by nscoleman | Jun 19, 2017 | entire buildings
To celebrate my birthday, my wife took me to see over 20 of Irving Gill’s extant works. I’ve always appreciated this seminal figure, and his lasting impact upon Southern California’s architectural development, but had never taken it upon myself to actually seek out his work in person. Lesson learned. And as much as I appreciate precedent study, that is the representation of existing works through drawing, I believe that history must be operative – that is, we must look to how history can work for us today. Not only what we can learn from it, but what we can do with it.
And with that introduction, I give you a small house, three squares in plan, stepped in section, cubic in volume. The articulation of the volumes is typical Gill, with an arcade wrapping the a portion of the ground floor as a screen, yet open to the air above (quoting Gill’s Bishop’s School in La Jolla). The remainder of the details are taken from Ungers, with some Schindler-esque diagonal planning.
by nscoleman | Jun 14, 2017 | entire buildings
A square volume set upon two long, cyma-ed walls, enclosing one garden per side, with deep eaves at the hip roof, and hung metal balconies at the second floor. The ground floor walls bi-fold upward, to offer complete movement between the interior and the enclosed gardens. Tall cypresses and vine-covered lattices complete the garden walls at either end. I really should flesh this one out a bit more, methinks.
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 | May 19, 2017 | entire buildings, precedent
In penance for doing little posting of late, I present you with a little precedent study, and an archaeological one at that. Burnham & Root’s Armory Building (Chicago, 1882), was demolished in the 60’s, and Richard Nickel’s photos are little of what remains to tell the epic story of this impressive structure. Predating the Monadnock Building by 9 years, the simple masonry volume is rather unornamented, save for the excellent brickwork and rough-faced battered stone. A large skylit central drill hall anchors the form, which gives only small fortified slit windows to the street, save for the large, Richardsonian Syrian arch at the main entry. The windows pre-echo Kahn, but I’m not going to argue that he was so influenced, no matter how hard I’d like to. The structure is framed by the large load-bearing masonry walls, which are filled with long-span trussed arches, which allow for the large hall at the center. My first (failed) attempt at a truly square floor plan is at the bottom.
by nscoleman | May 3, 2017 | entire buildings
For a little dose of fun, I took this week’s longhouse and shortened it up, ending up with a square with half-round screened porches on either end.
by nscoleman | May 1, 2017 | entire buildings
Maybe today’s project is not a longhouse perse, but definitely a domestic form that is quite elongated, with long solid brick gabled walls making up the length of the volume, and a hipped apsoidal colonnaded porches on the ends. I think that the roof itself would be particularly interesting, with the intersecting gables at different pitches, and a generous Rossi-inspired conical skylight.
by nscoleman | Apr 27, 2017 | precedent
Oregon has a large number of covered bridges, where the wood trusses had to be protected from the persistent damp and subsequent rot and failure. These are simple, rectangular, white clapboard (or board & batten) gabled ‘houses’, concealing impressive, large-scale Howe trusses inside. I find engineered structures to have a brutal beauty, especially those of the early 20th Century, and often believe the Historic American Engineering Record to be much more fascinating than its architectural counterpart. These covered bridges offer a wonderful contrast between the utilitarian trussed interiors and the domestic exterior form. There might just be another project somewhere in there. . .
by nscoleman | Apr 21, 2017 | entire buildings
Another vernacular form taken from my Oregon drive. This one, the study of roof masses, with a four-gabled volume over a hipped porch. I’ve taken this to it’s logical extent, with square-in-square, and a continuous, cubic central ‘house’. The reality is that this is no house whatsoever, at least not at this scale. Perhaps more of an elaborate cabin. Miesian stairs offer access from all four sides.
The final drawing represents a different formal operation on the same floor plan, with a single pyramidal roof replacing the hips and gables, echoing Asplund’s Woodland Chapel.
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 | Apr 10, 2017 | entire buildings
Another trip to Oregon with my wife has yielded yet another flurry of agriculturo-vernacular projects. This one is a barn, made a square, with exposed gothic-arched framing inside, and two shed-roofed wings to the side.
Two planters reflect these wings to create a larger cruciform plan. Exposed diagonal beadboard makes up the wall treatment inside, while white painted board-and-batten the exterior walls and roof.
by nscoleman | Mar 30, 2017 | entire buildings
This began as a small retreat house, in two halves connected by a central skylit entry, with full-height sliding doors on two sides and blank walls on the entry facades. But, then I got to thinking, and decided to put it on stilts up in the air, like the fire lookout towers that dot the American West’s forests. Obviously, this necessitates a staircase, which I suggest making a conical spiral. To increase livable space in what would be an otherwise stuffy cabin, the entire steel structure has been wrapped to create an over-sized screened porch. While I started with a butterfly roof and tried out a hip roof, I find the dichotomy of the butterfly against the spindly supports to be rather compelling.
by nscoleman | Mar 21, 2017 | entire buildings
Today, I’ve got something a little odd here at frame, four ‘L’-shaped towers surrounding a nine-square cubic courtyard. The exterior walls are bare brick, but for small observatories in the upper corners. The ‘house’ itself is broken into four independent towers, with public spaces grouped on the ground floor, connected via the large tree-filled courtyard, which acts as the main living room of the house, with baths and bedrooms located on the upper tower floors. In contrast to the bare brick exterior, the courtyard walls are detailed in a strict classical vocabulary, with pilaster colonnades wrapping floor upon floor.
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 | Mar 9, 2017 | entire buildings, precedent
Three ‘k’s. Three drawings. Three ideas:
Kahn – an homage to Louis I. Kahn’s Center for British Art at Yale, where one of his pyramidal concrete skylights is placed above a more classically detailed library, contrasting the stark materiality of his modernism with the richness of the English country house which inspired it.
Krier – Starting with a plan very much like Wright’s Charnley house, but facing its street façade with a stuccoed language taken from Leon Krier’s Perez Architecture Center at the University of Miami, all for the domestic scale of the single family home.
Kiosk – Almost an exact reduplication of a small Tokyo ‘warehouse’ featured in a book by Atelier Bow-wow, ‘Pet Architecture Guide Book’, with a triangular floor plan topped by a butterfly roof, centering the downspout on the front façade. All I’ve done is perfect the geometry and replace a roll-up garage door with a french glass door.
by nscoleman | Mar 7, 2017 | entire buildings
It began easily enough, a simple linear plan with two entrance porticoes per side, opening onto a square central hall with a circular stair its center, flanked by two sitting rooms, all sitting beneath two large deep-eaved hip roofs. But then my love of iterations got the best of me, and I began to chop off the side porticoes, play with roof forms, and open up the central hall into a dogtrot type house. . .
by nscoleman | Mar 3, 2017 | entire buildings
A week or so ago I promised elevations for a courtyard plan. Well, here they be. The front and back feature vernacular porches, complete with columns and hip roofs. The sides, however belie the modernist floor plan inside, with floor-to-ceiling Mies-ian windows at the dining room and bedroom (what’s privacy?), and counter-height butt-glazed windows at the kitchen. The roof forms cannot be seen from the exterior, as they all slope inward to the impluvium-like courtyard. I really aught to do some sections. . .
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 | Feb 13, 2017 | entire buildings
I normally like to post a number of drawings of the same project together, but I’ve been backlogged with scanning in some of my sketchbooks. Excuses aside, here’s a plan. A courtyard plan. Another courtyard plan: square court in a square volume, off-center to allow for a variety in the sizes of the surrounding rooms, but on axis from the entry to the rear porch. Large modern floor-to-ceiling windows paired against vernacular hipped roofs. Elevations, sections, and details forthcoming. Ti promeso.
by nscoleman | Feb 3, 2017 | entire buildings
Most of the time, the drawings I post on frame are more complete, polished, and thought out. Often, they are the reworking of previous ideas, or different ways of representing an already designed form. But that is not to say that I never do quicker, rougher, sketches. Indeed, often these early sketches lie buried underneath more ‘finished’ drawings. But today, I thought I’d share a few nascient ideas before they got worked through:
The top drawing began two discussions of halls-and-hearths (here and here); the below sketches reflect some agricultural forms I encountered on a long road-trip; a small cubic ‘house’ with a telescoping tower; another small cubic structure, with a large spire and a funky base condition; and a constructed mesa, a futile and humble attempt to capture the grandeur of those immense landforms (and not wholly unalike Hans Hollein’s landscrapers).
by nscoleman | Jan 30, 2017 | entire buildings
Today’s post is super simple: square house with notched out corners and a circular impluvium in the center. Hints of Louis I. Kahn’s Goldenberg Residence prevail, set against Mies-ian open planning.
by nscoleman | Jan 25, 2017 | entire buildings
Following the last post, this long hall also features two heaths, though here they’re in the form of the modernist cone fireplaces popular in the 60’s, and are placed along the length of the structure rather than at its ends. The most defining characteristic of this project though are the long roof rafters that are extended past the walls but without carrying any projecting eave of the roof itself. This was taken from a derelict barn building I drove past over the winter break, where the eaves had been completely bereft of their roofing, leaving only bare joists.
by nscoleman | Jan 23, 2017 | entire buildings
My apologies for a lack of posting in recent months, between the holidays and another licensing exam, my drawing and posting output has been admittedly underwhelming.
But enough of that. This is a long, gabled hall with a large hearth dominating the principal axis and full-height windows along the middle, topped with a square pyramidal skylight set at a diagonal. Entry is by low porches at either end, flanking the hearths.
Formally, this takes influence from the main dining room at Charles Whittlesey’s El Tovar hotel along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where my wife and I enjoyed a Boxing Day brunch. My own predilection for Mies-ian staircases, the diagonally-placed skylight, and the half-round dormer windows make it worthy of a post on frame. Elevations follow.
by nscoleman | Jan 10, 2017 | entire buildings
As a part of my Christmas traditions, my family and I spend a weekend in the mountains here in Southern California, where we can play ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ and safely return to our warm weather when our fingers are sufficiently numb. The so-called ‘cabins’ we stay in are often over-sized log mansions, and kitschy as can be expected.
This project is an answer to them: a simple nine-square plan with a central courtyard, and a circular infinity-edge spa at the middle; the kitchen-dining-living trio lines the north edge, with sliding glass walls fronting a supposed lake view; and private sleeping quarters located on the lower level.
by nscoleman | Jan 5, 2017 | entire buildings
Continuing the formal explorations of the German hallenkirche typology of a few weeks ago, today I’ll share some more detailed takes: from a traditional half plan and section to oblique wormseye axonometrics and a section of the Brunelleschi-esque cupola with half a traditional oblique axon on one side and a womseye axon on the other. These interrogations of representation are not just fun to draw, but actually aid in figuring out exactly how the timber roof is made up, and how that roof relates to the overall modular system.
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