architecture

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A Field Guide to Ugly Houses - the taxonomy

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A field guide to ugly houses

I look at a lot of ugly houses.  No one who has a really beautiful house needs my help as an architect - they are willing to live with a too small house or a dysfunctional house because it is so well-suited to its site and well-composed.  No, as about half my work is in renovations and additions, I see awkward houses with garage snouts sticking out front, Cape Cods with a cornucopia of bad additions, and lots and lots of ranchburgers. What has struck me over the years is that house-ugly comes in distinct forms.  There is a veritable taxonomy of classification for the types of ugly, bad, horrible and embarrassing houses.

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Sunshine Canyon A-frames

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I am working on a remodel and addition to an odd A-frame hybrid house at the base of Sunshine Canyon, just west of Boulder.  The original house, built in 1964, was designed by architect Richard Brown.  Brown designed a number of these modified A-frame houses, mostly around Boulder, before he later took that form and proceeded to design churches.

A Field Guide to Ugly Houses - Ugly by Design

another post in the ongoing series A Field Guide to Ugly Houses

UBD -Ugly By Design

Of the many types of ugly that inflict the American house, Ugly by Design, although not the most pervasive, it is certainly the most offensive.  These houses clearly fall into the "what were they thinking" category of a design idea gone wrong. Sometimes Ugly by Design is the result of a once-interesting and innovative design idea that has past its shelf-date.

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Midwestern churches

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MIDWESTERN CHURCHES

As I have talked about in a couple of recent posts on the flatness of the Midwest, a simple building standing in that relentlessly horizontal landscape is a powerful, singular moment.  This is even more apparent when it is a church, rising upward to heaven, a determinedly vertical building contrasting the vast horizon.

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an architect's education - figure drawing

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ADVICE to future architects

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 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.

 

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