Boulder, Colorado - M. Gerwing Architects blog posts for M. Gerwing Architects
architect boulder
Lundberg
Overly fussy designs: check
Haughty pose: check
Little glasses: check
Lots of attitude: check
Some things never change. Mr. Lundborg's visage was found in a 1908 newspaper down at the Carnegie Library for Local History here in Boulder, Colorado when I was doing some research on a project. The buildings shown above are still standing, although greatly modified. Mr. Lundborg shall stand forever I believe.
bad mansard 2
It is probably unfair to throw all of these in a single despicable category, but the abuses in the last 40 years are so egregious that only a complete moratorium on all mansard roofs will suffice to still the repulsion of most architects.
A mansard roof is unusually a full story of a building masquerading as a part of a roof. It is a gambrel/hip roof hybrid that brings the apparent mass of a building down a story or two by letting the "roof" start much lower down than the interior floor levels would typically indicate. Handled well they are a pleasing architectural solution to a vexing problem. Most often however, they are not so deftly deployed and instead of reducing the apparent mass of a building, they increase it with a gargantuan, bulbous forehead. These are not attics with quaint dormers sticking out, but rather massive toques with eyeholes sitting on top of otherwise rather elegant buildings. Or maybe not so elegant.
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
The term come from French Baroque architecture as often conceived by Francois Mansart, however many of the best examples come from the Second Empire period. Its popularity may stem from attempts to copy those examples or as a tax/code dodge - many municipalities tax a building based on the size from the ground to the base of the roof. Building height limitations also occasionally measure to a roof's midpoint. In both cases, the definition of "roof" is pressed with a mansard, arguing that the sheathing in roof materials meets the requirements.
bad mansard 1
The pet peeve stems from the truly horrible examples foisted upon the public in the last few decades. Mansards are almost always incompatible with more modernist design language and they take a very able hand in any scenario. So, for the sake of the collective built environment, I am going to advocate for a moratorium on mansards until at least 2020. By then maybe we will have figured out how to use them to enhance a building, not draw attention to its flaws.
Unless of course, you can make it over-the-top mansard-awesome:
mansard modern
fg01
I have written in the past about the efforts to save the Loveland Feed and Grain building.Novo Restoration, the group trying to save the building, sponsored some tours inside the building this last weekend and I took the opportunity to climb through this hulk, dragging my kids along for the ride.
The building was used initially as a flour mill and later as a grain storage facility. Surprisingly, its massive exterior bulk did not hide an equally massive interior space. The inside of the building is a labyrinthine collection of bins and chutes, vertiginous stairs and rusting augers. The walking space between the bulky wooden beams and bins was minimal as befits a pre-OSHA era building. The inherently explosive nature of so much dust and milling makes the continued existence of this kind of building a rarity. There was rudimentary safety system with a series of dead-man pull wires running through the various rooms and process rooms, but the ability to quickly navigate out of the wooden maze in case of emergency makes you think the safety system was there more for the equipment and building than its inhabitants and operators.
fg int 01
All of this is to say that the plans for renovating this building and finding new uses for it will require significant, drastic changes to the interior. This is also the case with the City of Boulder's Valmont Mill buildings. Both of these buildings were formed to execute industrial processes that are largely extinct. Preserving the shell of the building without its inner workings seems like hollowing out its past, leaving only a slight echo of its once vibrant past. However, a cursory tour of the interior of these places quickly demonstrates their near-incompatibility with anything approaching public uses. Should we mothball these places, equipment and all and allow only restricted access? Should our desires to preserve the past include spending public money to save buildings that, if made safe for the public, no longer exhibit the vitality of the place? Are we preserving what the building looks like or what it is?
Valmont mill 05
I love the idea of making art and exhibit spaces, black box theatres and performance venues in these structures, but to do so may eliminate so much of the buidling's essential inner workings that we ending up preserving the building shell like so many oddities in formaldehyde-laden jars.
Valmont mill 09
height sign
In Colorado and much of the Rocky Mountain West, the welcoming signs at the arrival of every town proudly or perhaps matter-of-factly, announce the most important attribute of the settlement: its height above sea level.
In the midwest and, at least in my recollection, most towns across the nation, the introductory boundary sign of a place contains the city's name along with the size of the population.
population sign
So why the difference? Most cities are proud to announce their size and status as reflected in a hopefully growing population. I guess in the thin air of the Rocky Mountains, that kind of boastful achievement declaration is reserved not for size but altitude. Our cities and towns may be small, but we're up there pretty high.
SdC chapels 01
As a bit of a follow up to a post from last year on the small village chapels in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, I recently took a trip down to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This range is in southern Colorado and makes the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley. On this most recent trip I ventured to the other side of these mountains to look into the chapels and buildings still existing.
SdC chapels 02
What is most striking is the very clear morphology of these churches along the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristos, compared with the much wider variety of forms and materials employed in the San Luis Valley. As you can see, most of these chapels are simple, single-gabled longitudinal structures. This forms remains fairly consistent even though the building material may vary from stucco-covered adobe to wood framing. Equally consistent is the appearance of a simple, open-framed steeple and a diamond, usually square, window centered in the end gable.
SdC chapels 04
SdC chapels 03
About half of the chapels I visited were abandoned, in various states of decomposition.
