Product of being busy

Often, when I have many things I need to work on, I feel more creative. I'll find myself procrastinating by putting my mental energies into things that I find more interesting. Part of me thinks its a complete and utter waste of time to indulge in this habit, yet, I can't help but thinking that sketching or designing for fun teaches me things that can be applied later. Or that allowing a creative outburst stimulates the brain and allows me to be more productive overall. In any event, I've been a flurry of activity lately, as we find ourselves in the pre-Spring Break crunch.

Today, I partially developed a design for a house. The behind-the-scenes work has its genesis in a number of thoughts I've been having about an ideal room. What does the ideal room for living look like? While in France, I was consistently drawn to the high ceilings and comfortable proportions that the French employ in their apartments. Part of the delight was due to the large, famed French windows that could be accommodated by the larger proportions of the room. My other inspiration is also French in a roundabout way - the beautiful home of our Paris studio professor here in Washington. He designed and built a house on a wooded site in northwest DC that takes advantage of heavy timber construction and a large "great room" that can be adapted to many uses.

So, back to the ideal room. Assuming myself as the client, what would my main living space look like? Where would I want to invite people for dinner? I think a large room would be ideal - with the kitchen elsewhere (I wouldn't want my dirty dishes on view during after dinner conversation). Not too much furniture, either. After our final dinner in Paris, we went back to my sketching professor's apartment, and the evening quickly turned into a salsa-dancing lesson - we were able to push all of the furniture to the edge of the room, open the windows and have a dancing extravaganza til the wee hours (the good Côtes du Rhône helped considerably). Regardless, the ability to be flexible is important to me. Of course, whenever I'm designing a house, I always think about what Christmas would look like there, and how Thanksgiving dinner could be accommodated. These rituals comprise only a fraction of the year, but then again, given their importance, shouldn't they be easily adapted into the architecture of a home?

Above, you can see the fruits of my labors. Essentially a two-story concrete box, the room makes use of a variety of wood details to add warmth. Steel beams and simple lightbulb light fixtures add a casual, industrial feel. Bookshelves divide the dining area from the entry hall and kitchen beyond. Upstairs, a small balcony overlooks the space, providing an isolated perch for reading. The master bedroom and a small office space are behind the balcony.

So now I've designed a house and taken the time to write about it. I really should get back to real work.

The floating red house

The other day, I finished reading The Skin by the Italian author/political chameleon Curzio Malaparte. The book is chilling, bizarre, and basically a-moral, but, more than any other book I've read it captures well the absurdity of war and its aftermath - in this case Naples under American "liberation". I would have never encountered the work of Malaparte had I not visited his home in Capri in September as part of a three-day architecture workshop. Below is an excerpt from my journal:

For the better part of this afternoon, Maria and I sat in the wood-paneled dining room at a heavy wooden table next to a little window that faced the sea. In the corner was a German stove - the kind you might find in a Munich bierhalle. On it were stacks of Malaparte's literary oeuvre in all of the languages of Babel. From where I sat, in the corner, I could see into the small foyer and out onto the front patio that blazed red in the afternoon sun. There was no relief in the typically azure sea beyond - the sun was at its zenith and the crests of the undulating waves were stark white. The sky was pale and dehydrated. The two became one flesh where the horizon should've been. The cat, Luna, had given up her pestering and was guarding the open front door. Outside of the window at my right, shady pine trees of the peculiar Mediterranean variety screened the view out toward the towering cliffs - cathedrals of a type that soar out of the water and continue to the heavens. But, like the mighty Cathedral of Rouen commanding the end of the narrow street, the cliffs stopped my view abruptly with a jumbled jaggedness of dry earth.

I had begun to feel more and more unsettled the longer I sat on that dark wooden bench. I got up several times to have a glass of water from the adjacent sparkling silver kitchen. But, every time I sat down, the twirling of my stomach would return. Looking out the window at the otherwise magnificent scenery was akin to looking at a flat, foreshortened tableau, not unlike a painting from the early Renaissance or a Chinese mountain print. The psychological problem, I later decided, was that I could not see the horizon nor the sky but was able to see very far laterally. It was as if I was constantly looking through binoculars at the cliffs. The only other time I've had this experience was when I was once on a cruise ship - as we sailed past that variety of mountain that plunges itself into the sea. That's what my body and mind were expecting. They thought - I thought - that I should be sailing along the coast of Capri, sitting in a German cabin enclosed in a floating red cloud. When the afternoon of work was done and it was time to go upstairs for espresso and orange cake, I stared at the horizon from the main room. The sky was purple and the sea was gray. I had missed that dear boundary between boundless expanses.

I have not had this experience since. It was visceral, physical, and extremely odd. It is one of the many reasons that extraordinary house will stay burned in my memories.

Here, you can see the house perched on its promontory, with the cliffs beyond. The dining room is on the other side.

Here, you can see the narrowness of the house on its little sliver of rock.

Two Saint-Jeans

We remarked at winding length on these pages a few days ago about the seigneurial system of New France, and its semi-feudal underpinnings. Since then, I have come across two beautiful relics of those days which now function as museums. They both exhibit typically French features in their architecture, and look as though they would be just as comfortable in Normandy as in Quebec. The first is the seigneurial manor of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, located on the south side of the St Lawrence, downriver (which is to say, northeast) from Quebec City:

Red, white, and beige do seem to be the dominant palette in La Belle Province. And, look at that steep sloped roof, managing to keep the inundating Canadian snow at bay. The second manor is also in a place called Saint-Jean, but this Saint-Jean is located on the Ile d'Orleans, the large island that sits astride the St Laurence immediate north and east of Quebec City. This is the famed Mauvide-Genest manor, which was completed in 1734:

This house is certainly more manorial in its bearing, being a full two stories and exhibiting more detail in terms of door and window openings. This manor was the seat of a seigneur who possessed a portion of one of the most ancient areas of French Canada. The Ile d'Orleans, due to its proximity to Quebec City and its fertile soils, was one of the first places to be colonized. Many of my own ancestors can be found among the island's records. Some, in fact, even came from Saint-Jean. It is interesting to think of them working the land for the gentleman who resided in this very house. Their residences would probably be more akin to his type of home (also located on the Ile d'Orleans):

This is a typical example of the small cottages built by the habitants in New France. They are simple, but certainly have an elegance about them. The fine view of the Laurentian Mountains in the background certainly does not hurt their case either.

House in My Head

 We've been apart too long, O Blog Readers! Recently, I have been inordinately busy with the culmination of my first studio project of the semester. Now that everything has been completed, presented, and turned in, things are a great deal quieter on this side of the screen. That said, I thought I'd discuss my studio project in general and give you a feel of what I learned et cetera, et cetera.

The title of the project was The House in My Head, giving one a clue as to its residential nature. The crucible of the project was that we were to design and give life to a house that our client had in their head. Now, our clients were other members of our studio section. So, in essence, each person was both a client and an architect during this project: we shaped someone else's house while giving another person direction on where to take our own house. It was a very insightful project in that it allowed a first-hand experience with the client-architect relationship.

In order to make this project more successful, we, as clients, were not allowed to simply dictate to our architects the number of bedrooms we wanted, or what we wanted our kitchen to look like. On the contrary, we had to express to our architect the overall feeling and experiences of dwelling that we want our house to embody. This was achieved through a series of preliminary experiential exercises such as narrative writing, collage, and conceptual models.

From this idealistic level of feelings, it was the architect's challenge to translate them into concrete elements of living. But, we were consistently challenged to not think in terms of conventional house "parts" but in terms of what we need to accommodate in the client's everyday life. To that end, perspective drawings and models took center stage in the requirements of the project - as these are the easiest means of placing yourself into created spaces.

My client wished to live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains overlooking Denver. His original narrative and illustrative collage conveyed feelings of intrigue, overlapping, folding, and pushing the boundary between landscape and building. To that end, I developed a house that folds along the crest of the ridge along the main datum of a very thick stone wall. This stone wall is the device that weaves throughout the home, creating spaces as it interacts with other planes throughout.

The house is not enormous, as the client wished to maintain a tight-knit sense of familiarity throughout the house. However, it is zoned in a way that makes each portion of the house seem distinct from the others: there are two sleeping zones that bookend the house, and in the middle are a dining/kitchen zone and a more private family gathering zone. Thinking in terms of zones rather than rooms can help guide the design more forcefully - putting together four large puzzle pieces is much easier than putting together seventeen small puzzle pieces.

In the end, I thought this project was very rewarding. My client agreed that this was a successful visualization of the house in his head. As an aside, my project, and a few other selected projects of my colleagues, will be on display at The Artist Within in downtown Muncie during the Art Walk this Thursday evening.

A Large Suburban Home

This plan is a response to the article found here about a modern interpretation of a stone farmhouse in Vermont. The basic concept of that particular house in a rural setting was a corridor of rooms arranged between thick stone walls - a sort of bookend house, if you will. That organizational typology works well on large, rural sites, where the plan can be spread out quite liberally, with this particular example coming in at over 120 feet long.

My plan here was an attempt at recreating the 'bookend' building vocabulary within a more constrained suburban environment. Additionally, I wished to explore the concepts of modularity and building skin, as these are elements that continually show up in my design processes.

The basic core of the building is a 24'x48' great hall, which includes spaces for a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room. These spaces are between two stone bookends at each end of the room. The kitchen abuts one masonry wall, allowing the stove to take prominence in the kitchen, hearkening back to the days when fireplaces were intimately tied to cooking and invariably featured prominently in kitchens. The other end of the hall, which could be termed the living room, terminates in the other thick wall with a massive fireplace set in its center. The fireplace becomes the focus of the whole room, so that the kitchen, dining space, and living space are all oriented toward it.

Use of material has also been somewhat explored in this plan. The great hall space between the two large stone walls is further emphasized by a wood floor. This design aspect separates the occupied spaces from the circulation spaces along the north and south sides of the room which are concrete floors.

Entrance to the house is by two primary ways - one at each end of the great hall. At the living room (hereafter referred to as the east) end, a formal foyer leads in from a porte-cochere outside. The west entrance is through the garage directly into the kitchen. A mud room with laundry facilities is directly off the kitchen, occupying a module that complements the foyer.

The rest of the house is arrayed in two wings that emerge from the east and west ends of the central great hall core. The eastern wing is designed as a series of more private spaces: an office, a studio/library space, and the master suite, while the western wing is more familial in nature with a family room, three smaller bedrooms, and a bathroom. The concept here was that the central core could exist without the wings for certain functions. If the house were being used for entertaining, for instance, the two wings could be closed off by a series of pocket doors at each end of the room. This allows the building to be very flexible - it can be totally open or just as easily divided into three distinct parts.

The core and wings are arranged around a terrace on the south side of the house. This space becomes a type of outdoor room, given the many interior/exterior connections made. Two pairs of French doors lead from both the kitchen and the living space. Another set of doors leads from the corridor of the master suite to the terrace, while still another pair leads from the family wing to the exterior.

I will likely develop this house further, so I ask for your comments and suggestions. The image, as always, can be enlarged, so that you can view the detail of the plan more clearly.