Category: Architecture and Interiors

Posted on

I Like This One!

To be filed under: I Could Live There

A little small for two grown-ass men with two dogs, but we could make it work. We've lived in smaller!

Posted on

I Could Live There

A little small for more than one person, but it could still work…

This actually reminds me a lot of the first project I worked on when I moved to Tucson in 1980. It was a long, narrow lot that was zoned multi-family, and the architect I worked for had designed three separate townhouses for the property.

I always liked the layout of the units. Sadly I don't have the original plans any more, but once upon a time I did a "beach house" design based off the original layout, and surprisingly I do still have that:

Posted on

My Ignorance is Embarrassing

For all the years I was in the architectural profession, I had never heard of this man.

From SickoRicko:

Paul Revere Williams was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1894 to Lila Wright Williams and Chester Stanley Williams who had recently moved from Mem­phis with their young son, Chester, Jr. When Paul was two years old his father died, and two years later his mother died. The children were placed in sepa­rate foster homes. Paul was fortunate to grow up in the home of a foster mother who devoted herself to his edu­ca­tion and to the devel­opment of his artistic talent.



At the turn of the 20th century, Los Angeles was a vibrant multi-ethnic envi­ron­ment with a popu­la­tion of only 102,000 of which 3,100 were African American (U.S. Cen­sus 1900). During Williams' youth the California dream attracted people from across the United States, and they mixed together with little prejudice. Williams later reported that he was the only African American child in his elementary school, and at Polytechnic High School he was part of an ethnic mélange. However, in high school he experienced the first hint of adversity when a teacher advised him against pursuing a career in archi­tecture, because he would have difficulty attracting clients from the majority white community and the smaller black community could not provide enough work.

Click here to read more. Click here to see an extensive gallery of his work.

Posted on

A Repost from 2017 (Since We Were Recently Discussing Groovy Houses…)

Dream Houses

Having spent half my working life in the architectural profession, it should come to no surprise to anyone that I've designed my fair share of personal "dream houses." Dozens. What might be surprising to learn is that I've never actually been a home owner.

I guess it stems from the very real refusal to settle down when I was younger. I loved the ability to pack up and move every six months if the desire struck me, and as much as I would've loved to have actually designed and built a home of my own, it was just never in the cards.

I was living in San Francisco when I finally started to get that urge to settle, and while I wasn't making bad money, there was still no way I was ever going to be able to get a down payment together in the amount needed to buy a place. Moving out of The City wasn't an option; as my friend Kent was fond of saying, "Why would anyone want to live just outside the pearly gates?" I'd rather continue to rent in San Francisco itself than own in Pittsburg.

And that financial situation hasn't changed simply because we're now back in Arizona. But that doesn't mean a boy can't dream.

Some of my dreams rarely progressed beyond basic sketches:

This particular one was inspired by an advert for the American Plywood Council (or something similar) in one of my dad's architectural magazines when I was a wee young thing. The magazine is long gone but the image was forever imprinted into my memory.

This one—a small beach house—grew out of a triplex apartment development I had the pleasure of working on shortly after I moved to Tucson in 1980.

I can't tell you how many house plans I've actually designed for myself since the architectural bug first bit in middle school. As my skill level increased, if my ideas got beyond the basic sketch stage, they burned with such intensity that I had to at least start a set of construction documents—if only a handful of those projects actually ever came to fruition with a complete, ready-for-a-bidding set of drawings.

Some of my first truly personal (i.e. not copied from another designer, a local builder or a magazine) designs were a series of desert houses originally inspired by Obi Wan Kenobi's bungalow in Star Wars and the lower floor of the tri-level house my family lived in during my high school and college years.

Buried four feet into the ground with massive concrete walls to keep out the heat, this design motif resonated with me for years, eventually coming up with several variations…


At one point I even went so far with this theme as to design an entire apartment complex (small scale floor plans and exteriors only, I'm not that driven) on the then-vacant land on the southeast corner of Grant Road and Wilmot Avenue in Tucson—but I never really developed a good way of integrating multiple bedrooms into this particular ouvre—which obviously limited its appeal.

My move to San Francisco in 1986 inspired a new design aesthetic. I loved the Victorian row houses with their multicolored gingerbread trim, but I was equally impressed by the modern, contemporary variations on the theme that many local architects were utilizing.

This 3-story house was the vehicle by which I actually taught myself AutoCAD. I became so engrossed that I was literally moving objects in my dreams by calling out their cartesian coordinates!

In the mid 90s, I returned to my desert house design, armed with a new aesthetic gleaned from living in a 1920s-era Victorian for several years. The massively thick concrete walls remained, but the barrel vault roofs were gone and much more wood was incorporated along with an almost steampunk feel for the interior details.

I don't remember what prompted me to do it, but a couple years after I tired of that exercise and had started contemplating leaving San Francisco and returning to Tucson, I pulled out a plan for a small house I once dreamt of building in in the northeast part of the city, at some undetermined point along the Catalina Highway before it actually started up into the mountains. I'd completed a lot of work on this plan already before moving to San Francisco—back when I was still doing overlay drafting with ink on mylar, but since I was now comfortable working in the virtual realm of AutoCAD, I decided it was time to transpose it into bits and bytes.

As you can tell, I tend toward smaller houses. Even this multi-structure design isn't really that big. And this one's builder-ready. Not only did I do the usual floor plan and exterior elevations that I do with all my projects, this was one of those instances when I did it all: foundation, roof framing, electrical, mechanical, and interior elevations. It was designed for a lot that gently sloped away from the street with an unobstructed view of the Catalina and Rincon Mountains. Sadly, while the land in that area was mostly untouched when I first envisioned this house in 1985, it isn't any longer. My last visit to Tucson confirmed my fear that the area is now completely built-up and there are no more unobstructed views of anything except your next door neighbor.

And that brings us to my latest bit of mental masturbation:

This is the house we're currently renting—with several changes. It's the first time I've created a dream house based on a remodel, and I'm liking how it's progressing. It started out as an innocent "what if" between Ben and I, but now it's developed a life of its own and has morphed into a full-scale architectural exercise. As I've written before, it's been an interesting excursion into the deep recesses of memory, pulling obscure AutoCAD commands from the dusty crevices of my head and continually surprising myself that I still know how to do this stuff. It's also become my go-to "happy place" when I'm laying in bed awake and trying to fall back asleep at 4 in the morning…

Posted on

Groovy Houses/Teenage Dreams

Inspired by this link over at Mostly Words, I started thinking about houses that inspired me when I was a teenager; inspiration that led in no small part, to my career in architecture.

The first of these were what eventually became known as Villa Spies in Sweden:

(Click on any to embiggen)

Villa Spies is quintessential late 60s/early 70s future chic. The majority of the photos above came from the magazine where I initially saw it and fell in love with the place: House Beautiful (January 1972). I had a heck of a time tracking it down after all this time. The only clue I had in my rapidly fading memory was it being in one of the magazines my mom subscribed to, and it arrived before we moved to the house where we lived during my high school and college years. That helped narrow it down considerably, and  I eventually located it at the Phoenix Public Library and then set about obtaining my own copy. (How did we survive before the internet?)

The second home, the Woolner House, crossed my path about the same time. This one was harder to track down than Villa Spies because I wasn't sure if I'd seen it in one of my mom's housekeeping magazines or in one of my dad's architectural mags. Like Spies, I eventually tracked it down in one of my mom's old mags at the Phoenix Public Library, but stupidly forgot to record exactly which magazine it had been in, so obtaining my own copy is going to be more trouble than it's worth. I also seem to remember a completely different photo spread than what I found at the library, so it's entirely possible it was covered by more than one publication.

 

I also found quite a few pictures online…

 

As well as finding a small spread in Architectural Design…

 

 

Posted on

I Could Live There










Okay, I know this one is a little bit more pedestrian than my other "I Could Live There" posts, but it popped up on my Insta this morning and I really like it. I mean, it's a house I could easily see Ben and I living in. It's got a very low-maintenance yard, and—always appreciated in Phoenix—a swimming pool.

And in the interest of full disclosure, yes, this is one of my Dad's designs for Hallcraft back in the 70s. I like how they've preserved much of what initially appealed to me about this plan but also brought it into the 21st century with new finishes and the removal of the very dated sunken living room and decorative screens.

Posted on

Ugly Houses

My dad worked as principal designer for Hallcraft (later NuWest) Homes from around 1972 to 1980. During that time, some of the company's most iconic developments were built in the valley.

Unfortunately, in the decade before he took over, Hallcraft had another designer who—IMHO and I'm admittedly biased—came up with some of the ugliest designs the company ever built.

These were generally homes that fell in the upper price range, which might explain their rarity In the various subdivisions. Of course, the other reason might be because they're butt-fugly.

One of the worst offenders. The rusted out car seems a perfect companion to this POS.
Same floor plan as the one above. Just as ugly. (Which is too bad, because the plan itself was interesting.)
Another ugly Mansard Roof atrocity. The French doors are not original to the house. At one time it had a proper front door.
Another interesting plan with a dreadful facade. This one had an inner courtyard that in the Phoenix climate was designed to be a cool respite from the heat.
Another interesting plan (this time a tri-level) with a horrible "Spanish" facade.
Same great plan as I spent my high school and college years in (but not with this "Spanish" abomination out front.
This was actually a really nice design when first built. It was a very unique floor plan (another tri-level; it was the 60s/70s after all), but the exterior has been destroyed by subsequent alterations.
I wish I still had the brochure for this house. I was probably 5 or 6 years old when we toured this development, so my memories are cloudy, but I do remember it was a wild tri-level design with a 2-story living room (hence those windows).
And lastly, I think this was some sort of bastard variation of the house above built on two lots, allowing for the once-upon-a-time garage to be moved off to the side and later converted to more living space. But goddamn…BUTT FUGLY.

If you're in Phoenix and would like to see these for yourself (why?!) they're in neighborhoods on the southeast and northwest corners of West Bethany Home Road and 43rd Avenue. The area, like most, has gone through ups and downs, and I think it's all in a very depressed mode at the moment.