precedent 03 - Loblolly House

One thing that's interesting about our house is that light can show up anywhere, different places at different times of the year. Because the interior is quite open, and because virtually all the windows face sun south. The clerestory windows are magical in this way. Because they are high and span the house and catch the sun differently with the seasons.

Here is an example: So I'm standing in [the kids' bathroom with no windows and the door open when] I notice this blazing patch of light as big as my two hands on the wall in front of me. I look over my left shoulder to see where it's coming from...I see that the late winter morning sun has just reached the lower corner of the first clerestory window. A laser across our interior space. I recall that in early spring, sunlight will shoot at mid-day from those top windows all the way to the back wall of the house. Light shaft to the back of the dark chamber, same as the burial mounds around Stonehenge.

from an email from Dad, 03.14.2009


It's not just the presence of light in the house, it's the quality. The house glows. The open space of the property and Carmen's green or golden field to the west provide a quality that needs to be harnessed, filtered, absorbed, etc. Appreciated. I can see why my dad chose to build how he did.This light quality was what I wanted to explore in this post. Dad's email seemed to dovetail perfectly into the next precedent house I wished to examine (click on any of the images to go to my picasa/loblolly image gallery).



The Loblolly House by KieranTimberlake is a Maryland house, taking many of the same local qualities into consideration. Loblolly is on Taylors Island, on the edge of a loblolly pine forest, with only a hundred yards or so of saltmeadow between it and the Chesapeake Bay. What drew me to Loblolly House, besides the location, was the vertical wood rainscreen on three sides; the elevations viewed from the pine forest. The concept was for these sides of the house to emulate the quality of the trees - light, shadow, striation, verticality - from the trees. The long west facade opens completely to the Bay and the setting sun. Loblolly House was conceived as a treehouse, a platform in the trees, or a duck blind, masked on three sides but with an open, focused front. The house rests lightly on wood piles driven into the sand.




While reading about the house, I learned that just as relevant of a concept as the open facades, the house was prefabricated primarily off-site and brought on-site in pieces (cartridges) which were then assembled in just 6 weeks. It is actually best explained by the architect (and owner) Stephen Kieran in a ten minute video interview and tour of the house by Ultimate House tv. Kieran describes the time and cost saving benefits of prefab, how Loblolly differs from modular homes of the past, as well as the house's other features: the rainscreen, folding doors, and green (color) bamboo floors.

While this post merely introduces the idea of quality of light and the Loblolly house, I'll discuss the topic further and what we can draw from Loblolly as either an edit to this post or in the next post.

GIMMEESHELTER!

precedent 02 - VH r-12

Restrictive zoning, rather than necessity, is often the mother of architectural invention. Made to withstand the harsh winters of Martha’s Vineyard while treading lightly on the island, the VH R-10 gHouse, designed by architect Darren Petrucci, AIA, was so profoundly shaped by local restrictions that it adopted the zoning district—R-10—as part of its name.

By code, VH r-10 could not exceed a 600sf footprint and still qualify as a guest house. Petrucci drew a 40x24 foot footprint on a 4 foot module and cut away the corners to meet the criteria. The outdoor spaces created at the corners present opportunities for exterior circulation and a terrace.





Floor to ceiling glass of the main living space echoes the subtracted volumes at the exterior. These spaces, exterior and interior, negotiate transparency and closure by the sliding of large mahogany rainscreens. The screens allow for the living space to be completely opened to the yard while giving definition to the (not counted in the building footprint) entry stair. Slid together (closed), the screens provide privacy, shutter the windows, and reveal the corner spaces resulting in a compactness of the volume as a whole. The shuttered house reads as a core (concrete foundation wall, shutters, and upper volume) flanked by the more delicate elements (exterior stairs, terrace, and sunscreen/trellis.




VH r-12 gHouse gains a half basement by sliding the wood-clad upper volume up four feet above grade, distinguishing it from the concrete base.

Both of these moves, shuttering and raising the first floor, can be utilized as hurricane proofing strategies.

We have also talked about the strategy of using a central core for the cottage. The central core would contain services (kitchen, bath, and a bedroom), the minimum that would need to be protected in the event of serious weather. The rest of the house would frame into the core. The living spaces, extra bedrooms, exterior terraces, or a screened porch.

One last thing. I wanted to point out this ceiling in the bedroom. It is another suggestion of complementary opacity and transparency. It is probably not as complex as it looks as a colleague of mine pointed out. It is delicate and substantial at the same time.

Until next time.

Complexity, Autonomy, Effort, and Reward

When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work is complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I'm guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that's worth more to most of us than money.

from Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell