by nscoleman | Jul 10, 2018 | details
Today’s post is a continuation of the previous week’s. Here, I’ve blown-up the kitchen proper, which like my grandparents’ kitchen that inspired it, has a large central island. Where theirs was square, though, I’ve rendered it circular, in homage to Sir Edwin Lutyens’ great subterranean kitchen at Castle Drogo. Similarly to Lutyens’, I’ve topped it with a great circular skylight as well, to bring ample daylight into the workspace. For a stroke of my own interest, I’ve placed a small breakfast nook to the south, which takes cues from Frank Lloyd Wright’s many inglenooks that dotted his earliest works.
by nscoleman | May 31, 2018 | details, entire buildings
After taking a little well-needed vacation, I’m back with more frame. Specifically, I’m sharing a continuation of the past two posts – a hillside studio and home. Both of these projects included a small cubic volume topped with a pyramidal skylight. This particular ‘studio’ typology is explored more fully here. While the exterior is a solid white stucco-ed cube, the interior shows a four-square heavy timber frame, with a pair of wood scissor trusses forming a smaller cube at the top, which is itself topped by the skylight proper. Since the geometry is a bit difficult to make out in these projections, I’ll draft up a quick perspective for a subsequent post.
by nscoleman | Nov 2, 2017 | details
Today I’m featuring two disconnected and distinct projects linked only by one formal trait – circular forms inset within squares.
The top project riffs on Adolf Loos’ Steiner House, isolating the iconic barrel vaulted roof, expressing it as a bow truss on the interior, and topping it with a central circular skylight.
The bottom is a take on a vestibule in Lutyens’ Middleton Park, where a hemispherical dome is cut rather unceremoniously by a rectangular rather than the typical square room beneath, giving the dome an inherent axis. I’ve topped this with a tall sculptural skylight, at once a nod to both the Choragic Monument and Michael Graves.
by nscoleman | Aug 28, 2017 | details
Rather, they started with a frame. Shelves, that is. I was scouring the internet and architecture books for shelves, first to house my inordinately large (and growing) library, and then just for the interest of how shelving could be used/designed in an architectural setting. So I started with a frame, three cubes stacked, but quickly found myself drawn to a two-by-four stack, with it’s squares within squares. Squares led me to think of Ungers, but placing a base and a top on it made me think Rossi. The detail below assumes a hollow metal frame with sheet metal pediment and base, prefabricated coves cut and welded to form rudimentary mouldings. A wormseye axon explores how an entire wall may be covered with these. And a final alternate places two large half-round cabinets to either side of the shelving proper, taken from a large wardrobe Lutyens designed for Viceroy’s House, Delhi.
by nscoleman | Aug 23, 2017 | details, entire buildings
Above, a small pavilion built into a wall, which I imagine could extend quite some ways beyond where I’ve drawn it. The roof, a tall shingled pyramid.
Below, a roof that modulates between a square base and a round oculus at the crown, again figured as a tall, shingled pyramid.
Come to think of it, what if we combined the two, a really long wall with a larger rotated square pavilion cut out of a portion of it (and I mean, big, like Krier big), topped with a tall, oculus-ed, pyramid? Maybe tomorrow.
by nscoleman | Aug 10, 2017 | details
I began by drawing cabinetry I found in a new volume on O. M. Ungers, then for whatever reason took a look through a book on Lutyens, where I found a small round wood kitchen island, detailed as four miniature Tuscan columns. I’m not one to shrink from putting two incongruous styles alongside one another, so why not? Lutyens’ kitchen at Castle Drogo, itself a riff on Soane, informed the ceiling.
by nscoleman | Jul 20, 2017 | details
Facade as generator: that is, starting with a facade and working back to a floor plan instead of the opposite, more traditional, fashion. Here, a scored plaster exterior references brick construction, with radiating joints at the circular window and jack arches over the rectangular side windows. A tall pyramidal skylight centers the whole.
Another facade, this time actual brick with rounded corners, simple square double-hung windows under jack arches with thin metal overhangs and stone shoulders at the inset front door. The plan suggests a small linear courtyard at the center.
This circular rotunda has a few things going on in plan that a section won’t illustrate. But not to mind, for the section shows enough of its own intrigue. The dome is cut, making it shallow at the center than the ends. A large skylight sits above, illustrated here as a small tempietto, a room beyond a room, above which the skylight proper is positioned.
by nscoleman | Jul 10, 2017 | details
This is a simple room, with a shallow dome set on squinches capping a square room. The whole is topped with a small tempietto-cum-oculus. A perpendicular section (top-left) is paired with a diagonal section (top-right), and a wormseye sectional axonometric on the bottom-right.
by nscoleman | Jul 7, 2017 | details
I’m fascinated by drawing projections, that is the way that we draw or project the linework of a floor plan into elevations, sections, axonometrics, etc. The drawings I feature here on frame clearly show that. But I know that often the thing to be drawn is often obfuscated by the drawing itself, where the projection can overpower the building itself. Today I present not a project per se, but a series of different projections of the same simple architectural form – a cube with a small dome and oculus.
The simple plan of the upper-left is revealed in simple section and elevation, and explored in two different axonometrics below – aerial and wormseye (upview). Oblique axons, my special sectional wormseye oblique axon, and sectional axons flesh out the sheet.
by nscoleman | Jun 2, 2017 | details
Three sketches, three squares, in anticipation for my 3X10 birthday tomorrow (the 3rd).
The first, an elevation, with an arcade atop two square windows in a wall – Traditional form with abstraction below.
The second, a plan, square in form, but diagonal in organization, with a nice entry rotunda on the corner. This is an homage to Schindler’s diagonal square plans (the How House and Bethlehem Baptist Church, plan), and his mentor’s detailing at the Ennis Brown House.
The third, in a three-dimensional axonometric, a modernist cube.
by nscoleman | Apr 18, 2017 | details, entire buildings
To celebrate one year of frame, I have something special for you all. That’s right, a small, un-programmable garden pavilion. A four-square frame of 4X4’s set on the diagonal, with a copper standing seam roof atop and a brick base below. There’s no way in, just a beautiful form without. Better than cake, right?
by nscoleman | Apr 14, 2017 | details, entire buildings
More than just a Bach reference, that title could really be the title of this entire blog, since the vast majority of what I post here are really just different takes on courtyards. Blame it on my being a SoCal native, blame it on my love of squares, palazzi, and any other architectural trope you can. I love me some courtyards. So here we go again. At the top, a more detailed elevation of a previous project, and below, a different take on that same floor plan, this time more loudly echoing Giorgio Grassi and Louis Kahn.
by nscoleman | Mar 17, 2017 | details
One square, one circular. The square has a radial winder stair inside (but cut as a square), while the circle has a square stair inside, with habitable spaces inside of that inner square. This particular example is a rift on a project by Oswald Mathias Ungers, where circular and square towers are set alongside one another (and of course, I can’t track it down, though I know it’s in the Electa monograph. . .).
by nscoleman | Feb 27, 2017 | details
A friend and I were out exploring the local architectural haunts here in the Los Angeles area, which in this case included Pasadena’s Gamble House of 1908 as well as the other Greene & Greene homes studding the neighborhood. One of these sits kitty-corner to Frank Lloyd Wright’s La Miniatura (or Millard House) of 1923, and I noticed a lovely wrought iron gate at the rear of the property, almost coyly unimpressive against dynamic klinker brick wall. I began to think of my own home, and if a similar wrought iron gate would work against its Spanish revival aesthetic, with some details massaged here and there. Not a building per se, but a linguistic study nonetheless. Now if I can just find a blacksmith and a few dollars. . .
by nscoleman | Oct 19, 2016 | details
This is a piece of a larger puzzle, the basic parti of which is sketched above. The stair is located centrally in the square plan, and is itself a nine-square plan. Tectonically, the stair is supported on a peristyle of Tuscan pilasters, while the stair proper is takes its details from Mies’ Crown Hall at IIT, and tall fireplaces occupy three sides (their form, a take on Schindler’s Kings Road House.
by nscoleman | Oct 4, 2016 | details
First, an apology for erratic postings lately: my wife and I spent a gorgeous weekend in Yosemite, where I photographed the granite quoins of the elegant bridges as I did the granite faces of El Capitan and the Falls; and I’m neck deep studying for licensure. But neither of those should give cause to think that I have ceased to draw. Indeed, my study copies of the AIA contracts are filled with margins of vernacular, agricultural, and ‘rustic’ architectures. Many of which I hope to make onto frame in the coming weeks.
But for now, more Lutyens. Two details: a Tuscan pilaster as reduction rather than addition, taken from his war memorial at Thiepval, France (adapted with stars per Paul Philippe Cret’s own memorial at Chateau-Thierry); and my own interpretation of a common Lutyens formal operation – changes in plane alternate from side to side, rather than retaining diagonal symmetry (again, look at the Thiepval memorial, especially the lower arches, where the walls step in from the side before stepping in from the front, and then repeating as it goes up…).
by nscoleman | Sep 14, 2016 | details, entire buildings
Because even the most mundane of elements deserve to be thoughtfully and appropriately considered, I’m featuring a series of details and design considerations for a gate at my house, fronting a small garden courtyard. Typical wood rails span brick piers, with a weighted chain closer to keep things tidy.
by nscoleman | Sep 13, 2016 | details, entire buildings
Returning to the work of Lutyens, this small room takes its primary cue from a detail in a stair hall at Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, where an arcade is topped with a small pendentive at the corner, curving the profile of the ceiling. Wormseye axonometric views follow – the bottom image also has sectional and wormseye studies of another Lutyens-inspired previous post.
by nscoleman | Sep 9, 2016 | details
Sometimes the drawings I post seem rather schematic, but as part of the great importance of building in architecture, they can never remain that way. Here I present you with a more detailed take of a recent post, with hybrid Tuscan-Doric columns (perhaps Graves doing Doric, maybe?), minimal Mies-ian window jambs and stops, shingled wall with a moulded cap to make the column in antis, all topped with a simplified architrave, rosettes replacing triglyphs. I fancy the wood work might all be painted a glossy black, similar to Earnest Coxhead’s shingled houses in San Francisco (and Bob Stern’s take on them).
by nscoleman | Aug 30, 2016 | details, entire buildings
In typical fashion, a synthetic plan was due: taking the vault from yesterday’s post (my take on Lutyen’s take on Soane’s take on antiquity), I slapped a half-round colonnades on either end covered each in a large conical shingled roof. The fun part is the cornice of the cubic vaulted form, which does some funky things to accommodate modules, structure, and walls, shown in the bottom drawing (wormseye axonometric detail). The lantern is a direct quote of the lighthouse lantern at Old Point Loma in San Diego.
by nscoleman | Aug 24, 2016 | details, precedent
I had wanted to draw this while we were on site, but the monk who was giving us a tour was moving at a brisk rate. This is the entrance pavilion to Aalto’s Library at Mount Angel, as previously featured here, and is worth featuring because of the inherent classicism of it all – strictly modular, rigidly symmetrical (minus that one angled wall on the right), with a well-coordinated ceiling plan, brick floor patterning, column placement, and door/storefront alignment. For the über-modernist Aalto, this is proof that his early education in Nordic Classicism never truly left. Details below.
by nscoleman | Aug 23, 2016 | details, precedent
Three buildings I saw while driving cross town = three quick elevation studies: A symmetrical hip-roofed house with a long continuous masonry wall that continues to form a low wall on the rear yard; A series of openings on a flat stucco wall, centered on one large square picture window (the jack arches are my own); A square light well lined with industrial sash windows, and a clapboard volume beneath.
by nscoleman | Aug 18, 2016 | details
Maybe not what most people consider ‘capital-A’ architecture, but interesting nonetheless – interior walls and their treatment. These four options are studies for my own house, with coved ceilings, picture rail, wall base, chair rail, and wainscot sticking. The two top options explore large-scale masonry patterns a la Michael Graves, while the two bottom options divide the wall into sections, from many stripes to more distinct panels.
by nscoleman | Aug 15, 2016 | details
A simple detail: a corner entry door under a decorative chamfer, which offers protection for the doorway while negotiating the full corner above. Two small lambs-tongue chamfers further detail the edges.
by nscoleman | Aug 11, 2016 | details
Taking cues from a small apartment complex south of Wilshire Boulevard, this small tower features an upper story that steps out over the lower floor, with a large, oversized ogee profile between the two, cut through with arched windows. The resulting effect is reminiscent of machicolation found on medieval embattlements.
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