Thanks for your comments. They were helpful. Keeping in mind my original intent of making the units 'rentable' to the public, I thought it was somewhat important to have a 'master bedroom' Which would be on the street level in this plan. Which is why it has a different relationship to a bathroom. I agree the other bedroom on the first floor was unfortunate. So I looked at the whole building again, and realized I had too many beds anyway. So I took the front bedroom out of the street level and made it a 'parlor' as we had discussed in boston. I had to add an entire other unit to make up the three beds I was missing, but I don't think it effects my site negativly. It might actually help my 'collision' of the two buildings.
I don't get your comment about communicating with the corridor. It is important to my program that the units be individual, and private. A corridor is just that... it doesn't need to be anything else in my mind. Maybe that is why you wrote never mind at the end of the comment???
Units communicating with the 'backyard'... I haven't really gotten there yet. To do this, one would need a door in the 'master bedroom' to the back yard... I don't know if this is appropriate... considering the separation the I am attempting to portray between public and private... nevermind. I'll out a door in... it will be perfect, because when the public is 'renting' that space... the students won't need separation in the backyard... hmmm.
On the topic of ornamentation... and exterior material... and genuine materials.
There are certain building types and budgets that require 'mickey mouse architecture' This building is a homeless shelter that we did. It doesn't look like a homeless shelter because we employed 'economical alternatives' to genuine materials. The people who house the homeless don't get a lot of money to build homes... if we have to fake and cheat to make a nice looking building... I will do it everytime. The budget on this building just like every homeless shelter was just about enough to get you a concrete block box. I think we did a little better than that... even though we had to cheat. Not all of us get to build museums for billionares in arkansas.
2 comments:
EIFS definitely has its place in architecture. The economics of projects cannot be overlooked. My comment only came along because I noticed the use of cast stone just inches aways from the EIFS banding... my first instinct is to always stick with genuine stuff. Does it always make it into the project... hehe, nope!
Anyway, Werner reminded me, in the other post, about the historical context of the copper "hats" on historic buildings which are economical and light weight. I worked on a historical renovation to a brick warehouse building where we had similar conditions that needed to be restored as originally constructed.
Karrick, Rick, there are certainly times where we have to satisfy the many clients we are working for: the conservative lender, the developer who doesn’t want to take on too much risk, the politician who’s constituents for the most part would like the world not to change, and so on.
Having to deal with the real world myself I understand the sentiment of creating certain illusions and to try to do that with the means allocated. In that context I applaud anyone who can get something decent without putting the client out of business, and using inexpensive alternates is one way of dealing with that. I would hope for the school environment we could try to do more. In the olden times a typical Boston rowhouse might have been 20’-25’ wide, 3 ½ to 4 ½ stories tall, had stoops (no wheelchair accessibility), the material of choice was a cheap brick, stone was the upgrade, the roof was shedding to the backyard, the front could have a parapet to make it look more impressive. There was enough volume in one of these houses that we easily cut them up into 3 to 6 condominiums. How do we build next to that to respect it and at the same time put the stake of our time into the ground. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if in the future people would refer to our time as having contributed in it’s own way to the positive growth of the city? Quite often we are producing today buildings that look as if built at the turn of the (last) century, but the quality of the construction will probably not allow it to be around for very long. At the same time we seem not to be able to develop an architecture that can be part of the fabric without simply copying the past. Can we find long lasting inexpensive materials to build our building with? Should it turn out that the same building materials (i.e brick) are still the same, could we use them in a way to express the new way of using it (veneer vs. solid wall)? Can we help undue some of the sins of yesteryear, such as pretending that there is no such thing as orientation to the sun; all orientations get the same wall paper, or can we develop shades for one side, smaller openings for the next, et cetera? Enough ranting, I need some sleep.
Post a Comment