Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

I just read this article by Rebecca Selove on NaturalHomeMagazine.com called “How Our Sustainable Tennessee Farmhouse Began.”

My husband John and I both grew up on farms, and for many years we’d planned to retire to a country home with room for vegetables and fruit trees. A few years before we expected to do that, my husband’s son Eric announced he wanted to leave his career as a corporate accountant so that he and his wife Audrey could develop a commercial organic vegetable farm. My husband said “Would you like a partner?” and that was the beginning of our search for a farm where we could all live.

In 18 months we located what we have decided is the perfect spot. Eric’s soil test results were encouraging, and beautiful creeks border the property on two sides along with a spring he could use for irrigation. There was a house which is now home to Eric, Audrey, and their two young boys, and enough road frontage that we would be allowed to construct a second home on the property. This past spring Eric obtained organic certification and officially launched Foggy Hollow Farm (read Eric’s blog) at Nashville-area farmers’ markets and restaurants.

From the start John and I planned to use LEED guidelines for Platinum certification, even before knowing all the details. We looked at library books on green architecture and perused the articles and ads in Natural Home. We found an architect on the Internet by using search terms like “green” and “sustainable” which led us to Mark West, who gives lectures in Middle Tennessee about LEED certification. We gave him our wish list—solar panels, geothermal heating and air conditioning, passive solar heating and ventilation, and rainwater harvesting capability. We’d hoped for composting toilets, gray-water recycling and bricks made from soil excavated for the house, but these dropped off our list as we learned about local building restrictions and the fact that no one in the area had experience making earth bricks.

We were startled when we saw Mark’s drawings for a modern-looking home with a butterfly roof, but accepted his assertion that it was the best way to integrate the details we considered essential for a sustainable farmhouse. It is on the south side of a hill for optimal solar energy generation, has two mudrooms, a root cellar and a modest footprint (1764 square feet).

We experienced angst in cutting a road up to our home site, and digging up what was a wildflower-filled meadow last summer. We’ll return native plants to the landscape, along with green beans for market. We take comfort in thinking about the solar energy we will put into the grid, and the rainwater we’ll use to irrigate a field once we figure out what kind of container can store it. We are thinking about what goes into this house from the “green concrete” in the foundation to the recycled steel in the roof. We hope we are balancing what we are taking with what we are leaving.

I just read this article in the July/August 2009 issue of Natural Home Magazine by Judy Arginteanu and I wanted to share it with you.

The Sikora family works to restore and green the Willey House, a 1934 Minneapolis home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Built in 1934 for Malcolm and Nancy WIlley, this Minneapolis home was restored in 2007 using cypress, plaster and regional brick.

Restoring an architectural treasure is a formidable task, and Steve Sikora and Lynette Erickson-Sikora knew the challenges they would face when they bought Frank Lloyd Wright’s dilapidated 1934 Malcolm Willey House in Minneapolis in 2002. The task of restoring the famed architect’s first small home was made all the more daunting because the iconic house had been unoccupied for seven years, victim to Minnesota weather and bands of partying teenagers. Previous remodels had left scars, including a kitchen filled with pumpkin-colored plastic laminate and coppertone appliances.

Determined to bring the Willey house back to its former glory, Steve and Lynette spent nearly six years painstakingly rebuilding this first small, affordable Wright home, a prototype for his later Usonian houses. In the process, they came to deeply understand Wright’s genius, including his use of natural, indigenous materials and the coalescing of design, function and materials into a seamless whole.

Watch a video of this house

Wright’s alchemy makes the 1,350-square-foot home feel both secure and spacious. A compressed entryway, one of his signature devices, leads into a large, open living space with kite windows and skylights. The kitchen—small but functional—communicates with the living space via a glass wall and a Dutch door that can be shut for privacy. A wall of French doors—a pioneering feature at the time—opens onto a brick terrace and into the yard. Open in summer, it completely erases any indoor-outdoor distinction; even when shut, its expanse is enough to soothe Minnesota cabin fever. Southern exposure brings passive solar heat in winter; a shed roof shelters the space when the sun is high in summer. The shade provided by four mature burr oaks also cools the house.

Whatever it takes

Nancy Willey, who was the wife of University of Minnesota dean Malcolm Willey, built the house for $10,000 in the depths of the Great Depression. Wright took the tiny commission—much less than anything he’d done before—largely because he had no other work. The house became pivotal in his career, moving him toward his crusade for small, well-designed houses for real people. “The more research we did and the more people we spoke to, we came to realize the importance of this house,” Steve says.

Lynette’s son, Stafford Norris III, supervised the restoration with help from his brother, Joshua. Hewing faithfully to Wright’s design, the family searched out authentic matches for materials they had to replace. Steve returned to the local brickyard in Menomonie, Wisconsin, to find exact matches for the originals made there. He spent more than a year working with Lynda Evans of Church Hill, Tennessee, brick-matching and historical restoration specialists StoneArt to replicate shale bricks he couldn’t find.

Wright constructed the home using red tidewater cypress for its beautiful grain. Although the wood deviated from Wright’s localist ideal because it’s not native to Minnesota, its durability was a boon, sustaining the house through its years of abandonment. “If it hadn’t been built of cypress, it wouldn’t be standing now,” Steve says. To replace wood damaged beyond repair, Stafford and Steve sourced cypress from salvagers who reclaim sunken logs in swamps and rivers, or salvage wood from beams, wine vats and water tanks.

“The thing about historical restoration is that you agonize over every little thing that must be replaced,” Steve says. “The original architectural ‘fabric’ is always retained unless there’s an incredibly compelling reason to replace it. Even the salvageable portions of rotted wood were repurposed.”

Integrity and sustainability

During the restoration, Steve and Lynette constantly weighed three issues: design integrity, sustainability and the house “as built”—because even the original builders sometimes deviated from Wright’s plans.

In some cases, practicality ruled. They replaced all the mechanicals with modern, high-efficiency heating and electrical systems. They replaced the worn-out rock wool insulation in the roof with expandable spray foam, which forms an airtight seal against the rafters. They installed a high-efficiency Unico high-velocity air conditioning system, even though the house is designed with myriad channels of cross ventilation and stays very comfortable in summer. “The realities of modern city life meant that we could not leave the house unattended with only screens latched,” Steve says. “The air conditioning system compensates for the lack of natural ventilation and thermal balance when the house is closed up for extended periods.”

In a few cases, the family had the chance to right old wrongs. “If we ran into a problem, instead of a Band-Aid repair for the fifth time, we would find the root cause and correct it,” Steve says.

The threshold between the living space and the terrace, long a source of disagreement between Nancy Willey and Wright, is a case in point. The architect, for aesthetic purity, designed a flat threshold to blur the lines between indoor and outdoor. Willey wrote to Wright: “The lack of a threshold will create … a triumphal archway to mosquitoes, flies, ants and all the insect comedy.” In the end, she took matters into her own hands and made do with a functional but aesthetically jarring aluminum threshold to ward off the march of elements and bugs. “And honestly, I would have to defend her decision,” Steve says.

Steve and Lynette rebuilt a raised threshold with the meticulously matched bricks from StoneArt, giving them the best of both worlds: Wright’s “indoor-outdoor” continuum and a seal against the great outdoors. “The house is like an open park pavilion on a hot summer day,” Steve says. “The scholar Grant Hildebrand identified two aspects inherent in Wright’s architecture that are plain to see in the Willey House: prospect, the ability to see; and refuge, the security of not being seen.”

Lynette loves the indoor-outdoor connection Wright created and the restoration maintained. “It’s like the sense of shelter you’d have in a cave or tree fortress,” she says. “Since childhood, I’ve had the deep desire to live in the forest, under or in a large mature tree. There’s a sense of safety, comfort and nature here.”

Source

In his article, “Five Ways to Change the World,” Jonathan Massey suggests that building a house is a good way to change the world.

Houses can be pivots of social transformation. They provide the context for many consumption decisions; they shape the patterns of daily life and intimate relationships. Buckminster Fuller recognized the centrality of the house to social change when, in 1928, he set out to transform how we produce and consume housing, with the goal of improving family life. Inspired by Henry Ford’s Model T, which made automobiles affordable through assembly-line production, Fuller designed a lightweight, super-efficient aluminum dwelling intended for mass production in single- and multi-family versions. A standardized hexagonal floor plan would have provided occupants of the Dymaxion House with a suite of well-lit, well-ventilated rooms furnished with modern kitchen, bathroom and media equipment. The structure was designed to hang from a central mast by cables akin to nautical rigging, allowing one or more floors to be stacked up and suspended above the ground. Dymaxion housing was to transform human society by systematically reducing the waste of resources from energy and materials to labor and time.

Unlike the automobiles that inspired them, Fuller’s house never went into production. If it had, and had it worked as Fuller planned, the Dymaxion would have liberated families from dependence on electrical and gas networks, water supplies, sewer systems and roads as well as the social and financial systems — above all mortgages — that bond us to what Fuller considered a form of serfdom. Airlifted by dirigible from factory to building site, its mast anchored in a crater excavated by a bomb, his “autonomous dwelling unit” would have been installed wherever its owner found the best opportunities for work and leisure. In Fuller’s vision, these mobile dwellings would have created a self-regulating labor market as workers were freed to follow jobs. The state would have dissolved into a self-optimizing industrial economy in which consumers dealt directly with transnational corporations. Rather than maintaining large houses and working to meet mortgage payments, families would have been free to dedicate themselves to creative pursuits and domestic pleasures. [3]

Much as I admire the ambition of Fuller’s utopian propositions, I’ve come to realize that it takes a lot of grit to live even a little bit differently from others. Commissions for individual houses have perennially afforded architects and clients opportunities to experiment with new modes of living. In Women and the Making of the Modern House, Alice T. Friedman examines instances in which architects and female clients produced unusual houses that shifted the rhythms and rules of daily life. My favorite among her case studies is the house in Utrecht, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 for the widow Truus Schröder, who was seeking a flexible, egalitarian environment for herself and her children. The intersecting floor plates, beams, walls and windows of this modernist landmark are best known as compelling applications of De Stijl principles to architectural design. More importantly, though, the house’s multipurpose furniture and sliding wall panels enabled family members to define the degrees of intimacy or withdrawal they wanted. By granting occupants the freedom to reshape the house through moment-by-moment choices about how to live separately and together, the Schröder House demonstrated the capacity of architecture to open up alternative possibilities for everyday home life. [4]

The equally innovative King’s Road House in West Hollywood, California, also shows how architecture can foster new modes of living. Vienna-born architect R. M. Schindler designed this double house to accommodate himself and his wife Sophia as well as another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace, and two newborns. Four large rooms, built of concrete and redwood, have sliding walls that open onto partially enclosed patios and gardens. A single kitchen, garage and guest suite adjoin these rooms. Envisioned as studios for living and creative work for the four adults in this cooperative household, they provided each person with a discrete space that could be opened to or separated from the others. Narrow glass strips between concrete wall-slabs ensured that even with all the partitions closed, no one was completely sealed off from the household, and the shared kitchen encouraged collaboration in the rituals of daily life. Built in 1921, the house reflected traditional gender roles: the women’s studios adjoined the kitchen because, as Schindler noted, “the wives take alternate weekly responsibility for dinner menus.” Nonetheless, the King’s Road House established an unconventional model of domesticity at a scale somewhere between that of the nuclear family and the community. [6]

Should you ever be fortunate enough to build your own house, keep in mind how domestic architecture orders daily life and try changing the game.

Other suggestions include Vote, Shop, Raise a Barn, and Throw a Party.

Read the Whole Thing

I just read this article by Larry Wilson called “Architect speaks out against modernism.”

Most of us choose early on in adult life to pull at least some of our punches.

We’d rather not offend. Or we just don’t want to get into it with others. At its best, this human trait is based in modesty. At its worst, it’s indulgent of nonsense and needless mediocrity.

Urban philosopher Leon Krier would seem to have never pulled a punch in his life. Best known to Americans as “Prince Charles’ architect,” Krier doesn’t mince words about what he sees as the pitfalls of pledging allegiance to the more brutalist aspects of Modernism.

No one who champions, say, Spanish Colonial Revival for houses or civic centers would have the gall to believe that the style is the best for everyone everywhere.

Modernism’s danger, Krier says, “is that it thinks it should replace everything else.”

It’s not just Stalinist apartment blocks, though, that get Krier’s goat.

After he gave a talk Monday night at the Pasadena Center, Krier was among a group walking along the north side of Green Street.

I nodded toward the new convention buildings that now surround the Civic Auditorium, replacing those from the ’70s that were, in Charles’ own favorite term for bad proposals for London, a carbuncle upon the town. Many have praised them for at least attempting to honor the classic Bennett & Haskell building in their midst, and I asked Krier what he thought.

He merely shuddered, and turned away. “An abomination,” someone else said.

“Just like the ones they replaced, they’ll be gone in 30 years.”

Krier is clearly no mere reactionary. He thinks and writes deeply about the loss of connection with the human scale in today’s cities. You can argue with his attitude toward all skyscrapers - I mean, I’ll take Manhattan, for instance, and he hates it. But not simply for its style - he says that unlike other buildings, massive towers have to be “rewrapped” every few decades, “and to pay for that, they have to go higher.” Because they take so much energy to maintain - think of the elevators alone - he cites starchitects’ edifice complexes’ “profoundly criminal nature.”

It’s entirely refreshing to encounter such an original mind. More of his thoughts from his Pasadena speech: “If we don’t revise our architecture, we’ll be revised by it.” “When I started to work for the Prince of Wales, it wasn’t the way to win hearts and minds in the architectural community.” “Most avant-garde architects not only live in traditional buildings themselves - they go on vacation in traditional buildings, they send their children to school in traditional buildings. It’s good enough for them, but not for the masses.” “People don’t change size because they are in a large or small city - that’s a physiological fact.” “We should build intelligently with natural materials in the places we have found them.”

It’s the suburb/’scraper model that destroys community, Krier says. We are both too vertical and too horizontal. He envisions a pedestrian city, five floors max, 10-minute walks to everything, no soul-less zoning. If Krier is crazy, it’s like a fox.

Public Editor Larry Wilson’s blog is www.insidesocal.com/publiceye.

Source

I juts read this article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple called “The Architect as Totalitarian.” Before you ask, yes, it’s about Le Corbusier.

I just want to say Thank You to Theodore for bolstering my already strong opinion about Corbu, namely, you’ve got to be mentally ill to think that his stuff is any good, and by “good,” I mean good for humanity, not for the evolution of ridiculous architecture ideologigies.

Great Quote #1:

When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

Great Quote #2:

The most sincere, because unconscious, tribute to Le Corbusier comes from the scrawlers of graffiti. If you approach the results of their activities epidemiologically, so to speak, you will soon notice that, where good architecture is within reach of Corbusian architecture, they tend to deface only the Corbusian surfaces and buildings. As if by instinct, these uneducated slum denizens have accurately apprehended what so many architects have expended a huge intellectual effort to avoid apprehending: that Le Corbusier was the enemy of mankind.

Read the whole thing.

I just read Roman horror day at Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi by Ellis Woodman.

Maxxi, Rome’s National Museum of 21st Century Arts, displays a cynical disregard for its purpose, that marks a conceit too far for Zaha Hadid

This is the fourth time that I have reviewed a project by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in these pages, a task that I have always approached with a sense of awe for the practice’s quite extraordinary formal facility, tempered by sometimes very considerable misgivings about the plausibility of the completed work. When it has come to the crunch, I have always erred on the side of optimism but I hardly need to say that a less sympathetic observer might find much to object to in the practice’s built output.

As an architecture undergrad at the University of Idaho, I was assigned to do a project on Zaha Hadid. I recoiled, because I did not, and do not, like her work. I cut up a bunch of paint chips, through them on to a piece of card stock, and sealed it. Ta da. A big mess of lines and shapes that has nothing to do with anything.

Her latest monstrosity is Maxxi, a very expensive and very empty museum in a sleepy town outside of Rome.

Keep Reading. Feel the cynisism.

Also check out the Pope’s involvement with this monstrosity.