PROTO-ARCHITECTURE

You might ask, “Why do you have a picture of a crusty old basketball official on your architecture blog?”.  It’s a fair question.  To explain, we need to go back a few years.

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A small firm with a large impact on the residential scene, David Baker + Partners is an unabashed innovator in mixed-use urban infill and multi-family residential design.  While their exposure is probably larger within the industry, particularly among those with associations to the typology, they consistently produce designs that are of the highest caliber.

Located in San Fransisco, the firm benefits greatly from the tantalizing crucible in which the local vibe, urban culture and artistically sophisticated combine to produce a fertile ground for design opportunities.  That said, being in this sector of design myself, many don’t understand the economic pressures placed on the typology, whose funding and financial returns are on completely difference scales than most commercial development, and how that, frankly, separates the innovative from the not.  It’s easy to just give up and say “but the funding just isn’t there for that”, while it’s a quite a more challenging avenue to take these hurdles as a opportunities to foster new thinking.   David Baker + Partners does this on a daily basis, constantly refining what urban living is, and can be. Read the rest of this entry →

For much of my collegiate career, Walter Gropius was a paragon of the architectural ideal.  For me, he represented a blurring of the edges between architect, designer, teacher and philosopher that I personally found so immensely intriguing with the profession.  As the catalyst behind the Bauhaus school, and certainly one of the fathers who gave birth to the morphology of modernism, Gropius’ work personifies everything that is elegant about contemporary design.

While I had seen many of his works during and after the war, is wasn’t until I was introduced to his 1922 submission for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition that whole new worlds opened for me.  His entry, at a time less than a handful of years removed from the First World War, severed this association with the past (much as the war hearkened the end of the old world) not only incorporated his modern elegance, but suggesting a level of futuristic advancement few others, I believe, had begun to consider. Read the rest of this entry →

Figure 1609 from the 2006 IBC

I recently did a design for a project in South Carolina, and as is always the case when we do work in areas that are hurricane prone, we researched the need for impact resistant windows.  The building code is pretty clear on this, consulting section 1609.1.1 it reads: Read the rest of this entry →

My wife and I are avid [forgive the overused term] foodies and we watch a lot foodie television programing.  I like it for the recipes, and my wife would say the same although I think she really enjoys indulging in the drama.  It’s in this that I came to think that architects and chefs have a lot common, which is evident in the learning of the trade, mastery of the craft, creativity in the product and the need for individuality and personal expression in what we do. Read the rest of this entry →