Hannah Barker house – preservation and perseverance

circa 1900

Yesterday Historic Boulder, our local non-profit preservation advocate organization, announced that it has purchased the long-unoccupied Hannah Barker house.  Most folks here in Boulder know it better as that dilapidated, boarded up white elephant on Arapahoe west of 9th Street.  Buying the house themselves certainly is a bold put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is move.  And it is not the first time.

today

Historic Boulder largely got its start in an effort in the early 1970's to save the threatened Boulder Theatre.  Rather than just picket the building and shout at some public hearings, they bought the building and secured it for a few years until a buyer could be found.  They have done similar purchase-to-perserve efforts since including the Highland Lawn School which has become the Highland City Club building.

1880 drawing

Sitting on the Landmarks Board, I hear a lot of complaining about the entire preservation process.  Maybe more than most places, in the West there is a strong owner's rights ethic that often runs smack into perservation efforts which attempts to protect our cultural heritage by primarily regulatory means. The recent success of Historic Boulder purchasing the Barker house mutes that conflict and lends immense credibility to the organization and the act of preservation in general.  And in the end, Historic Boulder will take the risk and the community will gain the benefit of a truly architecturally and historically significant building saved.

One of the most interesting aspects of this project will be Historic Boulder's intention to use the renovation of the house as a model for demonstrating that preservation, old houses and sustainability concerns can all work seamlessly together.  In Boulder we have a wealth of talented and experienced architects, builders, energy consultants and building science professionals that can be brought to bear on this project.

The building is currently a much-abused shell, but even in that state it has a tremendous amount of embodied energy that needs to be accounted for. Embodied energy is the all the energy inputs that the existing building represents - the energy required to lay the masonry, frame the house, and it also includes the trapped energy that was used in the creation of all those bricks and all that lumber, including its transportation.

Most energy conservation ordinances and programs do not give sufficient credit for embodied energy and rely more heavily on building systems and performance to meet sustainability goals.  Embodied energy is difficult to calculate, but only by carefully stepping through this process can we have a quantitative marker that proves "the greenest building is the one already there."

circa 1885

Hopefully a careful and exhaustively documented renovation process can convince the City of Boulder and other municipalities that they must included embodied energy as an integral part of their sustainability regulations and give it it's proper credit.  At that point, perservation and sustainability can be partners, not often contentious constituents.

Congratulations to Historic Boulder and all its volunteer members who made this possible, as well as the City of Boulder preservation and planning staff that aided in this much-needed process.

(All image from Historic Boulder and/or The Boulder Public Library, Carnegie Branch for Local History)

live – work

In the past few years I have had the opportunity to work on a number of projects that fully incorporated a live-work dynamic as a fundamental part of the house.  More than simply a home office, a fully-utilized live-work program creates a kind of tension of use and privacy that most homes in the last one hundred years or so have not encountered.

Most of the projects like this that we have worked on included a single large office or studio.  And the variety of work has differed greatly but all with one similar aspect - the ability, via computers and the internet, to communicate visually, verbally and to a great degree of satisfaction - with a remote office or clients.  Rarely do these home offices or studios include a separate entry for clients or employees because the work in question does not require it.  More often, my clients work at home and take the drive to the airport on a regular and frequent schedule to meet with their clients and co-workers.

So what is the nature then of these home offices?  They are not the 19th century gentlemen's study, a place of retreat and contemplation.  They are wired and connected not just functionally, but also culturally, to distant places and all to the landscape that is the internet.  More trips are taken to Google than the local coffee shop.  What is the nature of "privacy" in a space in your house that is open to so much of the world with the only "threshold" of a keyboard and/of mouse?

In looking at these projects and working on some current live-work projects, what occurs to me is that in each project we have tried to ritualize the passage in the house from the working space back and forth to the rest of the house.  In the images above, for a condo renovation, the office was on a half-level between the main level living spaces and the upper floor master bedroom.  We focused effort on the stair and tried to create a unique space, with light streaming down from skylights, to set this passage off from the more conventionally proportioned rooms.  In addition, we installed a series of semi-transparent resin panels on both sides of the stair to modulate the sound and views from the office to the rest of the house.  The public-private dialogue that takes place across this stair makes a kind of liminal threshold that makes the mental shift to and from "working".

In the project above, we designed a simple writer's shack as an additional outbuilding to a cabin renovation in rural Colorado.  The shifted geometry of the writer's shack reverberates back through the cabin as series of new dormers, inserting the "working" within the "living".  And again, the path between the buildings, a simple path through the woods, is designed as a careful separation - just far apart for a sense of separation, but not too isolating.  That ritual of walking between the two, with a cup of coffee in hand, boots on but not laced up, the pupils adjusting to and from the bright, Colorado high-alpine sunshine, makes each building a distinct place, the occupation intentional.

The image above is a home office we designed, very warm and internalized, that looks out to a mountain vista.  This is a built analogue of the relationship of the home-based office, secure and private, looking out via the internet, to the rest of the electronic world.

I'm not sure how the issues of the private office and the public connectivity play out for a project - that relationship varies with each client and each space.  I do know however that just putting a desk in an unused bedroom does not really address the live-work issue and forsakes a potentially rich landscape of ideas and use that is architecture.

the new small house – or maybe not quite

There is a ton of press on the new small house phenomenom.  As a response to the excesses of consumption and the economic turmoil of the last few years, many architects, builders and inventors have created amazingly livable micro-houses.

I was listening to an interview with one of these tiny house makers and he was mentioning that with technology, we can compress hundreds, thousands of albums and CDs into a single Ipod.  And the same with books - eliminating them saves hundreds of square feet.

This sounded absurd to me at first until I took a more careful look around our house.

For some, the compression of many hundreds of books into a single, tiny disc is a revelation.  However, I must admit that my books mean a lot more to me than the words inside them.  I have lived in a few cities, moved many times.  But the constant of books has given great solace to that kind of displacement.  Looking at one's various bookshelves is like looking at a kind of biography of self.

If you get the opportunity, I would strongly recommend Walter Benjamin's essay Unpacking My Library in his collection entitled Illuminations.

So, while I would encourage everyone considering making a new house to reduce their assumptions of the size "required", I am too guilty of a kind of hoarding fetish when it comes to books.  A micro-house may be the goal, but our impediments of self require considerably more than focusing a microscope on need and function and making that the totality of a house.  That difference, between our needs and our wants, makes the ground for making architecture.

2010 architectural trends we love to hate (and some good things too)

At the end of another year and another oh-so-typical list of the year's best and worst.  Not Best-Dressed, as I am not even vaguely qualified, not even Worst-Dressed, which I might even have a shot at.  No, it is the year-end,

ARCHITECTURAL TRENDS WE LOVE TO HATE (and some good stuff as well)

first, let's throw out our usual qualifier:  as I am not exactly in one of the world's architectural hot-spots, my notion of what is over-exposed and trendy comes from the webinet and trade magazines.  So this is not a list so much of the good and bad in the year's architecture as it is a gleaning of the architectural press and their obsessions, good and bad over the last 12 months.

The Good

This year definitely has seen an increase in the number of architect blogs - not the strictly professional type, but more personal.  Replacing, or at least supplementing the design-candy pages of aggregator sites like materialicious, or the vaguely academic tone and personal remoteness ofBLDGBLOG, these sites tend to discuss the nature of being an architect and have been heavily weighted toward the concerns of a profession in an economic and moral decline.  I find these refreshing and a recognition that though we are architects, we are also human beings, and our thoughts, desires and concerns come to bear on our projects, not just our fancy educations and "natural born talent".

The proliferation of the pavilion as the focus of architectural fascination and experimentation has been all too apparent this year.  Many of these are executed by unknown, young architects as a way of getting exposure.  Young architects need every foothold they can secure in a profession where usually only the well-heeled designers get the best commissions and usually reproduce previous work.

The Bad

The most disturbing trend of the year, and I think a clear result of too many architects with too much time on their hands, has been the return of the megalopolis project designed by architects.  In the late 1950's and early 1960's these ginormous projects were either horribly designed and generally racist urban renewal projects or architectural fantasies envisioning a utopic post-WWII world.  They at least had some charm in their naivete' as long as they weren't actually built.  When the were built, or partially so like Paul Rudolph's Government Center in Boston, they more often than not displaced vibrant communities with dreadful environments.  It has always been my belief that one of the most gratifying and positive outcomes of the critique of Modernism after this era was the realization that the will-to-power that these projects embody was the last death cry of a kind of technocratic fascism.  Great places are made up of the small accretions of many buildings over many years, not planned by a few elitist experts and plopped down on the unsuspecting, and unsolicited, public.  Lesson learned.

Or may not.  It seems like any time an architect has too big a site and budget or too much time, they come up with these things.  In 2009 there were giant projects that resembled some eco-architecture mountain or forest.  Now, in the guise of planning sustainable communities and re-thinking our relationship to the earth, we get these ridiculous and ultimately disastrous monster projects.  You may say that there is no threat that these will actually get built, but their proliferation makes it all the more acceptable to think in these terms and it is only a matter of time before some politician or corporation starts to execute such a scheme.  After all, the architectural press has given breathless praise to these megalopoli, so why not build one.  It seems Sir Norman and Apple may have already started.

One of the trends which has been increasing in 2010 is the frankly awful names that have sprung up for architecture firms.  This was a subject of an earlier post, so I won't dwell on it here, but I will be glad when the recession is over and architect's can afford some quality graphic design and brand consultants to put an end to this.

With the good comes the bad, and I think the pavilion as the ground for architectural expression and experimentation has a dark side as well. As I mentioned above, pavilions can be a great way for clients, be they cities or institutions, to try out the talent of young architects at a moderate cost and risk.  However, just as many have been by well-established star-architects, like Zaha Hadid, and I think represent an ongoing trend of architectural consumerism.  Call it a mini-Bilbao effect, but it seems like every city wants a star-architect building, and the recession has put an end to extraganzas like the Denver Art Museum by Libeskind and given us instead more affordable, and frankly disposable, star-architect pavilions.  If it turns out that the city leaders don't like it, trash it.  If it leaks, no problem, it's just a pavilion, it wasn't really meant to last.  I'm not knocking the architects who design these - they are given a project like a pavilion and they work at that.  But we should not loose perspective that a fully functioning building places significantly more demands on its architecture than any pavilion.  Pavilions are great architectural appetizers, but a meal they do not make.

And, not to step up on the same old soap box once again, but the trade rags have continued in their appraisal of architecture as a merely visual phenomena to the exclusion of actually visiting and experiencing a building as something other than an eyeball.  To some extent the exclusively visual analysis has begun to be supplemented by the usual slue of green stats - energy consumption, energy production, etc.  However, for me this is still not even scratching the surface of the totality of what a building is, how it effects us, and what it may mean for us as individuals and a culture.  How about talking to people who use the building and what it's like to be there?  Maybe too much work for architectural "journalists"?

The Ugly

The economy.  Even though the AIA Billing Index may have begun to tilt up a bit in the last few months, it is still ugly out there.  I know too many unemployed architects, too many architects working for less, working more and sweating it every day.  Now there is no reason why architects should be immune to the ravages of the economy, but I am very concerned about how hard this sector of the economy has been hit and what the future of the profession might hold.  There probably were too many architects out there.  On the other hand, there is no question that there are too many badly designed and poorly built buildings filling our cities, towns and countryside.  For a better built environment we need more and better architects, not fewer and more scared.

The dire economy has lead many architects to question the most basic underlying foundations of the profession:

What is architecture? Why is architecture so undervalued?  Do people want architecture?  Are all architect's educations fundamentally alienated from both the everyday practice of architecture and the needs and desires of people?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions and it may be a good outcome of the bad financial times that we are asking these questions.  But frankly I fear some of the answers, none more so than the increasing speed at which people will feel the need and desire to throw architecture under the bus when even the whiff of economic hard times flutters by.

On a cheerier note, the new year is upon us and with that has come a new form and format for this blog.  We combined the blog with M. Gerwing Architect's website and another blog to hopefully make a more cogent place for understanding architecture and our approach to it.  And it looks way cooler too.

poche’ – architect’s glossary

poche

Pronounced with an exaggerated accent on the final "e", "poche'" is a French architectural term for the all the stuff that is inside the walls between spaces.  In architectural drawings, it is the stuff blackened in on the plans.

poche 03

John Soane's House Museum in London

For typical construction where all the walls are about the same thickness and both sides run parallel to each other, poche' isn't really a design element.  However, back in the days of predominantly stone masonry buildings, the thickness of stone walls gave them a relative presence that allowed for their manipulation as architectural entities.

poche 04

niche spaces in the poche'

The simplest treatment of poche' and the base cause of the term’s use is when architects describe carving into a wall to create a niche.  In those cases they may describe using the poche' space of the building.  In a sense, it is carving into the "solid" mass of the wall space even though in modern construction this space of the wall is certainly not stone or solid mass.

poche 01

Baroque plans are especially rich in their interesting manipulation of poche' to create geometrically shaped rooms.  The resultant wall shapes between rooms, the poche', takes on a presence that is as "shaped" as the rooms and certainly more interesting than simply the space between two wall surfaces.

for National Poetry month: Yeats