Category Archives: Design ideas

Ideas of Home at UCSD and MOMA

Posted on June 8, 2012 | 3 Comments

Foreclosing on the Familiar

“Fallen Star,”  by the Korean born artist Do Ho Suh, is the newest sculpture installation at the Stuart Collection on the campus of the University of California at San Diego and debuted this week with more than a thousand visitors on opening day. It’s a small gabled cottage that has somehow crashed into the

roof of a seven story engineering building and now teeters over the edge… perhaps the Wizard of Oz was aiming for an advanced degree. It’s definitely a mortarboard mash-up. According to Mary Beebe, the collection director, “It was his idea and we produced it.” From the rooftop the house appears only a little off

kilter, but then as you peer over the railing you see that only engineering — i. e. the cantilever — is holding it up. It may be an art piece but it’s also a strong advertisement for structural daring. (“Go forth ye graduates, and engineer!”) The work explores Suh’s “on-going exploration of themes around the idea of home, cultural displacement, the perception of our surroundings, and how one constructs a memory of a space.” When he arrived in the U.S. from Seoul, Korea in 1991 to study, Suh understandably felt un-moored, which “led him to measure spaces in order to establish relationships with his new surroundings. He had to physically and mentally readjust.” The permanent installation is clever in the way it literally and figuratively readjusts — indeed, upends — the romantic notion of home, acknowledging that in today’s reality it remains both fixed and floating — or fleeting — for many.

In my mind this work is really a last minute West Coast entry in the current exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which I saw last month. The purpose of the show, organized by MOMA architecture curator Barry Bergdoll and which runs through August 13, is to explore new architectural possibilities for cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis. Five teams of architects, planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers were asked to produce proposals for housing in five different suburban communities, from Temple Terrace, Florida to Rialto, California. The result is a series of essentially utopian schemes. I was most drawn to the solution called Nature City, for Keizer, Oregon by WORKac, a design firm in Manhattan. Inspired by the Garden City concept

espoused by influential late 19th century British urbanist Ebenezer Howard, (detail of part of a garden city plan shown above, courtesy Our Letchworth), they proposed developing a 225 acre parcel (already slated for big box stores and the like) in a way that is  “five times denser than the adjacent suburban blocks but

has three times the amount of public open space, including a 158-acre nature preserve.” The idea is to create a symbiotic relationship between structure and site with a wide variety of housing types, from attached town homes to towers to

courtyard houses and long blocks like this “Cavern Building” with huge park-like pass-throughs and lake-like pools; the latter, glass-walled and three stories deep, is especially ambitious! (Model image courtesy MOMA). The most arresting

feature is a series of parks and pools that spiral around a great dome (shown above) that collects methane from a mound of solid waste and produces compost, while waste heat warms public pools at the rooftop. It’s an architectural circle of life — a rose is a rose is a Compost Hill. The show’s other four schemes offered equally suggestive architectural solutions for new construction (one, by Studio Gang, even inserted new housing into the shell of a derelict factory) but none addressed how to deal with existing neighborhoods where foreclosures are rampant — the house on the brink, as it were, to steal Suh’s metaphor. In the end that is the harder question.

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Posted in architectural history, Architectural Innovation, contemporary home design, Design ideas, Design Ideas and Inspiration, Engineering, Green Design, Landscape Ideas, The Vertical Farm, Uncategorized, Urban design

Window Walls and Rooms-Within-Rooms

Posted on June 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

Every Solid Loves a Void — and Space is a Wrap

Let’s explore two strong architectural ideas — the window wall and the room-within-a-room — and how they can enhance house design. Both have long histories. In one sense the glass wall goes all the way back to the tall banks of windows at the Tudor estate known as Hardwick Hall in England, built by Bess

of Hardwick in the late 1500s, shown here (photo courtesy Anglotopia.net). At that time glass was an important emblem of power and wealth because it was so rare — thus it was a fitting material for the richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth I. You didn’t mess with Bess. A more recent example is the glass

living room wall to the right of the tree courtyard, at the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau designed by Le Corbusier and built as a demonstration house or “machine for living” for the Paris Exposition of 1925 (photo courtesy 4rts.wordpress.com). As we have seen in previous posts, the window wall became a signature feature of Modernism, especially in mid-twentieth century works like Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth house and Philip Johnson’s Glass

House. Our Plan 520-4, by Irish architect Frank McGahon, shown here with its flanking window walls, is a recent version. The great appeal of the window wall is to unite inside and outside while framing both. The trick is to beware of exposures — even insulated glass can transmit heat and cold.

The room-within-a-room idea is vividly illustrated by a piece of furniture, also from England of centuries ago: the Great Bed of Ware, ca. 1580, with its large

post and beam frame and heavy curtains closing it off for privacy and warmth (photo courtesy Wikipedia).

Thomas Jefferson’s bed alcove at Monticello, shown above, is a sort of built-in version, minus the curtains (photo courtesy Colonial Williamsburg). Architect Charles Moore was fascinated with this idea and referred to it as an aedicula, which is Latin for a small shrine. (The most famous example of an aedicula

is the baldacchino with twisting columns over the altar at St. Peter’s in Rome, by Bernini, photo courtesy Saintpetersbasilica.org.) Moore used a much simplified version of it in his own house at Orinda from the early 1960s, where the larger

living and smaller bathing spaces are defined by columns and skylights, like separate domestic temples clustered under one roof (image courtesy Eleanor Weinel’s Arch4443). Moore’s design partner, William Turnbull, used an even more spare — and more Jeffersonian — version in his Sea Ranch cottage of the early 1980s, which is our historical Plan 447-1, where the bed is an alcove

in the corner. A flexible contemporary take on this idea is “The Cube” designed by architect Toshi Kasa of Spaceflavor for Feng Shui expert Liu Ming in his live/work loft in Oakland, California (photo by Joe Fletcher via The New York

 Times). The 8 foot-square cube-on-wheels is a bedroom on one side and an office on the other, allowing Mr. Ming to use the rest of his loft for his classes. I trust the brakes are on in case there’s an earthquake.

An outdoor room within a garden is yet another way to go, as architect Ross

Anderson shows in our Plan 433-2, above. See the outdoor fireplace opposite the built-in bench forming a small living area at the edge of the courtyard in this partial view.

But where might the window wall and the room-in-a-room work together? How about Hojo House by Akira Yoneda of Architecton in Japan. The glass house is

behind an elegant scrim of steel tubes, creating a modified screen porch that distracts from the very tight infill site (thoughts of cages inevitably spring to mind; photo courtesy infoteli.com). But I think today’s most famous example of the two ideas working together might be the marvelous glass cube entrance to the Apple store

on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where the novelty of a structure that is there-and-not-there makes you see everything around it — like the Plaza Hotel across the street — more clearly. The simple contrast between solid and void is visually refreshing and builds a larger whole. Designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Apple’s magic container makes you realize it is a room within the much larger room that is the terrace on which it sits, the street, and the edge of Central Park itself. Some ideas just expand!

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Posted in architectural history, Architectural Innovation, architectural toys, Cabinetry, contemporary home design, Courtyard Plans, Design ideas, International House Plans, Japanese design, mid-century modern homes, Modern Houses, modern houses and house plans, Porches, Uncategorized

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Architecture Is Not a Luxury

Posted on March 16, 2012 | 5 Comments

Living With Ingenuity

Architecture is often considered a luxury but why should that be true? I think good design is a necessity; it’s about invention and making new things happen. Bad design ought to be the luxury we cannot afford. And what is the general definition of luxury anyway? It derives from the Latin words luxuria and luxus, meaning excess; in the 18th century it came to mean “something enjoyable or comfortable beyond life’s necessities,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Shelter is of course a necessity; but it’s the job of architecture to make shelter something more — and more can mean comfortable, expressive, ingenious, idea-rich, even memorable. If that’s a luxury then hold the foie gras — I’ll take design. I feel architecture can inspire our own sense of possibility and make us aware of nature and the world around us in fresh ways. Take a tiny “unbuildable” infill lot in Tokyo, for example. Architect Yasuhiro Yamashita,

of Atelier Tekuto (photos courtesy the firm) saw the size limitation as an opportunity to develop a sort of contempo-Gothic iceberg: towering translucence

above, expanding volume below. Walls of obscure glass soar to a point (the wall is the ceiling) over the entry and bedroom floor above ground and make it

possible to flood the underground living area with daylight. Also the plan of the house tapers toward the back door, creating a false perspective that gives an impression of spaciousness, which is accentuated by the white metal fittings and walls. It resembles the bridge of a ship. Or a lantern for living. (Though I admit there’s not a lot of room for Granny’s sleigh bed.)

Or what about this unusual house by architectural historian and architect

Terunobu Fujimori (photo by Adam Friedberg via Dwell) that ingeniously combines opposites, an anchoring cave and a high-in-the-sky tea house, within a charred cedar skin — which is a traditional Japanese method for


protecting wood from insects (photos, courtesy Materia Design, and Japanese Craft Construction on Flikr). The design may be a luxury for the inhabitants but for me it is essential because it beautifully illustrates what a home can be: sheltering cave as welcoming entry and foundation; tea house as flight of fancy, an imagination set free. And yet contradictions abound — as they do in many homes. For what is a tea house but a space for ritualized ceremony — so here is ritual lifting away and loosening up — literally. And the cave is not dark and carved from stone but open and full of light, like a breezeway. Not to mention the burnt exterior protected from decay. Architecture can tell a story by turning some ideas upside down and making them hard to forget. Louis Kahn once said we didn’t need Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony until we heard it; well it’s the same with great houses. Maybe architecture is the luxury we didn’t know we needed.

On a somewhat more prosaic (certainly less melodic) level, to me the greatest luxury at the moment would be if my sweet peas climb up the grid of string I have tied to the backyard fence. Or maybe if we added an outdoor shower – like

the one here (courtesy Sunset Magazine). In any case, spring is here — and that’s a luxury I can live with.

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Posted in architectural history, Architectural Innovation, Building Materials, Building Methods, contemporary home design, Design ideas, Porches, Regional design, Rustic architecture, Traditional design, Uncategorized

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Top New Products at 2012 Home Builder Show

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 2 Comments

Winds of Change in Kitchens, Bathrooms & More

The current economy has certainly made the annual product showcase that is the International Home Builder Show smaller but it has not dampened the spirit of invention — in fact it may have had the opposite effect. Take the range hood, a fairly prosaic appliance. That is, until the Italian designers for Best S. p. A. blew

cooking odors into a galaxy far far away with models like their space ship-shaped Fusion, above, which is wall-mounted and made of stainless steel and glass. Or

how about their racetrack-curved Shelf, or their ceiling-mounted Sphera,

 which is camouflaged as a pendant globe light from the 1950s. The website for another Best line, the Sorpresa collection, offers a “Visualizer” that shows how different models look in the same kitchen, which is very useful. All these products dominated the Broan-Nutone booth (Broan, Nutone, and Best are subsidiaries of Broan-Nutone, and produce their own lines of range hoods.)

The Vault drop-in apron front stainless steel sink from Kohler caught my eye.

I like the way it updates the farmhouse sink with a crisp modern outline. Kohler is also expanding its array of enameled cast iron sinks with the Bellegrove

Double-Equal” version, which includes two reversible racks and a sponge caddy that fits over the saddle. For the bathroom, Kohler introduced the Hydrorail –

shower column (two versions are shown above). It includes an integral two-way diverter, and allows you to convert your existing fixed shower head to a spa-like shower. Also the column, which is insulated, functions as a grab bar. Sterling, a

Kohler subsidiary, introduced its Accord 60-inch Seated Shower, a very practical solution for aging in place since it can replace a typical bathtub for an easy retrofit.  The seat can change position and there’s ample shelving.

Mainstream manufacturers are improving their website functions. Lumber Liquidators, a large flooring supplier, has a new Room Designer tool that lets you see how various flooring choices might look in typical rooms — such as a cork floor in a kitchen

or a bamboo floor in the living room. You see the floor choices in each setting.

There are three versions or decorating styles for each room, which limits you to Lumber Liquidator’ taste, but it’s a good start. I wish you could upload pictures of your own kitchen or family room and see how they look with different floors. Maybe that’s next.

You’ve heard of key-less entry for your car – how about for your front door: it’s

the Simplicikey remote control door lock. If you prefer the digital lock, lift up the

escutcheon and type in your code; or you can still use a key! A clever idea, and they are working on a wider range of hardware styles.

Leviton, a major manufacturer of electrical devices, debuted its new universal

dimmer. The switch is unremarkable looking but does a lot: it includes a microprocessor that allows it to regulate current and emerging incandescent, dimmable compact flourescent (CFLs), and dimmable light emitting diode bulbs (LEDs). According to Leviton, the device can properly dim next-generation lighting sources “while remaining backwards compatible with current bulbs.” I love that phrase “backwards compatible” — it could be another term for an architectural historian like me. 

While at the show I toured three forward-thinking Builder Concept Homes sponsored by Builder Magazine and built by Centerline Homes, which cleverly target three demographic groups: Gen X (1966-1985), Gen Y (1986-2005), and Gen B — Baby Boomers (1946-1964).

Interestingly, they occupy a decidedly retro subdivision layout — a cul de sac — perhaps another example of “backwards compatible.” But each house aimed for flexibility with guest suites for in-laws or other relatives. The Gen X house by designer Tony Weremeichek of Canin Associates even has a full-fledged “Granny Suite” complete with kitchenette. I was struck by how the Gen X house, and Gen Y and B, designed by architect Mike Woodley of the Woodley Architectural Group, all made use of 90-degree corners defined by telescoping sliding glass patio doors (by WinDoor) to allow spaces to expand

or contract depending on needs and weather. Above is the corner of the Gen Y great room when opened up so that it blends with the pool patio. And here is a

corner of the great room at the Gen B. house. Woodley used sliding barn doors in

a similar way to open up or close off the study in Gen Y. The same idea was also used in The New American Home, mentioned in a previous post. I guess one good corner slider deserves another! For more on the three Concept houses and the products they showcase, see the Concept Home website.


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Posted in Appliances and Fixtures, Design ideas, Home Builders, Home Products, Kitchen and Bath, Patio Living, Uncategorized

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Praise and Parody for the Minimalist Home

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

Nature Abhors a Vacuum Cleaner, or Maybe Not

I’m always drawn to the orderly, spare, modern designs you see in glossy home magazines and books. But my house is not so spare and not everything is in its place. I’m kind of a pack rat as my wife — and office mates — will tell you. I go through periodic bouts of frenzied cleaning but the tide of newspapers, magazines, and books rises regularly. So I was pleased to come across the ingenious new book by Molly Jane Quinn and Jenna Talbott aptly titled It’s Lonely in The Modern World (Chronicle, 2011), which is an ironic primer on how to navigate the field of architectural minimalism.

These are the people who started the clever blog Unhappy Hipsters, which takes a wry look at ambitiously artful modern homes like this one and the way they’re

portrayed, where the individuals on the stoop seem quite unaware of what’s behind them (or perhaps it’s the elephant on the deck; image courtesy ifound). In these sorts of houses messy realities — like the need for windows and daylight, for example — never intrude, especially in architectural magazines. But spoofs are the sign of a publication’s success. (Remember the Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings by the Harvard Lampoon, and the one of Sunset magazine with a photo of a family picnicking in front of a nuclear reactor.) So I started looking around for ways to be both hip and realistic — i.e hide the clutter in sleek and elegant ways –  like this handsome storage bench from Herman Miller. It would help with all the bags

and blankets at the bottom of our bed. Or maybe we just need a new bed frame that incorporates storage drawers, like this version from Bluedot, which

streamlines a storage idea that was popular in the 1960s and 70s. Then what about a place for charging cameras, iphones and ipads? Bludot’s “Juice box” is

a clever solution in the way it hides the plugs and keeps the wires under control (image courtesy Mashable). This loft bedroom by Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture includes an

especially clever stair/bureau with pull-out storage drawers — though I would

probably need a railing, and I notice that the books seem to be piling up…

So in the end I confess I am impossibly conflicted because I am a huge fan of spareness and the uncluttered look and am always promoting it, while only rarely achieving it myself. Our Plan 491-2 by Braxton Werner and Paul Field

might be one answer to my dilemma — it’s uncluttered but not severe, there is storage, and pillows are scattered on the floor!

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Posted in Books, Cabinetry, contemporary home design, Design ideas, Furniture, Home Products, Interior Design, modern houses and house plans, Uncategorized

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