EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

West Coast Green and the Solar Decathlon

October 15, 2009 · 1 Comment

New Green Ideas for the Home

Calling home acquires new meaning with an application by Our Home Spaces, which turns an iPhone into an energy monitor and thermostat.

iphone thermostat app

It allows you to turn the furnace and the water heater on and off from wherever you happen to be. The system works with Proliphix thermostats. It was one of many products shown at this year’s West Coast Green environmental showcase, which  took place on the two main piers at San Francisco’s picturesque Fort Mason. A novel 200 foot-long bamboo trellis demonstration garden by Design Ecology — resembling a line of teepee frames –

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connected the exhibit halls and served as the emblem of the show.

Design Ecology drawing

The walkway’s native and drought-tolerant plant habitat, shown above in a schematic, illustrated key storm water filtration strategies: landscape buffer, hanging gardens as pre-filtration, and in-situ water treatment. Plans for a floating exhibit did not work out this year but I think a modern demonstration houseboat with a living roof would be a great draw in the future — call it the SS Green Living!

Here are some other new home products that stood out.  Nick Lee (Houseplans.com Services, Inc. Chief of Design) also toured the show and contributed several discoveries.

Green Lights. This trumpet vine-shaped LED (light emitting diode) pendant light system

M262 LED pendant from EST

is from Energy Savings Technology, LLC, a small Northern California company. The shape is a classic but using it to surround an LED light is new. The company also offers a sleek tube shaped light

M410_01 led light pendant from est

for installations over a counter or dining table. According to engineer-founder Gerhard Hoog  these lights provide either warm or neutral white light and up to 80% power savings compared to halogen spots or flood lights. They are fully dimmable.

Renaissance in Wood. That new hardwood floor you have been considering (actually I have been dreaming of replacing the dark brown tile in my kitchen with wood) might be older than you think. Recycled wood for flooring, furniture, and cabinetry is an expanding category at the show, with several companies represented. Wood Anchor, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, specializes in reclaiming and reusing wood from urban elm trees (victims of Dutch elm disease) and demolished grain elevators to produce flooring

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as shown above, and they’re always looking for more. As their website says: “Will Work For Wood.” I coveted their stools

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reclaimed from old timbers. Earth Forest Products, based in California, reclaims wood from barns, warehouses, and other buildings and also uses wood resulting from re-forestation projects as well as from FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) forests. I liked their “wood sample tree”

West Coast Green and Las Vegas 007

shown here. An innovative new wood flooring product was literally uncorked at the show: it’s made from slices of wine corks.

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These Showercork™ mosaic tiles by Sustainable Floors have a resilient cushiony feel. They come in 12- by 24-inch by 1/4 inch-thick sheets

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and are installed over a mastic, then grouted and sealed with a urethane finish like ceramic tile.

Mediterranean Energy. Solar panel technology is evolving toward flexible systems that form the roof itself and are not simply attached to it. The Solé Power Tile™

FireShot capture #241 - 'SRS Energy I Gallery' - www_srsenergy_com_Gallery_aspx

by SRS Energy is designed for Mediterranean style roofs and effectively mimics curved clay tiles.

Fresh Air. With new homes becoming air-tight thanks to more efficient insulation and building systems, poor indoor air quality can be a problem. Enter the electric Lifebreath Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV),

155_max_large lifebreath air exchange

which moves stale, contaminated, warm air from the house to outdoors and draws fresh oxygen-laden air from outside and distributes it throughout the house.

illustration.medium air exchanger

The two air streams pass on either side of an aluminum heat-exchange core that transfers heat from outgoing to incoming air. So on cold days warmth is retained as the air gets refreshed.

Green Days on The Capitol Steps

Take a look at this year’s Solar Decathlon on The Mall in Washington, D. C., ending this week.

2009 Solar Decathlon

Sponsored by the Department of Energy (photo above by Stefano Paltera for DOE), this international competition among college teams to design, build, and operate highly energy-efficient, completely solar-powered houses has resulted in an especially innovative crop of designs. It’s a veritable world’s fair of green architecture. Here are some highlights (photos by Jim Tetro, US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon).

Team Spain — photovoltaic walls and sun-tracking roof:

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Team Germany — louvers of integrated thin-film copper indium selenide cells (CIGS):

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Cornell University – corrugated drum shapes and solar panels:

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Team California — solar power and maximized indoor-outdoor living:

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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — Midwest farmhouse forms and recycled barn wood:

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The Ohio State University– recycled wood and solar collectors:

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Rice University — growing walls:

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This year winning teams will be awarded $100,000 over two years to support the Solar Decathlon’s research goal of reducing the cost of solar-powered homes and advancing solar technology. Check out the Solar Decathlon website for in-depth coverage. What a great way to use the nation’s outdoor living room below the Capitol! Members of Congress strolled this “solar subdivision” on their front lawn with evident interest.

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Once and Future Home Ideas

October 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Drawing from Disney

Walt Disney was fascinated with the shaping of space both visually and physically, from the way he transformed the animated film to his invention of the modern theme park. I think architecture was always an important theme for him, like the shiny-bright suburb in the Goofy cartoon Motor Mania of 1950 or the suave contemporary ranch house in the original Parent Trap of 1961. I vividly remember touring Monsanto’s  House of the Future at Disneyland

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(image fromYesterland.com) with its curvilinear white plastic pods

monsanto04 section, dailyicon.net

cantilevered over a central support and utility podium (Yesterland.com). Though designed not by Disney but by two MIT professors — who must have been channeling Buckminster Fuller

Dymaxion House model from website

and his similarly central-masted Minimum Dymaxion house of 1929 — Walt had the sense to give the plastic Monsanto house a ten-year lease in Tomorrowland. The swoopy modern  furniture from fifty years ago

monsanto05 lv rm dailyicon.net

still looks contemporary today (Yesterland.com photo)

I was reminded of these images and Disney’s huge influence on design and our appreciation of it when I toured the superb new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, which opened last week. Two hours flew by. I felt I had stumbled into an animated autobiography, or rather, a compelling four-dimensional biopic.

San Francisco’s Page & Turnbull Architects have deftly inserted the state-of-the-art museum

WDFM by Cesar Rubio

into an historic 19th century brick row (photo by Cesar Rubio) along the Presidio’s parade ground — which is itself like a distant extension of Disneyland’s own Main Street. From the front there’s no hint of the wonderland within. And at the rear only an elegant glass skin

Disney Museum

drawn across an addition (photo by Bruce Damonte) suggests a house of marvels. You experience the museum as a journey through Walt’s life with text blocks, still images, film clips, memorabilia, and narrations by Walt and others every few feet along a carefully choreographed and roughly chronological path. It’s a soft cacophony of sounds and images,  a “dark ride” that you walk, and even then it’s impossible to absorb everything.

Highlights for me are the multi-story “multiplane camera” that allowed Disney  filmmakers to create a realistic sense of depth within animations, the clever elevator that’s designed as a train car (the vertical naturally becomes the horizontal in this Looking Glass world), and the sleek modern terrazzo-and-glass mini-Guggenheim ramp

dol_dfm_v10__0042_MUSEUM-_-museum-campus_disneyland gallery

(image courtesy Walt Disney Family Museum) spiraling around a huge and meticulously detailed scale model of Disneyland.

In one sense it’s all a bit deifying, as if Walt were a latter day King Tut, but — as they say in Egypt — what a cool tomb! And here the hieroglyphics even dance to Silly Symphonies.

Beyond the Casino

I was also in Las Vegas last week, for a talk about Cliff May’s ranch houses at the World Market Center, which is another sort of  “ride.”

WMCLV_aerial

Well off the Strip on the north end of town across from City Hall (you can see the Stratosphere Casino tower in the background), this enormous furnishings marketplace is a contemporary landmark in its own right. The complex consists of a series of interpenetrating cubes and polygons that wrap around a 15 story tall central court that’s open to the sky,

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like a box canyon from Red Rocks Park  reassembled as a building. It feels like the entrance to Oz. One of the great things about this design center is that it’s open to the general public, not just to professional designers. The Center’s Design Salon

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offers consumers the ability to purchase designer furnishings previously offered only to the trade. Complimentary one-hour consultations with interior designers accredited by the American Society of Interior Designers are also offered. It’s a good place to get ideas for shaping or reshaping your home.

A short ride away is the new 180 acre Springs Preserve, Las Vegas’ answer to Tucson’s Living Desert Museum, and built on the site of the original springs for which the city is named (vega means spring in Spanish).

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Here’s one of  the rotundas, recalling a sculptural sundial or open cistern. Part of the vast indoor-outdoor complex comprises a  sustainability hall where one gallery has  been turned into a model home — which puts a novel recycling spin on that overworked trademark phrase “what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas.” One of the most effective exhibits here

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simply shows how much water is used in a typical five-minute shower with and without a low flow showerhead. (Nothing about sand baths, however…) Elsewhere in the museum you can experience a simulated desert flash flood (perhaps the other side of sustainability?) which in this case is fun: inside one of the buildings you stand on a metal bridge across a boulder-strewn arroyo and suddenly the water surges around and under you.

So what does it signify, when Disney comes to San Francisco and resource conservation arrives in Las Vegas? That may sound like the resolution of some distant prophecy but I think it means that things are looking up.

In other news, check out Writer Tracey Taylor’s  fine article about about us and affordable home design in the Financial Times! Her website tktaylor.com includes a wide range of stories about design and is a must read.

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Modern Living Around the World

October 1, 2009 · 1 Comment

House Plans from Italy and India

Our window on the modern home is widening: we’ve recently added some exciting (and exclusive to us) contemporary plans from abroad. Plan 473-1 by architect Lorenzo Spano of Terni, Italy, takes  an artful and sleek approach to indoor-outdoor living, from the cylindrical chimney floating over a circular hearth

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that draws your gaze into the landscape (in a retro wave at mid-century modernity), to the dramatic concrete cantilever

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that shades one side of the house,

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to the seamless connection to a pool terrace on the other side. A roof deck also overlooks the water.

Plan 467-2, by Mumbai architect Rinka D’Monte opens up a simple box with walls of glass.

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The floor plan takes the form of two rectangular volumes that appear to slide past

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each other, which allows room for private decks at front and rear.  It’s a new twist on the row house idea. We’ll be adding more international plans shortly.

Dutch Design and Other Inspirations in New York

I just returned from New York City, where I visited Governor’s Island off the tip of Lower Manhattan.

The Historic District and Lower Manhattan

It’s a remarkable enclave of early 19th and 20th century Army and Coast Guard houses, barracks, forts, and other structures now being preserved by the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Committee  (GIPEC), a New York State agency. One model for them might be the public-private joint venture at San Francisco’s Presidio, which was reinvented as a national park.

When I toured the Island the historic officer’s houses (at lower right in photo above) were being used for art installations celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in New Amsterdam (New York). Droog, the innovative Dutch industrial design and branding firm was one of the participants and worked with artist Marije Vogelzang (she is known as an “eating-designer”) to convert one house into a “Go Slow Cafe” that I found very appealing. I entered an all-white room and was asked to take off my shoes — the first gesture toward slowing down –  and then sat at a white table. Lunch arrived on a simple board, like this:

CM in Encino, W Esherick, NYC Sept 09 041

with circles around each item noting the distance it had traveled. The wood and the food comprised the only color in the space. The point: to slow down, focus on the meal,  and think about the energy used to bring us sustenance. The generous sampling of lettuce and cheese came from less than 100 miles away while the small portion of Chinese lychees (the white fruit at right) came many thousands of miles. For a while I was alone at the table as other visitors ambled past. I felt like part of the installation, which I guess I was. Of course another way to “slow down” like this is simply to have a real conversation with your family over the dinner table!

Droog is a fascinating global firm and reminds me of Marcel Duchamp in the way they transform an everyday object into something unusual, like a clothes hanger into a lamp, shown below:

16006 clothese hanger lamp

(This image is from 2modern.com.) The word droog, in Dutch, means “dry” or “wry.” One of Droog’s more provocative products is the “Do hit Chair”:

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a metal box that comes with a sledgehammer allowing you to bang it

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(and your frustrations, presumably) into shape.

At the Island, Droog took a somewhat calmer, “Do Hit the Cool-It Button” approach (as we have seen) and also supplied products for an intriguing temporary design  store designed by Marcel Schmalgemeijer. He stacked chairs to create shelving and display units like this:

CM in Encino, W Esherick, NYC Sept 09 039

It makes you reconsider the typical rented party chair  — maybe a way to use that leftover furniture in your basement…

Finally, I just had to visit one of the greatest American Beaux Arts monuments: the monumental New York Public Library of 1911, by Carerre & Hastings. Now this is a room for reading!

CM in Encino, W Esherick, NYC Sept 09 048

In the age of Kindles and I-phones, it still has the power to awe and made me appreciate anew the grandeur and majesty that can arise from the intersection of knowledge and imagination. And outside, the famous lions

CM in Encino, W Esherick, NYC Sept 09 049

are still guarding the majestic Fifth Avenue entrance. Read about them and New York’s many other landmarks in the just published Public Art New York by architect Jean Parker Phifer (W. W. Norton 2009).

PublicArtNewYork

Deftly written, it’s an indispensable guidebook to every monument worth seeing in Metropolis. From the book I learned that the lions, sculpted by Edward Clark Potter in 1911, are named “Patience” and “Fortitude.” I think they’re good to have around in a time of economic uncertainty. Don’t leave home without them.

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Back to School: Modern Architects on Film

September 25, 2009 · 1 Comment

Lights, Camera, Buildings!

You can learn a lot about how great architects shape space from the range of design documentaries now available.  For example, Checkerboard Films has just released Ray Kappe, California Modern Master: 40 Years of Modular Evolution, which explores the career of one of America’s most innovative and influential architects.

kappe film cover

From the cover alone you get the sense that this designer is interested not just in thinking but leaping outside the box. See how roof planes, floor planes, and wall planes extend outward and upward as if reaching to infinity.  Stretching the mind is definitely part of Kappe’s approach — he was the founder of SCI-ARC (the Southern California Institute of Architecture), which has taught generations of talented architects  –  many of whom I covered for Sunset. Ray went to U. C. Berkeley and worked briefly for the Bay Area firm of Anshen & Allen, designers of many mid-century modern houses for developer Joe Eichler, before settling in Los Angeles.

The film explores in depth (or height!) the house he designed for his wife Shelly and their family in 1967: a series of seven interpenetrating trays suspended over a steep upslope. It’s wonderful to experience the house cinematically because, to my mind anyway, that’s how it was designed: as a kind of three dimensional film strip.

KAPPE HOME EXTERIOR small from Kappe + DU

The warm wood-and-glass framed levels are supported on four 8- by 12-foot concrete, skylit towers that form the bathrooms and the kitchen. Cantilevers allowed him to get an expansive, multi-layered house on a very tight site. In the film Ray mentions his interest in the work of Paul Rudolph — whose Art & Architecture Building at Yale is a sculptural extravaganza of interpenetrating layers — and you can see Rudolph’s almost Baroque spatial sensibility resonating throughout Kappe’s design.

When Ray and Shelly kindly gave me a tour some years ago I marveled at how everything overlapped. Here’s an image of the living room,

Kappe_LR_09_09_09 from Ron kappe site

(both photos courtesy of Kappe+ DU Architects) showing how the space overlooks a study and is in turn overlooked by the bedroom level. I asked Shelly how they brought up children in such an open interior where railings are either glass or just not there, and she said: “Oh they simply learned where the edges were.” There are no handrails in the stairway either, which, as Ray explains in the film, is a way to make people more aware of what they’re seeing. I might call it the power of the double take…or just plain fear of flying. Also the Kappe children always helped hand the groceries up. Living in the house must have had an effect: their son Ron Kappe is a distinguished architect in his own right.

Ray Kappe’s recent modular, LEED platinum-rated “Living Home” for prefab entrepreneur Steve Glenn is also shown in the film. The Checkerboard series includes documentaries on Yoshio Taniguchi (designer of New York’s Museum of Modern Art),  Philip Johnson, Sir John Soane and others.

Other design films for your Netflicks cue should include the following two. Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner,

poster for John Lautner film Infinite Space

presents the work of another towering LA innovator. Lautner used concrete and glass in radically sculptural ways and his houses — no two alike — often became stage sets for Holywood movies, especially James Bond films. I met Lautner long ago when I was writing about one of his houses and he told me: “When you design a house you’ve not only got to design the house, you’ve got to design the site, and you’ve got to design the client.” Now that’s a custom house!

The other must-see is My Architect: A Son’s Journey,

homeimage1 My architect Kahn film

the extremely moving exploration of Louis Kahn’s career and life by his son Nathaniel Kahn.  The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California is perhaps his most famous building, but he also worked outside the US. I saw this film with my recent college graduate daughter. At the end, when a man tells Nathaniel that Kahn’s Parliament Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh “gave us democracy,”  I couldn’t help dissolving into tears. My daughter recoiled at my emotional response: “Get a grip, Dad!” Well, what can I say? Good design can be affecting on the big screen.

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Lessons from Sarah Susanka

September 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Not So Big Ways To Personalize Your Home

Rope rail, window seat, stairway shelf: they sound like an architectural version of Rock, Scissors, Paper, but actually these Sarah Susanka-designed details help personalize a home.

454-3p3-2440 rope banister

The hefty nautical rope, for example (Plan 454-3), works well as a short and tactile banister with an eye-catching ornamental coil at its base. Or consider the window seat:  it’s a simple way to make a room feel less cluttered while accentuating the view.

454-7p5-2979 window seat

It’s a natural place (Plan 454-7) to curl up with a good book. Add to the usefulness by storing reading material or blankets below a lift-up bench seat. Or think about a stairway as a multi-tasker that can include space for sitting and display.

454-7alt3-2979 stair detail

The design (also Plan 454-7) makes transitions gracious and welcoming instead of abrupt.

These ideas are just part of what makes the home designs of award-winning architect and Not So Big House series author Sarah Susanka so appealing. They demonstrate that, as Sarah says, “a house doesn’t have to be bigger to be better.” In other words, details count more than square footage. So as you browse for house plans or simply ponder how to improve your existing home, think about how Sarah shapes her spaces. The layout of the house she designed for herself, Plan 454-3,  is worth analyzing:

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See how open and spacious it seems, with kitchen, dining area, and living room all overlapping — and yet each of the three zones feels distinct.

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The built-in corner banquette helps in this regard but mostly it’s all about the soffits. These soffits — some solid, some slatted — are lower than the ceiling and span the transitions between each zone, visually constricting the thresholds to wrap — and define –  each room without enclosing it.

Sarah is adapting ideas perfected by Frank Lloyd Wright. Look at his Prairie School style  Little house at Wayzata, Minnesota of 1914, on permanent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (and not to be missed!)

hb_1972.60.1 Met museum Little house by FLW

where the soffit rings the room to create more intimate window seating and a dramatic entry. Or consider his more geometric modern Hanna Honeycomb house at Stanford University of 1937 (which you can tour by appointment)

3681886011_e3c6d8e964 Hanna house national register photo

where the ceiling descends over the edges of the living room and rises above open beams by the fireplace (photo from National Register via Flickr).

We’re excited to be the exclusive hosts of Sarah’s expanding architectural Not So Big House plan collection,

454-8p5-3062 elevation

and I encourage you to explore all eight of her designs (the one above is Plan 454-8), as well as her many books.

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