Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that Dwell on Design was AWESOME! And I took like 200 photos. And I was planning on posting EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM here for you to see.

Bad news? Almost two weeks of dealing with a malware/virus has rendered my photoshop dead. Which means I can’t resize the photos to a decent size. Really. I tested this. If I put a photo directly on the site, each one is probably bigger than your screen. Which is not so fun when there’s 200 of them.

So photos will have to wait until I can get this fixed

In the mean time, I do have two videos I took for you. Let’s called them “short films” because that sounds artsier.

I merge with a stranger on the other side of the Mirror Wheel. (I’m the one holding the camera, not the one with the blue scarf who walks away at the end.)

The most useless – but most fun – table.

Among the highlights at last year’s Dwell on Design was a cozy modular home created by Reclaimed Space, who hauled their one-of-a-kind structure made from reclaimed and repurposed materials all the way from their Austin, Texas, headquarters. The 400-square-foot home was rolled right onto the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, and served as a fitting entrance to the Dwell Outdoor pavilion. Attendees lounged in the comfy confines of Reclaimed Space’s weathered wood walls, drooling over each of the fully functional appointments in the modern surf shack.

This year, Reclaimed Space is busy building another home just for Dwell on Design. This year’s show home will be slightly larger—28′ x 14′—with an extended overhang for a covered outdoor area and a separate bedroom. Since Reclaimed Space uses one-of-a-kind salvaged wood and fixtures, the house itself also comes with an impressive history. Materials ranging from reclaimed galvanized metal to long-leaf pine shiplap were gathered from an 1830s German farmstead home in New Braunfels, Texas, a homestead and barn in Belton, Texas, and its most prestigious address: A Shiner, Texas livery stable built in the 1880s. “It is one of the oldest remaining structures in Shiner,” says Reed-Barber. “Well, it was.”

But this modular house is also unique due to the fact that it can be purchased from the comfort of your own home: The house, along with most of its furnishings, are for sale on eBay. “Last year when we decided to take a space to Dwell on Design, we also decided that we didn’t want to bring it back to Texas,” says Kimber Reed-Barber. “We came up with the idea to auction the space off during the convention, both as a way to sell the structure and raise money for charity. Who else would you use to auction other than eBay, everyone knows of them, right?”

Another popular detail from last year will be making a return to the Dwell on Design Reclaimed Space: Zem Joaquin from Ecofabulous will once again be curating the interior space, making all sorts of decisions from paint to appliances to furniture that showcase sustainable goods. “Ecofabulous will have its hand in everything involving the design this year,” reports Reed-Barber. “I’ve heard of a Miami Beach feel with some hot colored appliances!” Ecofabulous also selected this year’s non-profit beneficiary of some of the house’s proceeds, Global Green. Last year, $10,000 went to Habitat for Humanity. For those hoping to bid on this year’s house, you may have some competition. Actor T.J. Thyne, from the Fox show Bones, purchased last year’s home for $75,000 and it looks like he is hoping to start a collection, says Reed-Barber. “He intends to find property in California and purchase more Reclaimed Spaces to make a community for family and friends.”

Watch Ecofabulous’s MODERN LIVING site or follow #ecofabhouse on Twitter for the link to the eBay auction, which goes live on June 24 at 4pm PST.

The Reclaimed Space show home is part of the exhibition at Dwell on Design, happening June 25-27 in Los Angeles. Register now!

The Solar Living Institute will be offering its two most popular natural building workshops back-to-back around the Summer Solstice. Celebrate the beginning of summer by learning how to build structures using natural materials from the earth!

Build a Strawbale House: June 19-20
Solar Living Center, Hopland, CA.

This popular course will introduce you to the fundamental concepts and skills needed to build your own strawbale house. The course will cover: successful strawbale design, proven construction techniques, foundation systems, framing doors and windows, interior details, building to code, and other important topics. Students will help to build a small load-bearing structure - including foundation and roofing - and will have the opportunity to mix and apply various plasters.

Natural Building Intensive: June 21-25
Magruder Ranch, Potter Valley, CA.

This workshop is designed for both first-time builders and professional builders and contractors who want to delve more into building with natural materials. The course focuses on earthen building, offering hands on experience with cob, light straw clay (slip straw), adobe block, and wattle and daub. Students will learn how to smoothly integrate various natural building materials to create the best possible building solution for each individual situation. This workshop will be held at Magruder Ranch in Potter Valley – a 5th generation family ranch that raises 100% grass-fed beef and acorn-finished hill hogs.

See the complete list of all Sustainable Living workshops in 2010.

On an eight-foot-wide site in London, architect Luke Tozer cleverly squeezed in a four-story home equipped with rain-water-harvesting and geothermal systems.

When Luke and Charlotte Tozer learned they were expecting their first child, they knew it was time for a bigger house. Luke, an architect, was not averse to a challenge, so they went looking for a building that might need a renovation. What they found might have made other potential buyers flee—–a constricted site in London’s Notting Hill occupied by a derelict 1950s cottage—–but the Tozers used their imaginations to see the potential. “Only an architect would have been crazy enough to buy it,” says Luke, a director at Pitman Tozer Architects.

The front of the cottage was a mere eight feet wide, expanding to the rear where it nestled among the back gardens of neighboring buildings dating from the 1860s. It was immediately clear that obstacles would arise not only in the design process but also in accessibility during construction on this unusually narrow lot. “We had always wanted to build a house for ourselves,” Luke reflects, “but looking at this site, I couldn’t quite work out if it was my dream or a nightmare.”

Though the cottage was in poor shape, having an existing building provided a starting point from which to draw. “With the new design we were able to go up, back, and down,” says Luke. “We dug out the whole back of the site, and we were able to increase the floor area of the new house by about half compared to the original.”

At each stage, the slimmed-down nature of the site required creative thinking to get around access problems, from building a hut for the contractor that could be moved around on wheels to finding a drilling rig narrow enough to reach the backyard to drill the 165-foot-deep boreholes that are key parts of the geothermal system.

The ground-source heat pump, which uses natural subterranean warmth to heat the floors and water, was one of a multitude of measures the Tozers took to make the house as sustainable as it would be beautiful and livable, from overhead to underfoot. On the roof and under the courtyard garden, a rainwater-harvesting system was installed in order to use reclaimed water for the home’s toilets. Materials for the timber-and-steel-frame house were carefully selected from responsible sources, including the wood for the custom staircase, which is sustainably grown larch composite board. Operable skylights in the stairwell and the sitting area allow for natural passive ventilation on hot days, while the orientation of the glass to 
the sun maximizes solar heat gain on cold days. Many of the green features in the house are common sense, including high-efficiency glazing and lamb’s-wool insulation.

Throughout the house, built-in storage and shelving is cleverly positioned in alcoves and recesses, as in the dining area, which allows clutter to be easily cleared away.

Ultimately, the Tozers were rewarded for their painstaking process. Having bought the site in 2005, they finally moved in two years later and were just within their $987,000 budget. The finished interior maximizes every square inch of space yet avoids any feeling of claustrophobia. The narrowest, street-facing section of the house is essentially an entrance area on the ground floor, topped by a stack of three bedrooms.

By placing the sleeping quarters in the leanest region of the house, the living zones gain the more expansive back area, which unfolds dramatically into a semi-open-plan kitchen, dining area, and sitting room, enriched by banks of retractable glazing that open out onto a courtyard. The indoor and outdoor floor levels match up for a seamless transition. “We enjoy looking out onto the garden year-round,” says Luke, “but on a nice day, with the gatefold doors open, we have a much greater sense of space. It becomes one big room within this rather Californian indoor-outdoor idea.”

For the Tozers’ two young boys (their second son, Alexander, arrived two years after Mark), the openness of the main floor makes for a great place to play. “It’s very well suited to two small kids who can have the run of the ground floor during the day,” says Charlotte. In order to make it equally suited to adults, built-in storage means toys and clutter can be tucked away after the kids go to sleep.

Their children are one reason why Luke and Charlotte chose to emphasize sustainable design—–both to teach the boys environmental awareness and to keep their carbon footprint small. “With young children we do a lot of flushing,” says Luke. The couple encourages turning off lights and taps but try not to be too overbearing.

One more bonus of the green approach: “It is cheap to run,” Luke says, “but none of that is especially noticeable. It’s about trying to design in a sustainable manner without making a song and dance about it. We did superinsulate the house, and the glazing is very high spec. It’s in excess of what you have to do in the UK, but the benefit is worth it.”

The rainwater-storage system saves on the family’s water use, providing recycled water to flush the four dual-flush toilets. No special allowances were required for the system, which comes under standard UK building regulations. The Tozers considered graywater recycling to reuse bath and shower water, but decided that the simplicity of the rainwater system suited them best. They did, however, install a separate rainwater-collection barrel for watering the courtyard 
garden, even though the plants were selected for their low-water needs.

Though the environmental upshots of their home are many, Luke and Charlotte are perhaps most pleased that the unique constraints of the site became its best asset: By having to situate the majority of the living space to the rear, with just a sliver of the facade exposed to the street, the Tozers ended up creating their own private world, turning a dejected lot into a safe haven where their family can grow.

Source

The Solar Living Institute is thrilled to welcome back the Greenest Show on Earth after a one-year hiatus that allowed us to focus on expanding our educational mission. 2010 is a year of transformation and growth, as the green economy expands to provide new opportunities in renewable energy and sustainable living. SolFest is a celebration of this new expansion, and we are excited to reinvigorate a long tradition of environmental leadership by welcoming back this annual fundraiser on September 25 & 26.

In an effort to reach out to the broader community and to reduce the ecological impact of SolFest on the Solar Living Center in Hopland, Solfest will be relocating to the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds in Ukiah. As always, the two-day celebration will feature world-class workshops and demonstrations, amazing musical performances, speakers, wine tasting, raffle prizes, Silent Auction, Film Center, Kid’s Stage, and much, much more!

We look forward to celebrating this new era of environmental consciousness with you. Please stay tuned for details on our website as they develop.

SolFest 2010
September 25 & 26, 2010
Redwood Empire Fairgrounds
Ukiah, California

Ticket Information:
Tickets will be available beginning June 15th.
Ticket Prices: $30 Saturday; $25 Sunday OR $45 for the full weekend.
Camping: Weekend pass + camping (with showers) is $100 before July 15th; $125 after July 15th.
RV Camping: $125 before July 15th and $150 After July 15th.

Learn more!

I just read this article in Dwell (dot com) about a family from the Netherlands who moves to Singapore.

In December 2007, Nicolette de Waart, her husband, Joost Dop, and their four children moved from Heemstede, the Netherlands, to Singapore. While Dop began his new job, De Waart set out to find someplace for them to live. In the process of turning a house into their home, she also found a footing for her interior design business, Design Doctors, an extension of her well-established Dutch company, De Stijlfabriek. De Waart tells her tale of procuring (and piecing together) a place for her family in the big city.

We moved to Singapore for my husband’s job. We worried about being far away from family, but there are always reasons why you shouldn’t do something. We decided to look at it as a big adventure and just do it.

When we first moved here, we lived in a 24th-floor apartment. It was quite shocking for us, because in Heemstede, a suburb of Amsterdam, we lived in a house with a nice garden and an outdoor kitchen. Looking out the windows of our apartment in Singapore, we could only see concrete. There was always construction noise, as we were living close to Orchard Road, the main shopping street. For Singaporeans, it was really great, but for us, it wasn’t ideal.

Finding a place to rent was hard. We were used to living in a green environment, and that was really important to us. Singaporeans, however, are less focused on their gardens than on their houses, which seemingly should be as big as possible and completely air-conditioned. Our first real estate agent showed me properties with closed, dark rooms. When I switched to an agent who understood what I wanted, we found the right home in two weeks. The house is on a street with what were originally seven other similarly designed residences, all built in the 1970s. Our home is the only one that remains unchanged. All the others were renovated to enclose the balconies and add more interior rooms.

The house has three floors. The lowest floor is where you enter and where I have my atelier. The main space has a living room, dining room, kitchen, office, and guest room. Go up one more level and there are four bedrooms and a big family room. There are balconies and a garden all around the house, so it’s nice and green. There’s a weird place cut out of the back where, in the past, a chauffeur could have waited. Most people would have closed it up and added it as another room, but we turned it into an outdoor play space.

The house had sat empty for nine months before we moved in. Here, it’s tropical and always in the high 80s, so everything falls into disrepair twice as fast. The kitchen was horrible, but we were lucky because the landlord let us renovate it. We kept it simple and stuck to white to make it look bigger. We almost always cook at home and eat outdoors. The kids like to draw in the living room and play in the family room. We really use the whole house; I try to make every room somewhere you’d like to be.

We brought all of our furniture with us from Holland. We’re attached to our stuff—–not in a materialistic way but because everything has a story behind it. I wanted to surround myself with pieces that would be recognizable. It made the kids feel immediately at home.

Missing, though, were bookcases. I designed some myself and had a local carpenter build them as a trial run for whether he’d be able to execute my other designs, which have since included work for a restaurant and many homes here. In Holland, I’m accustomed to working together with a carpenter to create a design. Here, the individual tasks are managed by different shops, so fabricating an item requires many players. I did a lot of research to find tradespeople and suppliers, and I went to many shops and factories. Everyone was shocked that I, a white woman and a stranger, came to the stores myself and didn’t just send a messenger. They found it funny, but in the end, a lot of people have asked if they can work with me.

We love living here. Singapore has a lot of development and there is construction 24 hours a day, but there’s so much natural beauty too. We cycle and hike. There’s an eco-farm where you can see where a banana comes from and what kind of tree a papaya grows on. The kids love to swim in the lake there, and they have a nice restaurant for lunch. Singapore might seem like one big shopping mall from the outside, but there’s so much to do and see when you peel back the layers. That’s what I love about it.

Source

I just read this article on Dwell (dot com). I thought you might like it because it involves building a house out of shipping containers.

Having purchased a 3.5-acre plot of land in Topanga, California, with a very rustic, 750-square-foot cabin on it several years ago, architect Christof Jantzen found himself in need of a fairly quick, low-cost house expansion for his family (wife Lauryn and three young sons). Jantzen, principal of the Venice, California, office of the firm Behnisch Architekten, soon came upon the idea that more space could be achieved by redesigning a series of recycled and modified shipping containers, which would drastically reduce the typical time-consuming process of a traditional remodel.

“Building my own house made me realize that this was doable,” says Jantzen. “Most of the prefab structures on the market are very expensive, so I tried developing these container structures that would bring the cost margin of prefab down, which I think should happen.” At a cost of around $100 to $150 per square foot, the structures can be customized, stacked and combined into one of six Jantzen designs ranging between 320 and 2,400 square feet. With builder Eric Engheben of 44 West Construction, Jantzen has completed, among other designs, a poolhouse in Brentwood, California, and is in the permit stage on a 2,400-square-foot, 18-container atrium house in Topanga.

“In order to create a unity between the old and the new, I used a freestanding steel roof supported by I beams to cover both the cabin and the containers,” says Jantzen, who passed on installing A/C in favor of integrating natural cooling elements into the design. “The roof has an interesting climate-control effect; it almost functions as a sun umbrella hovering over the house with a buffer providing an airflow that helps keep cabin cooler, especially in summer.” The containers at front hold two side-by-side bedrooms; at left is the living area.

Jantzen was able to leave most of the sloping lot intact by anchoring the structure onto concrete piers of varying heights. He installed floor-to-ceiling insulating glass on one side of the bedrooms, consulting with a structural engineer to shift load-bearing elsewhere to compensate for the removal of the original steel panel.

On the opposite side of the house stands an old oak grove; the views to it are enhanced by floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, which, when opened, create a natural breezeway through the house. Jantzen was able to sneak the roofline in just under an existing branch. At left is the small bedroom of the original cabin.

Jantzen sheathed the living area’s walls and floor in furniture-grade plywood paneling, behind which he placed thermal insulation to retain heat in the winter. He then sealed the ply in a water-based, low-VOC clearcoat to prevent any fumes from escaping from the ply.

The dining area overlooks the oak grove; the original cabin can be seen beyond the glass doors. Jantzen placed the addition about two feet higher than the cabin, reached by a small staircase at right. “The containers are not only recycled, they’re very sturdy—stacking up to eight stories high on cargo ships—they are the perfect building material,” he says.

The owners of the Kelly residence in Brentwood, California, designed by Abramson Teiger Architects (which was on the AIA tour of Los Angeles in 2008), chose a Jantzen container design for their small poolhouse, which was pre-designed and fabricated, then lifted onto the site with a crane.

A rear wall of the container in front was covered in wood, with the opposite walls designed to be left completely open to the elements.

Made up of two containers, the poolhouse, built by Eric Engheben of 44 West Construction, was placed on the prepped foundation in three hours.

Jantzen designed a new, multi-story 2,400-square-foot house in Topanga, California, still in the permit stage, out of 18 containers, incorporating an existing tree into the atrium design.

Source

I just got an email from CoARQ. They are inviting architecture and design students to participate in their first international architecture student competition!

Learn more.

Beat the price increase! Enroll by June 25th and you’ll lock in your low field trip fare.

That means when field trip fares increase, yours will stay the same.

And did you know that you can lock in your low price for AS LITTLE AS $95!

Join us in Athens

Join us in Peru

Join us in Japan

Join us in Barcelona