abandoned buildings

abandoned 01

What is the fascination with abandoned buildings?  There is certainly some attraction to the mystery and faint danger of these places, but I think there are darker forces at work as well.

In abandoned industrial sites, much of mystery of the place has to do with the fearful contrast of the quiet stillness of the place once so vibrant with noise and activity.  Of course this is also a confrontation with the humility of realizing that the promise and productivity of an industry or a hospital can be so swiftly displaced with the simple closing of the doors.  These places do seem so full of ghosts because so often the signs of human activity, the equipment and architectural elements that were designed to be engaged with the body, are still there, echoing the uses that have long since disappeared.  The door knobs and levers, the switches and furniture are all scaled for us, made for us, and are waiting for us to return.  I think this has much more to do with why these places attract us than the recognition of them as B-movie horror sets and gory extravaganzas.

abandoned 03

Of course there is a whole community of folks out there that explore and photograph these places, known as Urban Explorers or Urbex.  Their photos are all over the interwebz and they document more the desolation of these places than their lost grandeur.   These folks and their photos are more akin to dystopian novelists than the pioneering work of the early preservationists who documented the abandonment and destruction of these places as a last desperate attempt to pull the handbrake of so-called progress.

For my part, what is so intriguing about especially abandoned houses are the fading signs of seemingly tranquil domesticity decaying with time.

abandoned 02

These abandoned houses make you feel small, in the way that walking around an unfamiliar city for the first time does.  There is clearly a continuum that you are a part of, that you recognize, but that clearly posits you as just a tiny, maybe unconsequential part of the whole. That is something devastating to the ego and thrillingly liberating, especially for this architect.  It is a kind of existentialism laid bare and maybe even exposed in its own self-importance.

man space

pool-hall-1913-s

The title of this post is not an allusion to a gay bar in Chicago, although I do think there was one with that name.  Rather, I have written in the past about the growing prevalence of and interest in gender specific 'guy spaces'.  I am not an academic and I am wary of stepping into such a dangerous landscape as gendered space, but by coincidence or not, I have been engaged on a couple of projects recently that press the question of male-dominated spaces.

I should say that these are not really "male-dominated" because they are actually male-exclusive places.  One is a fraternal organization, the other is a generations-old hunting club.  Both have that smell of leather and old wood and the unmistakable look of domestic neglect that are tragically stereotypical but abundantly manifest.

Travelers Club London Smoking Room by csabagaba

I have worked for a number of different types of clients for a variety of project types.  As most of my work recently is involved with single-family houses, the majority of clients have been female-male, married couples.  Some have children, some not, some couples are near retiring with adult children, a remarkable number of clients have children during or immediately after construction.  I have had plenty of single clients and recently a number of female-female couples as clients.   In all these cases there have not been any easy patterns or identifiable mechanisms by which you can predict how the interaction of decision-making will take place.  The cultural prejudice has the woman making the aesthetic decisions while the man handles the finances and "functional" issues.  As an architect, that has not been my experience at all, and as a single, hetero-sexual guy with kids, I have empathy with anyone that puts their trust in me to make them a home.  Any attempt to delineate these issues with regard to gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, etc. would have been impossible.  With maybe one exception.

Berghoff, Chicago

Guys seem really embarrassed to say how much they care about how things looks.  They flee from the aesthetic realm with a surprising zeal.  Of course this is not always the case, but as a guy who spends my days and nights designing things, this seems odd and a bit disorienting.  And when your client is a bunch of guys, the owners of a club for instance, and someone has to make design decisions, this can be frustrating.  No one wants to really own these decisions, to strongly come down on the side of sage green in lieu of celadon, or vernacular versus traditional.  A guess it all sounds and feels a bit too fluffy, too close to aprons and doilies and pom-poms for many guys to feel comfortable.

Sorrento mens club, by Lorayn DeLuca

As a result, I have been collecting images of traditional guy spaces that I can show to this kind of reluctant client.  I think it is much easier for them to see an image and say, "yeah, like that", than to talk through the particularities of each material or color and even more elusive quarry like room-feel and atmosphere.  Many of these are old photos, of places long since past:  barrooms and pool halls, club rooms or military institutions.  There is more nostalgia dripping from these images than in any of the countless of magazine photos that other clients send me.  I know it is too simplistic to say it is nostalgia for a by-gone era when men unquestionably and unapologetically ruled the kingdom.  There is clearly a remisniscence of fathers in these places, for fathers maybe more imagined than realised.  You can almost smell the acqua velva, old spice and brill cream mingled with smoke and whiskey.  There is certainly some recognition of these places on my part and that may largely explain my growing collection.  But as a design tool, these photos are invaluable.  And I would never have guessed, back when I was a eager architecture student, that one day I would have a binder in my studio labeled "MEN'S ROOMS".

Pendennis club, grill, 1928

the simple nature of materials

balcony

Just outside my office I have a little balcony, not much more than a space for a couple of chairs and a table.  For as attractive as the idea of sitting out there is, resting on the rickety metal chairs and sketching away on that little table,  I don't often venture out there.  It is too cold or too hot, the sun blazing or the traffic sounds too loud.  The balcony has become a repository of stone samples now, buff and red sandstone chunks stacked against the low walls.  But I hate the idea of giving up this little space.  More than its actual use, I like the idea that it is there, an extension to my studio, and subject to the hot and the cold, the rain and snow.

As I write this, I am looking out at the remnants of the last snowstorm slowly melting away on the little balcony.  The pieces of stone are heating up in the Colorado sun and radiating that heat, retreating the snow around them like a small territory claimed by each rock.  The daily and nightly ritual of melting and then re-freezing has made the last vestiges of snow into a miniature glacier, slowly retreating unto itself, stubbornly clinging to the rusty drain cover.

It is easy to loose sight of the existential nature of the work of architecture sitting at a computer in a conditioned office.  At a fundamental level, it is not design or form or composition that selects the materials from which we build, but their ability to resist the rain and snow, the sun and wind.  The stone and concrete, wood and steel and glass all work diligently to allow us to live insulated from the elements.  Working with computer models and drawings, even pencil and paper we forget the weight, the touch and smell of these materials.  My little balcony reminds me not just to take a break some time and sit out in the sun, but also to come out and heft the stones around, listen to the drip drip of the melting snow and to love the real materials that we make buildings out of, not just their representations on screens and paper.

Dakota Ridge Village house, construction progress

Construction is well under way on a single family house we designed for a site in north Boulder.  The lot is on the edge of the city's open space facing west to a series of rolling foothills.  As a corner lot, the house's views are primarily directed toward this westward view with some smaller, more discrete views to the south and east.

As far as the construction progress is concerned, this project started like many with an accurate layout of the house on the property.  Obviously we have figured this all out in the design stages many months ago, but it is always instructive to see the placement stakes on the land itself.  Those simple little stakes lead the way for some heavy-duty work:

Excavation can be a tricky business.  We have a soils report that we rely on to tell us the profile of the subsurface conditions including bedrock and water table issues.  However, only when equipment is actually rolling do we get to see the actual conditions and often have to make revisions on the fly to accommodate conditions or take advantage of opportunities that arise.  In the case of this house, the soil conditions for supporting the house were deeper than originally anticipated so we had to dig a bit further and create taller foundation walls.  Our contractor realized immediately that this deeper foundation could result in more full-depth basement space and less crawlspace.  So after a quick conference with contractor, owner and architect ...

Well, we're still working on it.  The proposed change looks like it makes sense and the cost is not too formidable.  So, while the concrete foundation walls are being poured and slowly coming up to full strength, a lot of phone calls are made, calculators worn down and potential changes are weighed and reconsidered.

It is simple to say that we should just make a really complete and thorough set of drawings and turn them over to a contractor to execute.  In my twenty or so years of experience there is no substitute for being fully involved in the construction process as a reliable partner to the contractor and owner in helping solve issues that inevitably bubble up.  Architects, if you think your drawings alone will get you a good building made, I am afraid you are solely mistaken.  It is the relationships you develop on the jobsite, with your client and with the inspectors, reviewers and every single tradesperson that will result in a building you can truly be proud of.

So the best marker of construction progress is not so much a series of photos or payout requests, but the growing trust and belief in the team itself to execute not just a set of drawings, but a shared vision of a project, a building and a home.