by nscoleman | Aug 5, 2016 | entire buildings
In another rift on Bruce Price’s library at Tuxedo Park, this project takes one long gabled volume, with trabeated Doric aedicules on either end, and meets it with a second gable on the short axis. These two volumes don’t meet with a 90° corner, but are filleted with a quarter-round, in a nod to Stanley Tigerman’s Daisy House (among others). The variations below ditch the primary gable for a low one running in the opposite direction, and the aedicules take up the difference in geometry.
by nscoleman | Aug 4, 2016 | entire buildings
Following up on two themes from my northward journey, I’m giving you a look into two ideas, both alike in simplicity. The Coast: a cabin, square with a large hip roof over a wrap-around porch, and elevations that need a good fleshing out. Farmland: a barn, with deep eaves on three sides, enclosed in glass behind.
by nscoleman | Aug 3, 2016 | entire buildings
Driving on I-5 through northern California takes you through a lot of farm land, and reminds you just how much of the American economy is agriculture. This means silos – lots of silos, which of course got me thinking. . . From top to bottom: Two silos bridged by a glass Miesian volume; Two silos on a courtyard base, bridged at the top; a picturesque collection of three silos and a grain elevator; a battery of six silos, spaces cut between them, topped with a temple form.
by nscoleman | Aug 2, 2016 | entire buildings
Diagonally symmetrical, this small cabin type is a riff on the minimal, mid-century cabin we spent a week in on the Oregon coast. The plan is four-square, with the living room occupying one corner, fully glazed, with the hearth as a corner-focused object: this is a direct quote of our cabin, down to the thin-gauge blackened steel hearth. The rest of the plan stems from this single move, with the circular stair opposite, a study and kitchen flanking. The roof runs a single gable along the diagonal toward the living room, but tapers back into a typical hip for the two other facades.
by nscoleman | Jul 27, 2016 | entire buildings
A Palladian villa facade on the primary axis is countered with long, low shingled porches on the transverse, which in a twist of irony is where the entry is located. Behind a symmetrical elevation of colonnades and porticoes, the building takes a more free spirit – one porch is exterior, the other ‘enclosed’, a glass-wrapped stair hall occupies two of three bays of a frontal portico, while the left over bay is screened in. The shingled roofs of the porches extend to meet a long skylit lightwell, cutting the central Palladian volume in twain.
by nscoleman | Jul 26, 2016 | entire buildings
A half-cube with filleted glass corners surmounted by another half-cube under a skylit hip roof. A glass block floor demarcates a gallery above, with a matching laylight, while a steel and glass spiral stair provides access.
by nscoleman | Jul 25, 2016 | entire buildings
frame is back in town. So let’s get started: two classical brick pavilions sit under their modernist counterpart, divided by a long driveway, forming a nine-square plan. While the first story bars quote Bruce Price’s library at Tudedo Park, the second story harps on Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan. Details follow.
by nscoleman | Jul 15, 2016 | entire buildings
A square with Richardsonian towers on the corners, flat masonry facades in the main axis, with full-height shingle roofs over porches in the other. A skylit circular stair in a square hall in the center with octagonal-ish foyers on either end with half-round aedicules for entry porches.
by nscoleman | Jul 12, 2016 | entire buildings
Yesterday’s circular courtyard influenced this take, along with a small fountain I passed by in Beverly Hills the other day. Six columns make up a circular courtyard, filled with a pool and floating obelisk, while one side of the circular entablature rises to a pediment on one side, hidden from the entry tunnel. The focus is obviously interior, but that doesn’t mean that the exterior is devoid of a little fun and asymmetry. A wormseye axonometric above, sections and floor plan below, elevations and roof plan beneath.
by nscoleman | Jul 11, 2016 | entire buildings
I’ve had circles on the brain recently. Here’s an example of a small project that stemmed from a little single family residential remodel I’m working on, where we’re turning a nondescript backyard into a courtyard, uniting three distinct structures into one in the process. My version objectifies that courtyard, an off-center circular motor court, with a peristyle all around – porches, porticos, patios, garages, and alleys all spiral off of this singular form.
by nscoleman | Jul 8, 2016 | entire buildings
As I was writing this post a few weeks ago, I found the plan to be once again worthy of some further reflection and thought – precisely the nine-square plan, with a hybrid basilica and greek cross interior volume, the four empty corners filled with circular forms (bathrooms and stairs) encased in heavy poche, and all of it wrapped in a brick Richardsonian wrapper under a singularly simple red tile hip roof. The bottom iteration was the first, while I was still wrangling the plan into a perfect nine-square.
by nscoleman | Jul 6, 2016 | entire buildings
A building type that was very common in the western United States in the decades before World War II, the bowtruss-roofed industrial building was a single story brick or concrete masonry shell, topped with a long-span wood truss roof that resembled a bow in section – hence the name. Many of these stand throughout the Los Angeles basin, which are the originators of this project.
The brick volume is open to the short sides, pedimented on the approach, and takes hints of Hejduk’s Wall House, where bathrooms stand as separate, formally distinct, elements. A more elaborate exploration is at the bottom, where the restrooms become chimney-inglenook pieces, and the bowtruss volume is surrounded with a peristyle among other things. . .
by nscoleman | Jul 5, 2016 | entire buildings
O. M. Ungers and Richard Meier play the primary instigators in terms of language of this basilica – minus the Doric impluvium entry courtyard, of course. The front elevation/plan drawing shows shadows that hint at both wormseye and oblique axonometric projections. Structure and tectonics play a central role where pipe and wide flange columns slide back and forth next to one another, while small circular side chapels cut into the deep poche of the stone walls.
by nscoleman | Jun 30, 2016 | entire buildings
One half is a nine-square (Richardson wrapper, Mies core), while the other half is a four-square (Neutra patios, Mies fireplace). This came from a small garage conversion that never got off the ground – see bottom drawing. So here it is.
by nscoleman | Jun 27, 2016 | entire buildings
This beach cottage betrays symmetry while remaining rigorously modular. A tower surmounts the concave entry aedicule, a large half-round stair walled in glass block curves back into the square living room, where a circular bay window contrast with the entry, and a long porch is added onto the otherwise square, hip-roofed volume.
by nscoleman | Jun 21, 2016 | entire buildings
Juxtapositions: the first square is further development of a project I featured some time ago, where the square is the internal volume (indeed cubic in it’s section), but flanked on two ends with large masonry walls that curve in to the entrances, and again to form corner towers, while opening to full-height glazed opening on the sides. The second square is a study of differing systems, where the primary axis is four-square, and the secondary is nine-square, all topped with a shallow central dome.
by nscoleman | Jun 20, 2016 | entire buildings
This is dumb. Mondays are dumb. A four-square temple with skylights intersected with a circular metal screen. That’s it.
by nscoleman | Jun 17, 2016 | details, entire buildings
This small hall type has a basket-weave brick floor, the roof supported on pipe columns that float free of the brick walls. The exterior corners are Mies-inspired, while the window treatments are a take on Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard.
Details of that window system are below: elevation/section, axon of the base, worm’s eye of the head. I owe you roof-ceiling information – but the question remains, bow truss or hammer beam? Or something altogether different?
by nscoleman | Jun 16, 2016 | entire buildings
I was waiting in the drive-thru line at that iconic California burger stand when I began to think of all the ways that the concrete masonry building was banal. And yet, with a few interesting moments – the angled drive-up windows, for instance. My proposal takes that window and wraps it over the entire rear of the building, Mies-like, allowing customers in the car to watch their burgers hop off the line. The dine-in patio is flanked with stylized palm tree columns, hinting back to Hans Hollein and John Nash before him. A central oculus sits over the point-of-sale, with the iconic red standing-seam metal roof rendered as a hip.
by nscoleman | Jun 14, 2016 | entire buildings
This house is a line of three squares: a central tree-filled courtyard flanked by a garage/studio impluvium volume on one end, and a large, hip-roofed residence on the other. The rafters of this roof extend to encapsulate a long porch, the majority of which is screened. A spiral staircase descends to the bedrooms, which are located below. The complex is imagined to be sited on a hillside, with the garage square nearly underground, and the residence looking out over the valley below.
by nscoleman | Jun 10, 2016 | entire buildings
Santa Maria del Naranco was not built as a church, but rather a palace, and is thus an atypical church plan. My interpretation of it is devoid of any ecclesiastical use, and reverts back to a folly. I’ve stripped it of the Romanesque ornament and overlaid a Grecian pediment, corners similar to the Monadnock Building in Chicago, and stripped modernist interiors.
by nscoleman | Jun 8, 2016 | entire buildings
Taking cues from Shingle Style residences mixed with a fair amount of Richardson (red mortar on Flemish-bond brick and rough-faced ashlar masonry much?) and a bit of my own preferences for industrial sash windows and rigid geometries, this little cottage is organized around a nine-square plan, with cramped interior rooms and no central ‘Hall’, thereby favoring the large screened porch at the rear.
by nscoleman | Jun 7, 2016 | entire buildings
This church type is actually a collection of types – a Colonial American meeting house makes up the sanctuary, while flanked with the choir and apse of a more traditional Anglican church, accessed by an almost domestic-scaled atrium. The level of detail and poche changes with each individual element.
by nscoleman | Jun 3, 2016 | details, entire buildings
Today is the day I celebrate my birth into this crazy world. So I’ll take this time to share some personal drawings: my house, or rather the little nooks and crannies of it that I’d like to alter, shift, sheathe, or paint. There’s a lot of me here, my confusion, my interests, my unrest, as well as where I sleep, read, eat, and otherwise live. There are bathrooms (above and just below), staircases (below), ceilings (below), gardens (bottom), and wainscotts throughout. Enjoy.
by nscoleman | Jun 2, 2016 | entire buildings
This small project is a riff on a diagram I’ve been working on at work, but taken to a polemic state. It’s a single volume, capped with an inverted gable ‘butterfly’ roof, clerestories all around, with a walled-in porch at the public entry and a covered patio at the rear. The drawings below show what happens when this prototype engages with additional forms to make a more complete residence.
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