on-site architect and construction manager.  In the same capacity, he and I have done a number of projects over the years both here in Colorado as well as in Chicago.  Now our occasional collaboration is a full-time occupation embodied in ACI.  While M. Gerwing Architects still exists and works with a number of excellent local contractors, some of our projects will be joint ventures with ACI as both design and construction professionals.

The design/build process offers some unique advantages over the traditional architect-and-contractor process.  The communication and coordination is certainly streamlined as is the process of designing, detailing and documenting a project.  This realizes significant savings for our clients and makes the process much more rewarding for ourselves, being able to spend more time on design and less on paperwork.

For as interesting as design/build is, there are limitations.  Very large or significantly complex projects benefit from the long experience and solid focus of an experienced general contractor.  And, for my part, I have learned so much from general contractors over the years that I would never give up using that more traditional process for many of my projects.

We spend a lot of time custom designing a project for clients.  We avidly search through the project to find the unique aspects of the client and the site to highlight these issues and create tailored projects.  However, we don't often adjust our process to the needs of our clients.  We are the experts at that process and we often bend each client and project into that form.  I think now, with the addition of ACI, we have options we can present to our clients for not just the design of the project, but the process to get there as well.

Some Pretty Homes of Boulder

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While doing some research for a new project, I ran into a these photos of some of Boulder's older houses in a weekly newspaper called the Daily Herald.  This article is from 1908 and is really more of an advertising/marketing piece for the local realtors than an actual act of journalism.

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"Boulder is not a manufacturing  town - it's  just the place to live, a deslightful city with admirable schools, several sanitaria, a great university, a fine theatre, admirable sewer system, fine churches representing all denominations, a Carnegie Library, a $40,000 YMCA building and $125,000 hotel, provided with the purest water known, a most equable climate, an electric street car and lighting system and five newspapers (two of which are dailies having their batteries of linotypes) and several college publications to tell the story of her wonderful prosperity and to give that publicity without which no community can prosper.  Boulder has six trains each way to and from Denver and is in close touch with her neighbor towns of the north."

As most current local know, the regional transportation provider, RTD, has promised a Boulder-Denver train over the years and taxed the residents mightly for its eventual construction.  That date of completion is now something like 2035, where we will be back to the original route of 1908.

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"The city is not only building rapidly, but it is building well. Many beautiful residences are being erected. Retired capitalists are choosing this ideal little city and building magnificent homes with the intention of enjoying the remainder of their lives in this ideal garden spot."

"...settle here to enjoy the superb school and health advantages of a modern up-to-date, beautiful little city, whose boast that it is "The Place to Live" seems to be accredited by a never ending tide of immigration from the great West. The say the county could be walled in and become a self sustaining community with all the creature comforts."

The above quote is as true today as when it was written in 1908.  Boulder has indeed become a beautiful spot where retired capitalists choose to enjoy their remaining years. And our "wall" is an expansive green space ring around the city, making an ideal natural setting, but also limiting the housing supply and driving up the costs to lofty heights only retired capitalist can climb.

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Realtors in Boulder no longer sit around in smoky offices, in fact they are more likely to be seen pedaling around the city with their prospective clients.

As you can see from the images above, many of Boulder's older homes have been wonderfully preserved and at least from the outside, seem remarkably unchanged. That is certainly the case for the two houses shown and undoubtedly have benefited from a robust preservation code and historic district designation.  For as much change as Boulder and every town has seen over the last 100 years, so many things remain the same - the marketing of the city's real estate and the endless attraction of a beautiful home on the hill.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

description of place - Cheever

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Great Gear Dilemma

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Boulder is known as an outdoor enthusiast's kind of town.  Almost everyone I know has a plethora of outdoor gear - multiple bikes, skis, helmets of every configuration, packs and bags, tents, stoves, and the occasional kayak and canoe.  Largely this equipment has usurped the car from its usual haunt in the garage.  It is a rare Boulderite who can actually fit their car in their garage because of the ever-expanding collection of bikes if nothing else.

Inevitably all this gear starts to overwhelm the garage and starts to slowly make its way into the house.  It starts with a few pairs of ski boots in the mudroom, which is already choked with daypacks, dog leashes and coats and jackets in every configuration of breathable, wicking, wind-stopping fabrics.  This is especially true for families with school-age children and their additional collections of school packs, musical instrument cases, sports gear bags and the odd science fair project that can't find a home.

For additions and renovations we are always directly engaged with providing space and corralling all this gear and making not so much a mudroom as a tack room.  The Colorado mudroom is minimally 10' x 15' and consequently larger than some bedrooms.  It certainly is not the quaint little niche just inside the door of a Midwestern house designed to hold a pair or two of wet galoshes.

All of this however does not save the garage and we increasingly are discussing with clients the real function of these spaces.  You can store a lot of bikes in a garage but you certainly can't get to the townie when you want to take a quick trip to the store because it is buried behind a peloton-worth of other cycles.  We are talking about adding doors to garages, lots of doors, on every side of the space, to access all the stuff.  And, for that matter, really changing the nature of the room from a garage-converted-to-gear space to its own dedicated room with its own requirements.   This room can access outdoors in a couple of locations, is probably heated, certainly has a floor drain and most likely a work sink.

If we can get this all figured out for each homeowner and accommodate the average 2.5 bikes/person storage requirement, we might even be able to give the garage back to the car.  As long as you still remember you have the bikes on the roof before you try to pull inside.