Boulder, Colorado - M. Gerwing Architects blog posts for M. Gerwing Architects
architect boulder
We started construction today on a house up Sunshine Canyon to replace a home lost in the Fourmile fire. Equipment is rolling.
Although the scars of the fire are all too evident, new life is sneaking back in between the County's air-dropped mulch.
Spring is indeed a time for renewal.
Stay tuned for updates over the next 12 months.
This is the base competency for an architect - if you want a dining table that seats 10 (and you have made that clear to your architect) then the dining room ought to be able to hold that table. Room-by-room, this is not difficult. The homeowner describes what they want, in functional terms, the architect provides it. Added up it all might not be in the budget, but simply designing a building to accommodate the functions of a house is usually pretty straight forward.
I am often slightly amazed when I visit a house to realize that the original design turned its back to an amazing mountain view or to get to a room you have to go down three steps and then up two. These are also functional issues, though not as straight-forward as the room size problem. I am currently working on a large renovation and addition that will put the living spaces at the best place to capture beautiful valley views, not just the garage like the old house.
Of course houses individually designed have individual quirks. There are homeowners who see no need for a mudroom, or no need for doors to bathrooms for that matter. Some of these functional oddities do show up in houses. It has always been my practice to pursue these often strange ideas of clients while also pointing out to them that a bedroom without doors may be seen as odd by some folks.
For as important as these functional issues are in the design of any building, they are not, and should not be, the sole catalyst for a project. A perfectly functional house does not exist and the quest for such is of diminishing returns and at some point, diminishing spirit. A house should work, but it should do so much more ...
tune in to part two
On this celebration of Earth Day it is tempting to post about all the sustainability efforts and green productsthat we have integrated into our work. Here in Boulder, the installation of solar panels, integration of geothermal ground source heat exchange systems, advanced framing techniques, etc. are so commonplace that they have become a standard part of every architect's practice. Sitting on the Landmarks Board, weekly I hear the stories of homeowners upgrading windows and insulation, caulking and duct-sealing. A blower-door test is used more frequently than a soils test.
These are all important and necessary techniques and processes that should be brought to bear on every project. But they do not address the most compelling issues of how we inhabit the land. Not even the quest for greater density and less sprawl and impact speak to what I believe is the most crucial problem of the built environment. It is the more subtle and less ostentatious attitude of how a building sits on and within the earth that I believe is the most important problem that an architect can tackle.
When we dig into the earth to make a building, and we almost always start with digging, how do we resolve the desire to make a place on the earth with a passion to protect that same landscape. How do we honor, and maybe even enhance, the land we initially dig up, blast out and push around?
We could make no building there.
We could make a beautiful building there.
We could make a building that will last a thousand years.
We could make a building that everyday allows the homeowners to see the landscape as integral and necessary to their lives. We could make buildings that forever sever the man vs. nature paradigm that has marked so much of our attitude to the land. We could make a building that makes present the wind and sun, that frames the moon and stars and our place among them.
I was at a jobsite earlier today and was watching one of the tradesman prepare some raw, exposed steel for final finishing.
steel almost always makes me think of Chicago
tough, uncompromising
city of steel, city of the blues
For some reason I have been thinking alot of Chicago as well.
In the Loop, the curbs are occasionally made of steel. Those same curbs are granite in Boston, concrete in New York and most other cities. But in Chicago, especially right out in front of the Inland Steel Building, the curb is steel and the concrete is formed to it. Straight from the rolling mills of Gary to the Loop, Michigan pig iron, forged and fired in the blast furnaces along the shore of the Lake. Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.
in light of that last post highlighting some of the best work of some of the folks here in the studio, I would like to be honest and show some of our worst work to date:
Zeke, the faithful but inpatient studio pup, does not like drawings and especially trace paper. He really feels that is only with a 3D model can you truly depict the essential nature of archtitecture - space.
And he's a wizard with SketchUp.
In case you were wondering if its true that your building materials go a long way to determining a building's shape, I give you the following:
The 1980's historical pastiche of Po-Mo as rendered in the very appropriate foam blocks (not so far from the EIFS of the time)
the large, rambling suburban "Western" McMansion that pervades the front range here in Colorado, as executed in, of course, Lincoln Logs and their associated plastic cousins
and of course the Flemish, stacked masonry house with Dutch tulip garden out front as rendered in Legos.
All of the above design and construction credited to M. Gerwing Architect's youngest studio assistants.
