house construction and being local

wires

In many ways, building or remodeling is about the most local, job-creating activity within the economy.  Unless your construction is from very unconventional materials, they are most likely sourced relatively closely to the place of construction.  "Local" may mean the US, not the preferred 500 mile definition, but very few of the things consumers typically purchase can even say that.  Most of the wood in residential construction comes from the US or Canada (the importing of subsidized Canadian softwoods is a touchy subject for US manufacturers).

Almost all of the building stone and brick used here in Colorado is sourced within 500 miles.  The woods used for cabinetry and trim, unless exotic, are usually US grown, as is the drywall for the most part.  The most common import is probably tile, often from Mexico or Italy, along with countertops and roofing materials.  Each of those have readily available substitutes. ( If you really want to view the relative costs of  imports, take a look at stone importers.  It is less expensive to have stone quarried in China or Brazil and shipped over to the US than to source it locally.  This means that there are thousands of shipping containers carrying around the heaviest stuff imaginable - stone slabs, stacked like saltines, delivered across the US.  Stone is a natural product and much of the wide variety of available colors are due to this global sourcing and we have become so used to the variety I am not sure we could do without it.)(More about the excess of shipping containers in the US in a later post.)

trusses

For residential projects, labor costs represent about half the total hard costs of the entire project.  And of course, the labor of construction is most often local.  For residential projects, rarely do the subcontractors and laborers travel much more than 100 miles to the jobsite.  Of course, most of the soft costs of construction - architects, engineers, surveyors, etc. are also usually local as well.

wood

So, next time you see someone building a house or an addition, even a gargantuan edifice, remember that what you are seeing is the unconstrained and unforced redistribution of wealth.  From aspiring homeowners to local carpenters, masons, laborers, roofers, runs the stream of money like the braided channels of a river across a delta, from a single source to a thousand rivulets.

after the fire - Sunshine Canyon house completed

SZ LR 01

Eighteen months after the devastating Fourmile Fire swept away so many houses in the western foothills of Boulder, we have finally completed construction on a new home for Lynn and John Stasz.  Like all projects it has been an exciting, frustrating and time-consuming task for everyone involved.  This has been especially true for Lynn and John who did not decide they wanted a new house, but rather that decision was forced upon them.

These images are just some recent snapshots I have taken, not the professional photographs that lends so much to the look and feel of the house.  However, the photos do reveal much of the intentions of the project - to make a home again in the mountains that is simultaneously open and protective, light and airy but also firmly rooted to the earth and sheltered under the sky.

SZ Master Bathroom 03

A couple of weeks ago Lynn and John were able to spend their first nights sleeping up at the house, in the landscape that they have called home for 27 years.  We are really pleased to have been a part of making that happen and look forward to sharing a beer with them on the terrace.  Much thanks as well to Cottonwood Custom Builders.  Marc Anderson, Jeff Hindman and all their crew have taken the care and concern to make a nicely detailed, solidly built house and made the work of me, the architect, a little easier along the way.

SZ Master Bedroom 02

Congratulations Lynn and John and welcome home.

Fifth anniversary, M. Gerwing Architects

for the fifth anniversary of M. Gerwing Architects, we went fishing on Sunday. (No buildings were harmed in the making of this event)

an architect's education - figure drawing

I have been asked on more than a few occasions what advice I would give to a teenager who may be interested in being an architect.  I try to avoid the cranky, cynical responses that most of us can toss out with such aplomb.  More often than not I talk about the passion necessary to see you through the grind of thousands of hours work trying to just get the basics down right.  And the passion required to see you through years of working in offices, often 60+ hours per week, detailing mind-numbingly boring buildings before you get the chance to really be in charge of the design of a building. And then I am asked, most often by inquiring parents, what classes or skills their child should undertake in preparation for architecture school.  And to that question I always reply the same: drawing.

angus sketch

I am admittedly pretty old school about this, but I feel strongly that there is no substitute for learning how to draw competently.  I don't mean art.  I mean the ability to depict in two dimensions a three dimensional object in a manner that is clear and unambiguous.  This is not so much a question of talent as it is the learning of a simple skill.  Everyone can do it and drawing was part of the basic educational package for the educated class back in the nineteenth century.  With the advent of worry-free photography, and especially all the digital visualization tools that we can currently access, there has been a marked loss of the basic skill of drawing in general and in architects in particular.

diagrams

So why spend so much time learning to draw?  We certainly don't need drawing to depict something and have the ability to show someone else.  My Iphone does that quite well.  But in architecture and design, we are charged with imagining things that don't exist yet.  I can't take a photo of the house I haven't designed yet or the detail I haven't figure out.  But I can draw it, on the spot, and explain it through drawing to someone else.

I draw everyday.  Not beautiful architectural illustrations or artistic visions, but the most rudimentary of sketches and diagrams that help me work out a design that is plaguing me.  More often than not I have at least one sketchbook with me at all times and I use it often to simply describe something I'm talking about to a carpenter or a client.  Frequently I start drawing an explanation of a detail that someone else is trying to describe, unsuccessfully with words alone, to another person in a meeting.

rail

So I have dozens of old sketchbooks piling up on shelves and they are filled with these kinds of diagrammatic drawings and explanatory sketches.

sketchbooks

A few weeks ago I decided to take my own advice and take a figure drawing class, a kind of drawing that I haven't done in decades and one that frankly I wasn't too good at when I did.  In two-hour long sessions I work diligently to accurately describe the figure in front of me, sometimes with stark, beautiful success, more often with awkward marks cascading across messy pages.  And I love every minute of it, even if most of the time I think my drawings are a failure.  The discipline of working very hard just to see and mark that seeing with a few lines is satisfying work.  The time flies by and I am usually pretty frustrated at the end of the session but fulfilled in a way that only making something can truly satisfy.

heads 01

So, to the prospective architect:  draw.  As much as you can.  And if you don't like it, if it doesn't in the end engender a love/hate relationship with it, don't bother with architecture school.  You don't have to be good at, but if don't like this part, the rest may not go so well.

Dakota Ridge Village house, construction progress

MT framing 01

Framing has begun in earnest on a new house we designed for the Dakota Ridge neighborhood in north Boulder.  Weeks of excavation and foundations do not lend much to the physical presence of the building, but in few short days, a flurry of framing happens and the building begins to take shape.

The pace of construction is not apparently consistent.  The largest single physical change happens during framing when the building takes its initial shape and the scale and size of the elements can be clearly seen.  This all happens rather quickly - a few weeks - compared with the overall one year building schedule.  What follows next is the time-consuming effort to put into place all the basic plumbing and electrical and mechanical systems.  This rough-in period often far exceeds the framing and seems painfully slow by comparison.  Weeks go by with very little changes - a pipe here or there, some electrical wires - and the pace seems glacial when set next to the dramatic physical transformation that takes place during framing.

MT white plan

Framing certainly is the most heroic part of the construction phase, when mere lines on paper are transformed into the very solid stuff of beams and rafters, joists and studs.  It is the most exciting for me as an architect as I get to see the first real glimpses of the building on the landscape, the scale and proportion of rooms and the presence of the building.  It comes as a great disappointment to most homeowners that the end for framing is only about one third or less of the project's completion.  It is a marathon, not a sprint.