Before I recommend some home design-related books for your last-minute gift list, let’s consider the bookshelf that will hold those new tomes. Thanks to a cool website called The Design Vote, I came across a poetic version: two artworks by Mike & Maike (produced and sold by an innovative design company called Blankblank) that comment on the influence of words and ideas. Each is a cluster of books on a single theme notched into a shelf that’s a piece of reclaimed hardwood.  One, called “Juxtaposition: Religion” holds religious tracts, including the Bible, Qur’an, and Tao Te Ching (according to the company the art piece is one of twelve things Gwyneth Paltrow can’t live without).

The other,  “Juxtaposition: Power” holds political treatises, from Plato’s

Republic to The Communist Manifesto. By bringing such volumes together and scribing slots for them into the wood so that they all sit at the same level, the artist makes us think about the influence of each book, their competition with each other, and how juxtaposition is important in stimulating curiosity and the imagination itself. The fact that each book has its specific (literal?) slot is also suggestive –

things can get messy — and interesting — when ideas move off the page (out of the slots we invent for them) and into the world at large (a land of many suppositions and juxtapositions).

On a somewhat more practical level, what’s a good shelf that’s flexible enough for changing needs and expanding collections? We used the infinitely adjustable Rakks system of extruded aluminum shelf supports (photo courtesy Rakks),

in the laundry and closets of our Online Ranch House, Plan 508-1 (detail below). The brackets notch into the vertical strips at any point so shelves can be placed

at whatever level you wish. We’ll be using the same system in our Online Country House, Plan 508-2, which is now under construction.

Three New Design Books

Counter Space, by Juliet Kinchin with Aidan O’Connor, accompanied the recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition on design and the modern kitchen – shown below – and offers a fascinating look at how

architects, product designers, and artists re-imagined the kitchen in the 20^th century. For some, such as Viennese architect Grete Schutte-Lohotzky,

it was a kind of laboratory where efficiency, cleanliness, and storage became standard elements. The photo shows the MOMA exhibition replica of her 1926-27 “Frankfurt Kitchen” for affordable public housing. MOMA started collecting stylish kitchen implements in the mid 1930s. Ideas for “Kitchens of Tomorrow” proliferated during World War II. Tupperware appeared in 1958. Television writers and film directors used the kitchen to communicate harmony or chaos. In short, it’s a huge subject – this book just scratches the surface – or should I say, scrubs the sink.

Salvage is always of interest but especially during a difficult economy, so I was drawn to Salvage Secrets by Joanne Palmisano (W. W. Norton & Co.),

which offers a wealth of ideas for using old objects and materials in new ways. She includes a helpful lexicon — for example, recycled refers to items made from salvaged materials whose basic structure has been changed and repurposed means  items reused in a different area of the home or used in a different way — like the antique swing doors adapted as sliders, shown below.

Chapters are on wood, glass, metal, stone/concrete/brick/ceramics, lighting, where to find salvage outlets (a countrywide listing is included), and design concepts. The book shows the wide range of salvageable material available and what to do with it.

Edward Durell Stone was one of the most influential yet least appreciated modern architects. His work was uneven but fascinating. The excellent and exhaustive new biography by his son, architect Hicks Stone (Rizzoli, publisher)

lucidly describes the man, his work, and his contradictions. An abstract modernist, he was strongly influenced by pattern and texture. He developed a form of ornamental grillwork — beginning during his participation in the design of Radio City Music Hall during the 1930s — that culminated in his famous American Embassy in New Delhi,

completed in 1959 (image above courtesy David Cobb Craig blog; below, courtesy Goat Hill Resorts).

Hicks writes that here “Stone had essentially taken a glass building and wrapped it with ornamental screen block.” The interior courtyard is an elegant water garden, expressing — with the screens — not just connections to Indian landmarks like the Taj Mahal, but also to Stone’s lifelong interest in unifying indoor and outdoor space (photo below courtesy Bustler.net).

Stone later used similar concrete block grills on other commissions and then other architects and designers copied the idea and it became a cliché-victim of its own success. (I remember wondering about such screens on dental offices and shopping malls as a boy.) Stone rose from poverty to become one of the country’s most successful architects who counted Eero Saarinen, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other visionaries among his friends. He also designed some of the earliest dramatically modern American residences,

like the Mandel house at Mt. Kisco, New York, of 1935, with its iconic curving

glass block dining room (photos courtesy Arch News Now). And yet he had a lifelong drinking problem that no doubt lead to his multiple marriages, poorly managed office, and work that occasionally verged on the simplistic and banal. The story brings an important but largely forgotten architect, and architectural culture, back to life. It turns out Stone isn’t easy to pigeonhole — or slip into a notch on a book shelf.

Let’s talk about how using an iconic shape can help you conceptualize the modern design of your new home — architects start here all the time. Take the simplest architectural outline, such as four walls topped with a gable roof, as shown in this archetypal Scottish stone barn.

(Image courtesy gairloch.org) What can you do with it? How can you pack it, expand it, open it, raise it, give it a sense of history or modernity? Here’s a sampling of houses that all began with a similar profile,

starting with architect Rick Joy‘s design for a barn-inspired house in Vermont.

(Images courtesy Architectural Record.) Inside you can see how the shape is simply hollowed out for the main living space, with minimal but strong posts and rafters providing support. The design feels modern and historical at the same time. One side opens to a terrace while other has high windows for balanced light. Architects William Turnbull and Mary Griffin began with the long barn idea and then

divided it into two spaces (kitchen/living area and a bedroom/bathroom) separated by a breezeway-dining room, creating a contemporary dogtrot cabin (itself an historical house type) for the wine country.The outdoor dining room can be closed off from the prevailing wind with a sliding barn door  (which is in the open position, in kitchen on drawing).

The house is the width of a vine row (drawing and photo courtesy TGH Architects). Architect Stephen Atkinson took a similar tack with corrugated aluminum siding

and pulled the fireplace away to mark the edge of the deck in his Zachary vacation house.

Images courtesy Stephen Atkinson Architecture.) His plan is also a dogtrot but includes a galley kitchen that parallels the long axis; the breezeway stretches beyond the house to include the fireplace and deck. Australian architect Glenn Murcutt has often explored the use of simple house forms and distilled them to an essence,

as in the elegant curve of the gable on his Marie Short house (images courtesy Architectural Record), which also seems to be channeling a fluid line from Alvar Aalto. In this case the walls are really a series of operable layers that filter light, air, and view. So the iconic form creates a structure that allows for change depending on needs and circumstances. The two story gable is equally iconic, especially in the Rudin

house, made of concrete by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron (image courtesy Apartment Therapy), which in turn has influenced designs by others,

like this memorable little shelter by Ultra Architects of Poland (image courtesy Mocoloco).

The most famous riff on such shapes is probably Robert Venturi’s design for his mother’s house from 1964 in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania.

Venturi used the gable as the centering device for the facade and then broke it to bring in high light and shape the entrance (image from The American House, courtesy curatedmag.com). This house became an icon in its own right as a herald of “Post Modernism.”

Archetypal house forms are also at the heart of designs by architects in our Exclusive Studio, such as Bud Dietrich’s wide gable that encompasses

greenhouse windows and a garage, Plan 481-1; Ross Anderson’s Plan 433-1

for a coastal getaway, with saddlebag-like attachments like the rustic staircases and the screen porch; Braxton Werner and Paul Field

and their version of a long barn house, Plan 491-10; Gregory La Vardera’s Plan 431-14

even recalls the Herzon & de Meuron example in its cubist quality, only in shingles this time, not concrete,  and Frank McGahon’s Plan 520-7,

which combines a series of long gables into a courtyard layout. And we’re back to the stone barn — not from Scotland now but from Ireland!

Recycled Wood News

Kirei is a sustainable wood manufacturer known for handsome bamboo, wheatboard, and Kirei board products (the latter is made of reclaimed sorgum straw) and has just launched the new Windfall line of paneling.

It uses reclaimed wood from deconstructed buildings in the Pacific Northwest to create engineered wood panels for wall coverings and casework (image from Kirei). Solid panels come in Clear, Ivory, Anthracite, and Mocha finishes; 3-ply panels come in Clear finish. Solid and 3 ply panels also come in an end-grain style.

For many homeowners – with apologies to Star Trekkers – it’s really interior space that’s the final frontier. The potential for improvement is infinite. Take this new house by innovative and edgy interior designer Erin Martin working with an adventurous Napa Valley client. It’s both rustic — as a barn-inspired ranch house — and highly refined.

The big timber structure, which supports a sleeping loft over the kitchen, is exposed and becomes a foil for a sophisticated black and white furniture palette. The loft itself is simple but eye-catching, and not a little galactic,

thanks to an art piece suspended on a rope and resembling a dusty comet — or a hay bale on a bad hair day. It’s wonderful, like a tiny hint of Halloween. The table on the dining porch reads as a vertical extension of the floor, thanks to

the continuity of material — the same kind of boards are used for both. It’s a clever idea and makes you wonder just for a moment which is which — porch or table — rather like an Escher print. Martin’s design of the galley kitchen is particularly effective at enlivening our perception of space through the use of contrast. Her backsplash, for example, does more than protect the wall above the sink from water damage — not to mention the occasional “wormhole.”  She used antiqued mirror to cover the wall behind the range.

The soft indistinct reflection adds surprise while visually expanding the space into a sort of parallel universe. In this view straight down the galley

see how the backsplash almost blends with the windows, adding a little reflective mystery to contrasts with the bunkhouse-like floorboards. The peninsula dividing the kitchen from the dining/living area

includes an integral sink that simplifies the line of the counter, further blurring boundaries.

The barn has always been a good starting point for home design: a typical barn layout — which is similar to that of the Roman basilica — includes a high central portion and lower side aisles. One of our newest exclusive designs, Plan 530-2 below,

by Classic Colonial Homes, makes use of this arrangement for the garage; the living space is in the loft. Architect David Wright‘s Plan 452-1

glazes part of the roof to brighten the rear porch and the adjacent living room. Architect Francois Levy took took inspiration from gambrel-roof barns for his Plan 450-2.

Here the garage door is deceiving — it’s used not for a garage but as a way to open up an entire wall of the living space. Barns are always worth a look, if not a double take.

Heat Seeker

Finally, just in time for colder weather, a thermostat that turns up the heat through modern functional design: it’s the new Learning Thermostat from Nest, a company founded by Tony Fadell, formerly of Apple — so naturally it’s a sleekly appealing object in its own right. It’s also intuitive — just turn the dial the way you did with units of old but now there’s a new twist, not to mention a learning curve.

According to Tony: “Turns out you change the temperature in your house 1500 times a year. 1500! Our thermostat learns what temperatures you like so it can program itself. It senses when you’re out and turns itself down. And we started from scratch with design, so it’s beautiful.” I concur, though it reminds me a little of the lyric from Santa Claus is Coming to Town:  “He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake…” It has fully integrated software,  provides energy-saving tips, can be controlled from your smartphone, and installation is over most existing circuitry. If you’re good maybe you’ll get one!

I just saw a wonderful rustic-contemporary house by eminent architect Peter Bohlin, whose firm – Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson – is responsible for the design of the Apple stores including the marvelous glass cube on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as well as the headquarters for Pixar, in Emeryville, California (which I profiled in a previous post). The tour was sponsored by the California Council of the AIA, hence the populated spaces.

The house rides a gentle live oak-studded ridge and offers layout lessons as well as some innovative design details. You follow the long stone wall

to the entry, pass through the wall, and arrive on the deck between the pool and the house. Turn right and you enter the great room.

The stone-paved circulation spine (where everyone is standing) follows the inside of the wall you just paralleled, past the kitchen to the bedrooms at the rear. Turn the other way and you face the pool and the dramatic mountain view.

That familiar stone wall is now leading the eye into the distance even as its

increasingly irregular profile deftly echoes the line of the hills. Now this is architecture that resonates with its setting!

In one sense, and with the Apple connection in mind, it’s a sort of “I-house” (thank you Houseplans.com colleague Ting Lee for this observation!) so here are what I’d call the relevant “architectural apps.”

The cutting board/drain board that’s part of the kitchen island does double duty: it slides on tracks across the sink to form a handy cover for dirty dishes or when you need more

surface area for food preparation or a buffet.

This is a clever idea that I wish I had in my kitchen — the cutting board always needs to be washed off anyway so why not make it part of the sink in the first place. Another “take-away” idea is the way the fireplace forms part of a separate alcove while still warming the room at large, as shown in the overall photo of the great room, above. The generous hearth allows for sitting, wood storage, and display while acting as a focal point for the rest of the space.

It’s a short-hand version of an inglenook, which was popular in Shingle Style and Craftsman homes at the turn of the 20th century. Bohlin’s multi-functional approach continues in the design of the niche for the flat screen television.

It’s hidden behind this sliding steel panel, which is shared with the adjacent deep-sill window — note the barn door track at the top. When you want to watch television you slide the panel to the left and it covers the window, thereby blocking the light. Then — to just slightly adjust  the phrase on every I-Phone — just slide to unblock! A clever alternative to hiding the flat screen behind a painting.

The bathrooms in this house are also very cool and include a double vanity that’s one long concrete trough sink

and a bench that extends through the glass wall of the shower

to maximize the feeling of spaciousness.

The broader lesson of this house is in the simple linearity of its plan: really just one big room connected to bedrooms and bathrooms by a corridor like compartments on a train. And here the deck and pool continue the line, but as rooms that are open to the sky. This “single file arrangement” is a good conceptual starting point for anyone thinking about building a new house and will fit a variety of site conditions. For example, compare Greg La Vardera’s Plan 431-2

where every major room opens to the deck that runs the length of the house, with Plan 491-10 by Werner Field,

with the great room similarly bracketed by bedrooms, decks like running boards, and a breezeway near the center. This sort of linear plan is almost an archetype — Peter Bohlin simply put the great room at one end. So if hiring Apple’s architect is not an option, use these plans to start visualizing what you need for your situation, I mean your “I-Building-Pad.”

The 20th Monterey Design Conference, sponsored by the California Council of the American Institute of Architects, took place last weekend. The two days of lectures and seminars by architects and landscape architects from across the country, Canada, and Spain offered up a superb architectural feast. There was the usual architectural jargon — overuse of words like “aperture,” meaning window or opening, and “iteration,” meaning version — and sometimes you just want a clear declarative sentence explaining the purpose of a  particular design — but all in all this was a wonderfully stimulating experience.

Of course the setting at the Asilomar Conference Grounds – a California state park on the ocean at Pacific Grove near Carmel — sets a high design standard. The marvelous serpentine boardwalks that wind through the dunes (to protect them) aren’t just useful as a kind of palette cleanser between the high intensity talks,

but  also act as a powerful metaphor for the journey of discovery that a good conference makes possible.

In addition the original Asilomar buildings designed by California’s most famous woman architect, Julia Morgan (who also designed Hearst Castle), like “The Lodge” shown above from 1917, set a high architectural standard by deftly using natural materials to make buildings that seem indigenous.

And inside, the cinnamon-hued, redwood board and batten walls and stairway have a visual and tactile power that is unforgettable.

All the large lectures took place in another Julia Morgan building, called Merrill Hall (above), a rustic-elegant barn on a hill. In other words, at a place like this, any design talk better be good!

This conference succeeded because it offered  a strong cross section of contemporary work. Here are first impressions –  more reporting on the conference will follow in a subsequent post.

Newly anointed MacArthur Genius Grantee Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang — whose most famous building is the Aqua skyscraper in Chicago, shown below and described in an earlier Eye On Design post –

spoke about how nature, context, and materials research inform her work in the US and India. How appropriate for a lecture in a sand dune by ocean waves!

Tom Kundig, of Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle, designs seductive modern buildings with vividly expressed mechanical systems and hot rod elements like super scaled cranks and rollers, as in his famous Chicken Point Cabin (photo by Benjamin Benschneider, courtesy Olson Kundig Architects)

or his Rolling Huts — guest cabins on giant steel wheels (photograph by Tim Bies, courtesy Olson Kundig Architects).

Tom has been influenced by the painter and kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, whose most famous work, titled “Homage To New York” and shown below,

(image courtesy New York Times) was a machine that was designed to self destruct. It was easy to see how Tom’s fascination/obsession with machines has lead to an architecture that becomes kinetic sculpture.

Part of the conference was devoted to “Emerging Talents” and one of these talks showed how architects are embracing new tools and techniques, like Andreas Froech of Machineous, who is adapting industrial automotive robotic systems to fabricate not buildings, but polymorphic structures that might be used in buildings, like this screen

or this extraordinary table (both images courtesy Machineous).

I wondered about the practical application of some of this work but now thinking back on the talk I see how “natural” it is — though a nature that has been rethought through the computer. The table is a table unless it is a tree — sounds like Gertrude Stein! More about MDC in my next post.

Drawing from Frank 

The latest book from the vast and ever expanding publishing engine that runs on a fuel known as the imagination of Frank Lloyd Wright is a splendid collection of his conceptual sketches and presentation drawings, just published by Rizzoli. They are selected and explained – with some fascinating anecdotes — by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, longtime director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.  For anyone interested in Wright it is a must-have because it lets you follow his mind at work.  The cover image

is for an unbuilt project in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood – it’s the house as sculpted cliff and monumental exclamation point. The book shows just how lucky Wright was to have such super-natural sites to work with but also how brilliantly he rose to each topographic occasion. It would have been fun to see what he could do next to Julia Morgan at Asilomar — then again maybe that wouldn’t have worked…