* Residential Architecture: Stacked Cabin by Johnsen Schmaling Architects

Residential Architecture: Stacked Cabin by Johnsen Schmaling Architects: “..This modest, 880 square-foot cabin for a young family sits at the end of an old logging road, its compact volume hugging the edge of a small clearing in a remote Wisconsin, US, forest..The tight budget required a rigorously simple structure.  In order to minimize the building’s footprint and take advantage of the sloped site, the horizontally organized components of a traditional cabin compound – typically an open-plan longhouse with communal living space, an outhouse, and a freestanding toolshed – were reconfigured and stacked vertically.  The bottom level, carved into the hill and accessible from the clearing, houses a small workshop, equipment storage, and a washroom, providing the infrastructural base for the living quarters above.  A wood-slatted entry door opens to stairs that lead up to the open living hall centered around a wood-burning stove and bracketed by a simple galley kitchen and a pair of small, open sleeping rooms..Floor-to-ceiling curtains on either end of the living hall can be moved or retracted, their undulating fabric and delicate texture adding a sensual dimension to the crisp interior palette.  Depending on their arrangement, the curtains can provide privacy for the sleeping rooms, open them up to the main living space, or screen the kitchen when not in use.  Large-scale lift-slide apertures along the sides of the living hall offer extensive views of the forest and direct access to an informal hillside terrace.  In the summer, the apertures become screened openings, virtually transforming the living hall into a covered outdoor room and facilitating a high degree of cross-ventilation that eliminates the need for mechanical conditioning.  A small study, originally conceived as another room adjacent to the living hall, was instead stacked on top of it, creating an intimate, elevated observatory with treetop views..The meticulously detailed project takes advantage of readily available materials used in the region’s farmstead architecture. On the outside, exposed concrete, cedar, anodized metal, and cementitious plaster all echo the muted, earthy hues of the surrounding forest and rock formations.  The material palette extends to the inside, where integrally colored polished concrete floors on the two main levels provide sufficiently durable surfaces against the periodic abuse from cross country skies, dogs, and muddy hiking boots.  Walls, ceilings, and built-in cabinets are painted white, lightening up the interiors during the long winter months and providing a quiet, neutral foreground against which nature’s complex and ever-changing tableau, carefully framed by the cabin’s large openings, can unfold..”  Extensive glazing, natural light, forest views; interesting interiors, warm, in contrast to the rather austere exterior; contextual sensibility..

See our posts on other homes by Johnsen Schmaling Architects:

• Residential Architecture: Nexus House by Johnsen Schmaling Architects
• Residential Architecture: OS House by Johnsen Schmaling Architects
• American Institute of Architects Selects 18 Recipients for the 2010 Housing Awards

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image: © John J. Macaulay; article: ”Stacked Cabin / Johnsen Schmaling Architects” 01 Apr 2013. ArchDaily

* Residential Architecture: Frank Gehry Designs Mixed-Use Tower for Downtown Santa Monica

Residential Architecture: Frank Gehry Designs Mixed-Use Tower for Downtown Santa Monica: “..Developers M. David Paul Associates and the Worthe Real Estate Group have commissioned Frank Gehry to design a mixed-use hotel and residential tower in his hometown of Santa Monica, California, USA. The 22-story “Ocean Avenue Project” aims to stimulate the coastal city’s economy with street-level restaurant and retail space below a 125-room hotel and 22-unit condominium tower topped with a rooftop observation deck. As for accommodating the car-centric lifestyle of the West Coast, resident and visitor parking will be available in a three-story subterranean garage beneath the tower. In addition, the developers plan to integrate a 36,000 square foot museum campus that will add a cultural perk to the development just North of its two-acre site..Although this project looks promising, the 244-foot, Gehry-esque tower is currently pending approval from the City. A vote by the end of March will decide its fate..”

See some of our other posts on work by Frank Gehry:

• Architecture: Miami: America’s Next Great Architectural City?
• Architecture: Gehry and Mirvish unveil Toronto ‘Sculptures’
• Architecture: Frank Gehry designs Facebook HQ Expansion
• Architecture: The French Cinematheque by Frank Gehry
• Residential Architecture: Duplex by Frank Gehry for Make it Right
• Architecture: The Dancing House by Frank O. Gehry
• Residential Architecture: Video: Gehry Residence by Frank Gehry, 2012 AIA Twenty-five Year Award Recipient
• Residential Architecture: Gehry Residence by Frank Gehry
• Architecture: Opus Hong Kong by Frank Gehry
• New York by Gehry Now Complete
• Frank Gehry-designed Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Faces Boycott
• “New York by Gehry” Now Renting
• Gehry, Hadid, Foster, Ando, & Nouvel – All on One Small Island
• Frank Gehry’s New World Symphony Center – Wonderful the Way it Should Be
• Frank Gehry Residential Tower Prepares for Renters
• Frank Gehry’s Riotously Sculptural $100-million Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas Opens

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image: © Gehry Partners; article: Rosenfield , Karissa. “Gehry Designs Mixed-Use Tower for Downtown Santa Monica” 04 Mar 2013.ArchDaily

* Architecture: ‘The Artistic and the Beautiful’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wide-Ranging Views (audio interview)

Architecture: ‘The Artistic and the Beautiful’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wide-Ranging Views (audio interview): “..In 1957, two years before his death, Frank Lloyd Wright sat down with WNYC (ndlr: radio) to discuss his design philosophy, exhibiting his trademark eloquence and blistering opinions. The year of this interview marks an explosion of commissions for Wright, who by then had been practicing architecture for 70 years..

Wright mainly designed homes until 1957-58, when he took on 90 new projects, many for public buildings. Over all, Wright’s last decade was his most prolific, accounting for nearly one-third of his oeuvre. This interview was recorded in his Plaza Hotel apartment where he’d moved two years earlier in order to oversee construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on which he had been working for 14 years. Here, Wright neatly dismisses the project’s many critics, promising “…a new point of view…it’s going to be so enlivening and refreshing that it will make some of these painters quite ashamed of the protest that they issued against it.”

In this interview, Wright also expresses distaste for the nascent designs of Sydney Opera House, as well as the U.S. Air Force Academy structure, whose designers he lambasts as “Poetry Crushers with a capital P.” The Academy’s use of an advisory committee of architects prompts Wright to remark that “an architect is either an inspiration or…he’s merely a committee-mind…a liability.”

Asked whether he’s acquainted with New York’s planned Lincoln Center complex, Wright remarks, “I think it wouldn’t do me any good to become acquainted with it. I suggest the other way around: they become…acquainted with the ones that I’m doing.”

Two notable influences on the young Wright were his itinerant childhood (his father was a traveling minister), and years spent on his uncle’s Wisconsin farm where he “learned…the region in every line and feature…the modeling of the hills, the weaving and fabric that clings to them, the look of it all in tender green or covered with snow or in full glow of summer.” His mother, a school teacher, enhanced his understanding of structure by giving him a set of newly invented blocks developed by revolutionary German educator Friedrich Fröbel whose theories laid the foundations for modern education.

Beyond architecture, Wright is also noted as a singularly influential and innovative urban planner, interior designer, architectural writer, and educator. He is noted for his often prescient, sometimes embattled philosophical and social views, a range well displayed in this broadcast, when in the middle of describing his new designs for homes with children’s playrooms, he can’t help but point out that “the American family should be three, not four…and above that, heavily taxed, more and more as they increase in number.” (Wright fathered seven children.)..

Recognized by the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time,” Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wis., and went on to design 1,141 structures — including houses, offices, churches, clinics, schools, libraries, bridges, and museums — 532 of which were built. Today, 409 are still standing, nearly one-third of them listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wright died in 1959, six months before the Guggenheim opened.

Asked what architects could do to help build “a better society and civilization,” Wright slips into an uncharacteristically heartfelt tone, suggesting they “study nature, seriously, intelligently, and with feeling, and appreciation.” He also warns that if New York City doesn’t acquire more green space immediately, it will be “uninhabitable.”

At least four of Wright’s descendants became architects, one of whom, his son John Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs. Other descendants include an architecture professor, two interior designers, a master woodworker, and the actress Anne Baxter, who is Wright’s granddaughter..”  Fascinating…

image: © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA; article: Charis Conn, WNYC, NEH

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* Architecture: AIANC Center for Architecture and Design by Frank Harmon Architect PA

Architecture: AIANC Center for Architecture and Design by Frank Harmon Architect PA: “..After seven years of planning and fundraising in the midst of a national recession, construction of the North Carolina chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA NC) thoroughly sustainable Center for Architecture & Design was completed this summer in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA..Located on an oddly shaped, previously unused lot in downtown Raleigh near the State Capitol and Government Complex, the new Center is the first AIA headquarters facility to be built from the ground up expressly for this purpose, and AIANC hopes it will serve as a flagship for modern, sustainable urban design in North Carolina’s capital city..The three-level, 12,000-square foot building was designed by noted “green” architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, principal and founder of Frank Harmon Architect PA, after the firm won a professional competition for the project in 2008. Harmon calls the Center “a modern building with a green heart.”  He also says he saw the commission as his chance to create “an embassy for architecture.”..Quick to note that not a line was drawn before landscapearchitect Gregg Bleam, FASLA, studied the site with him, Harmon stresses that building and landscape were conceived as “one interlocking system. The landscape is an extension of the building and the building is an extension of the landscape.” As if to underscore that notion, the native stone walls in the landscape extend inside the building – or extend outside into the landscape, depending on one’s perspective..The narrow building is sited snugly up against the existing city sidewalk so that the majority of the triangular lot is a park-like green space in its urban context. In fact, the necessary parking area is what Harmon and Bleam call a “parking garden,” porously paved so that it will dry quickly and can be used for a variety of outdoor functions by AIA NC and other community groups..The building’s open floor plan features two main rooms on the ground level and a continuous open office space on the top floor. The open plan is meant to evoke a sense of community among occupants, and it also makes temperature and lighting control more efficient..Harmon designed the building to meet LEED Platinum standards as well as AIA Committee On The Environment (COTE) goals, which include regional appropriateness and the use of regionally available materials, land use and site ecology, sustainable materials and methods of construction, reduced water usage, and increased energy efficiency..The siting, narrow form, and abundant glazing – including operable windows — maximize natural ventilation and light in every interior space. (AIA NC officials report that they rarely turn on interior lights.) Other sustainability features include:

• Geothermal heating and cooling
• Rainwater collection for use on site
• 90 percent recycling of construction waste construction on site. In addition, the building’s an energy-efficient Lutron lighting system. (There are no switches. As a room is entered, lights go on in proportion to the light needed depending on how much natural light is available)
• Deep roof overhangs and porches to shade the building in the summer but allow warming light in the winter
• A “green screen” where vines will shade the building in spring and summer • a zinc roof (zinc being one of the most sustainable metals available) • all locally available materials, including Cypress wood felled by a hurricane in the state’s Great Dismal Swamp
• Low-flow bathroom fixtures
• Zero VOC paints and carpets
• Windows that open for cross- ventilation..”

Interesting form, materiality; extensive glazing, natural light; sustainability..

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image: © Timothy Hursley; article: ”AIANC Center for Architecture and Design / Frank Harmon Architect PA” 08 Aug 2012. ArchDaily. <http://www.archdaily.com/261468&gt;