Revisiting the great public parkway in New York City known as The High Line recently made me appreciate once again the power of design to make you see the world in fresh ways or as if for the first time. Created by James Corner Field Operations (Project Lead), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and planting designer Piet Oudolf for the City of New York, it occupies the tracks of a defunct elevated freight rail line snaking through the West Side of Manhattan from Gansevoort Street to West 30th Street. Maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line, it opened in 2009 and another section was completed in 2011. I joined crowds of enthusiastic New Yorkers and tourists to admire the unusual vistas through and around buildings, and saw how sections of the original rails act as a kind of

talisman, literally and figuratively driving the design, as shown here (both photos by Iwan Baan, courtesy thehighline.org). Parallel concrete strips or “tracks” form planting beds, benches, and the walkway itself. Simple. Ingenious. Brilliant! I like the way the planting beds add another metaphoric layer  as rows of crops visually connecting the walking surface to the earth itself. To my mind the High Line is a marvelous 21st century version of New York’s Central Park

designed by Frederick Law Olstead and Calvert Vaux, where a similar, if less abstract approach to “nurtured nature” can be seen in the way the Vista Rock Tunnel over 79th Street appears to be hewn out of a stone outcropping (photo by brianac37 courtesy Flckr), which, in fact, it was. Both Central Park and the High Line express a heightened appreciation of  both nature and urbanism and the contrast/connection between them. Each in its way is a descendant of the Picturesque movement (emphasizing the romance of nature) of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

So can you bring something of that natural line, or lineage, home? Here’s an

example from the remarkable series of demonstration gardens at Appeltern in the Netherlands, where the line of stone literally links inside and outside (photo courtesy Appeltern.nl). Or follow the shape of an early modern backyard by the

great landscape architect Thomas Church, where the rectangular grid and curvilinear swoop intersect to form patio, sandbox, and tricycle path around the tree (image courtesy ncsu.edu). The design makes the outdoor rooms and paths extensions of each other so that it’s not possible to imagine one without the other. A recent garden by Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture also

combines grid and curve, but with a twist — the ground cover expresses the grid as an extension of the landscape, not the paving — as if nature is coming in from the wild (photo courtesy desiretoinspire.net). And what about that blue fire pit? I guess that’s where all the lines converge in dancing flames…some designs are hotter than others. And some lines of thought (i.e. mine) can perhaps go to far. But, hey, summer’s almost here!

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Nir Pearlson Rethinks the Simple Home

I’m excited to welcome Oregon architect Nir Pearlson to Houseplans.com –  his designs are the latest additions to our Exclusives Collection. With experience as both craftsman/builder and architect, Nir has brought new energy to compact and sustainable home design. In fact, he just won Fine Homebuilding magazine’s 2013 Small Home of the Year Award for an 800 sq. ft., two bedroom one bath garden cottage. The magazine recognized the design “for its shared spaces and connections to the outdoors that make it seem larger than its physical boundaries…” And guess what?! It’s our new Plan 890-1! The layout is

mostly one open space containing kitchen and living-dining area connecting to a

large wrap-around deck, as shown here (all photos in this post by Mike Dean, courtesy Nir Pearlson). Nir explains that he designed the house as a series of roughly 12 foot-square modules — they overlap to comprise the main living area. Key elements define individual “rooms” without separating one from another,

effectively making the main space feel larger than it is, like this window seat with storage drawers. The built-in platform and overhead beam frame the seat as a separate unit without cutting it off from the larger space. The kitchen peninsula

(a warm-toned granite) performs a similar function — see the window alcove in the distance — as does the central wood stove on its slate pad. Naturally dyed

plaster wall finish, and red oak floor and Douglas fir and hemlock trim add visual warmth. Nir designed the house to be as energy-wise as possible, with rigid foam insulation in walls and roof, and separate photo-voltaic arrays — a larger one

for generating electricity and a smaller one for hot water — which are visible on the roof in the photo. It’s definitely the little award-winning cottage that could!

Nir designed this 800 sq. foot two story home — Plan 890-3 — to function as a

backyard cottage. Two bedrooms are on the lower level; kitchen and living space are on the floor above and open to the charming porch you see here. While this version of the cottage tucks into the toe of a slope, it could easily be adapted for other site conditions. Stay tuned as we add more Pearlson plans. Welcome Nir!

If you’re planning to build a house on a rural site it’s a good idea to try to camp there first, to get a sense of the site’s key features and best orientations. In my case — having just returned from an overnight stay in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara in a sleeping bag that must have been rated for indoor use only — camping only made me appreciate beds and bedrooms all the more.  But while lying awake in the cold — the moon is beautiful but really, really slow — I started to think about ways to include aspects of camping without actually leaving home. Seattle architect Tom Kundig, of the firm Olson Kundig, is especially adept at what I would call “civilized rustication,” that is, heightening an outdoor experience indoors. I have mentioned some of his projects before –

he gives new meaning to the nurture in nature. For example, consider this plywood bedroom with the round Rais wood stove: I’d call it architectural camping (no doubt the sleeping bag is rated for actual warmth). The wood grain, expanse of glass, platform bed, and stove are enough to create a feeling of being in a landscape without actually strolling into the wild (photo courtesy stylecarrot.com). Or here’s a bedroom in another Kundig cabin with an outdoor

vibe in the decking and open/screened walls (photo by Tim Bies courtesy justthedesign.tumblr.com). Berkeley architects Richard Fernau and Laura Hartman, of Fernau & Hartman, have often experimented with blurring the

boundaries between inside and outside. One of my favorite examples is their design for a house in Colorado, as shown here. When it’s time to say goodnight,

the bed, which is on rails, rolls onto the sheltered porch –  next stop, dreamland (photos courtesy fernau+hartman.com). If that seems a bit extreme, maybe well-proportioned, operable window walls will do the trick, as shown here in

Plan 491-10, a modern cabin by Braxton Werner and Paul Field. That would work for me! Then there is the question of bathing outdoors — always fun to think about in warmer weather. You can simply plumb the tub somewhat away

from the cabin, as shown in this design by the innovative Japanese firm Atelier Bow-Wow (photo by Iwan Baan). Or you can blow the lid off convention as, once

again, Tom Kundig demonstrates, in his bathing pavilion with a crank that raises

the roof. It’s part drawbridge, part cabin — a wonderfully kinetic and, I would guess, invigorating bathing machine (photos by Tim Bies, courtesy Olson Kundig and Architizer — see the video of the roof opening up!).

The idea of the camp-as-house has long been a strong and suggestible architectural idea — remember those famous Adirondack lodges.  A particularly quirky early 20th century example is the house known as the Temple of the

Wings in Berkeley, designed by Bernard Maybeck and A. Randolph Monroe and built in 1911 for Charles and Florence Boynton as a riff on Greco-Roman architecture (photo courtesy Berekeleyplaques.org). Richard Fernau and Laura Hartman know it well. It consists of two circular open-air pavilions defined by 34 Corinthian columns. Canvas shades provided weather protection and one presumes, a measure of privacy. Mrs. Boynton, who was a childhood friend of Isadora Duncan, taught generations of dance classes here: the outdoor life as leaps and pirouettes of the imagination. I guess a colonnade is all you really need to make the camp your home — and maybe now I can get to sleep.

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I recently visited the new (38 years in the making) Four Freedoms Memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Louis Kahn, on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan’s East River across from the United Nations. The name comes from a famous Roosevelt speech where he listed the four basic human freedoms worth fighting for: Freedom of Speech and Expression, of Worship, from Want, and from Fear. The memorial exemplifies the power of architecture to celebrate locations and

ideas. You get there by tram, which sets the experience apart, like an architectural palate cleanser, as you soar above the river and see the landscape below (photo courtesy Eldridgestreet.org). The memorial forms the tip of the

island like the prow of a ship, which is fitting, since Roosevelt was a yachtsman and Assistant Secretary of the Navy before becoming president. This view is looking back toward the tramway, which is hidden on the far side of the bridge (photo by amiaga.com courtesy Business Insider). But it’s also a dazzling geometric abstraction made of huge precisely cut blocks of granite set extremely close together but not touching. The triangular wedge of lawn, linden trees, and gravel paths lead into a grand rectangular open-air room like an arrow piercing its target. After a brief walk from the tram station you come to a grand stairway which forms the ceremonial entrance to the park. At the top of the stair

everything unfolds, drawing you inexorably across and down and into the view (photo courtesy Vanity Fair). It recalls the axiality of Kahn’s famous Salk Institute at La Jolla, where the plaza between the two main wings frames and magnifies the view to the sea. As The New York Times put it, when advocating for the memorial’s island site when it was first proposed: “It would face the sea he loved, the Atlantic he bridged, the Europe he helped to save, and the United Nations he inspired.” See the elegant UN slab on the right. But here the tree-lined paths (four rows — four freedoms?) at the side are as important as the central greensward: all roads lead to the man, the city, and the seascape. Visitors

eddy around the bust of FDR by Jo Davidson (photo courtesy FDR Four Freedoms Park) and enter the roofless room at the island’s tip where they can sit at the water’s edge. The close-up and colossal granite blocks literally anchor

the space (the famous speech excerpt is engraved on the central block),

contrasting vividly with the long panoramas across the river. Everyone gathers on the stone steps at far end. In a sense the memorial leads us back to ourselves and our own contemplative horizons.

It’s a monumental room that’s also poignant and personal, and prompted other thoughts about the meaning of interior and exterior space. I think a well designed room should be a little like the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts, which, as Dobby explains to Harry Potter,  “is a room that a person can only enter when they have real need of it. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not, but when it appears it is always equipped for the seeker’s needs.” A domestic

example might be Frank Ghery’s famous Norton house in Venice, California, where the architect gave his client, a former lifeguard, a lookout tower he could call home whenever he wanted to savor — if not save — some personal space (photo courtesy You-are-here.com). A somewhat broader interpretation of “requirement” might be a multi-functional space like a great room where some

functions lie dormant until a particular activity is called for, as illustrated by Plan 65-142, above, which is essentially a contemporary one-room cottage. (Despite all the Medievalisms in the Harry Potter books, maybe there’s also a modernist streak!) In any case, whether in public environments or private spaces, I think the best architectural designs fill many roles.

I just returned from the Chrysalis Remodeling Awards jury in Jacksonville, where I was reminded of one of the great American house types: the Florida Cracker. According to architect Ronald W. Haase, author of the excellent Classic Cracker: Florida’s Wood-Frame Vernacular Architecture, the term “cracker” originally referred to country folk in Southern Georgia who “cracked their corn to make meal.” For settlers of  northern Florida it also meant

the crack of leather whips used to drive cattle and ultimately became identified with the unpretentious wood-frame houses that these individuals built. The Boyer house of 1878 at Tarpon Springs, shown above (photo courtesy Heritage Village, Pinellas County) is a good early example. A gable or hip-roofed structure that’s only one or two rooms deep with at least one porch, the Florida Cracker

developed numerous variations, from porches on two sides, as shown above in a reconstruction at the Tallahassee Museum (photo courtesy Wikipedia); to a

breezeway through the middle forming the classic “dogtrot” type, shown here and which I have written about before, some might say obsessively (photo courtesy oldhouseweb.com); to Georgian four square hip-roof versions as

illustrated by Haase in his book — note the front and back porches and the central hall connecting all four rooms (image courtesy Pineapple Press). As Haase points out, the Cracker is as expressive of a regional architecture as the New England saltbox or the Southwestern adobe ranch house. It’s also a very suggestive form to use as  a starting point for anyone thinking of building a house because the components –  square room, porch, and shed, gable, or hip roof — are so straightforward, simple, and easy to combine in different ways. It’s almost like playing with blocks — as actress Diane Keaton points out in her

recent book House. So here’s a quick sampling of plans that do just that, from Plan 464-4, above, which resembles the Boyer cottage, to Cabin Plan 452-3 by David Wright, below — which looks as though the Tallahassee Museum

reconstruction has simply been fine-tuned with corrugated metal and some new posts, to Plan 426-11, which reworks the four square, hip roof idea  and adapts it

for easy, modern indoor-outdoor living in a humid climate. See how the plan almost becomes a dogtrot thanks to the way the central axis cuts through the

house from front porch to rear porch and how the the central living room and the rear porch become extensions of each other. This plan  was recently purchased by a Florida family with forbears who were Crackers — so you can go home again, as long you understand that things will be “the same only different” and perhaps a little more comfortable.  Call it the “Circle of Life” — I mean Cracker.