Jens Risom in Dwell Magazine

We were happy to receive an email today from our friend, Helen Risom Belluschi, telling us that her father, the prolific, preeminent furniture designer Jens Risom, is featured in Dwell Magazine's September issue.

We were even happier to reach into the mailbox this afternoon to find our own copy of the magazine and to get our first look at this terrific looking chair Jens designed as part of a new collection scheduled to be released this fall for Ralph Pucci.

We last wrote about Jens in this birthday salute. At 93 years old he is still busy creating designs for furniture that are as inspiring as those he made 60 years ago. Go Jens!! – GF

(Does this chair – which makes me think of a very updated wing chair – actually have 3 legs? Very cool!)

we have windows - XHouse3

The model now has window and door units which lends a little bit more scale to the image.

Next will be the fit out of interior doors, cabinets, etc. Coming along - final stretch of modeling.

the form is revealed - XHouse3

Now you can see the outside shape of the house. Based on the massing of traditional forms, yet it will be thoroughly modern.

I've been studying houses with this particular combination of modern detail + space with traditional massing and form. I've been calling them "Motrad", at least to myself, but I like the term.

This design will offer 3 bedrooms and a small home office, 2 1/2 baths, all within a tidy 2000 sqft. A front and rear porch can slightly expand the small 32ft square footprint of the home.

Hey – You're Stepping on my Nose!

The rug tile company, Flor, is producing rugs using some of the witty images made over the years by Swiss-born graphic designer / photographer François Robert. Robert has produced a couple of books of images of human-made objects that have discernable "faces" (Face to Face, which sold out in Europe and the U.S. and Faces published by Chronicle Books).

I see faces in all kinds of things, and I've know Robert's work in this vein for years, so I really get a kick out of this application. –GF

insides - XHouse3

This is the insides of the house, but its the outside of the insides.

Did you follow that?

New design begins - XHouse3

The XHouse collection gets its third design.

This new design was started this week, and today we are blocking it out in 3d in preparation for creating Design Prints. We'll describe it in more detail in coming posts.

too big to take to the beach

This post is not about a house, or hardware, or a great architect, although its 1066 pages certainly include something about each of those.

It's hard to imagine that any subject has been passed over in Alan Fletcher's amazing book, The Art of Looking Sideways. Although it was published some years back – and, sadly, Alan died way too early at 74 years old, in 2006 – I am just getting around to reading it now.

In a filmed interview, Alan says the book is "for visually curious people" – not for those who are funny-looking, but for those who see past the obvious and delight in the connections they make there. It is deeply fascinating, and, although I know it's a bit of a cop-out, I'm going to excerpt directly from the publisher's (Phaidon) website which describes it well.

The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery. This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value. The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

I noticed that the book is paginated by spread – that is, each page and the one facing it is designed and counted as a unit (which is how we graphic designers lay out books, magazines, and things that open up – creating facing pages that work together in a dynamic way to support the story being told). That one subtle consideration (the folios are, like, 4 point type printed in grey...) is huge to me: each spread is an idea to be absorbed altogether, independent of what precedes or follows, not read one page at a time. Like looking at an exhibition where each piece has its own power, but assembled with others makes an even greater statement.

I feel I could / should read this book now, and keep reading it forever. I knew Alan, and when I see his line drawings and his own unmistakable handwriting here – as 'real' to me as any foundry's typeface – I miss him and am grateful for the proximity to his brilliance that I enjoyed even briefly. – GF

Better hope it's a BIG check in the mail

Well designed window and door hardware, mailboxes – everyday items that execute their purpose with elegance and perfect functionality delight me, perhaps to a slightly excessive degree. . . This handsome mailbox caught my eye in the daily sale email I get from Design Within Reach.

A wall-mounted mail box: original price – $900, on sale for $450. What is with DWR? Great looking stuff, much of it, but I resent them billing themselves as affordable or within reach of anyone but wealthy design snobs.

I've always observed that every house in (yeah, you-know-where) Switzerland has either a cluster or single mailbox that is sophisticated and low profile, and virtually impossible to vandalize with a baseball bat (not that I've tried. honest.). Residents, I'm pretty sure, are NOT spending $900 OR $450 on their briefkasten! – GF

from top: DWR Line One mailbox, Blomus Signo letterbox, typical bank of Swiss briefkasten, antique built-in mailbox in Switzerland, terrific-looking stand-alone letterbox, our kids and mailboxes in front of the apartment we rent, typical rural or suburban American "expressionist" mail boxes

Formally introducing: ibu-revolution

The way to build dwellings with shipping containers

Yes, today is the day we launch the new portion of our site dedicated to showing our long promised system for building dwellings from shipping containers. Its been a long multi-year journey, much of it documented right here on the blog. Its worthwhile now going back and reviewing where this began. I think my path to this point is informative, and most importantly speaks to how carefully considered this system is. We invite you to click through to read the rest of the history of this journey. But first may we present ibu_revolution.

visit ibu_revolution for more information

Like much else around here my first interest in the application of shipping containers to building shelter began on the original Dwell message-boards. Prefab was heating up thanks to Dwell magazines competition to design a prefab house, and notably one of the entries by architect Wes Jones featured containers, something he had been advocating for some time. A new site fabprefab.com was launched to track all this activity. Fabprefab included a section on shipping container homes which began the path to legitimizing it as a building technique.

Fabprefab included a message-board where there was much discussion about just how you would go about building a home out of these things. When one day in the Fall of 2004, lo and behold, a fellow David Cross appears on the message boards and says Wow, its really great that you are all so interested in building a house with containers, and oh by the way here are some pictures of the container house that we are right in the middle of building in Charleston. Well we were all floored.

David and I spoke a lot over the next few months and I tried to absorb as much as I could from him. He was an ex-merchant marine who had been working with inter-modal shipping containers for many years. His company was folded into a larger outfit who among other things were creating custom modified command centers and field offices from containers. David was interested in expanding it into housing and the Charleston house was their first proof of concept. I made plans to go visit their factory and see what it was all about.

Around this time David and I had a discussion about the difficulties in convincing building officials of the merits of building with containers. David advanced the idea that a "shipping container" as a term was too loaded with preconceptions. He proposed that this was a form of modular construction using Inter-modal Steel Building Units, or ISBUs, or IBUs as I call them. We were not building with shipping containers. We were building with ISBUs. That was it - the term was coined by David, I wrote about it in the blog in March 05. Since then the term ISBU has take firm hold of the concept and you can see it being used all over the internet. Just Google it - here, let me get that for you. Thats right. 2005 - First time ISBU on the internet - right here where you are reading now. Fast forward to Today - ISBU in use everywhere, including by every greazy dealer that would like to convince you they know what this is all about. Thats how you can tell its sunk in!

So I went down to Tampa and visited the factory, got a full tour of the anatomy of an ISO box, I saw a mysterious command center being fabbed, and had my fingers protected from white hot metal by a mysterious insulation. I came away with the seeds planted. I had an understanding of how the boxes were built, what was good about them, what was their weaknesses, and I had begun to formulate my ideas about what was the best way to use them to make houses. A sketch that was posted along with my IBU essay in 2004 shows the first iteration of the house design you will be seeing today. Three 20ft boxes gathered around to form a large open space. This space to serve as the common areas of the typical home program, and the containers to form the other functions that can tolerate their limited dimensions. Shortly after this I posted a cartoon about a container home being built in a traditional neighborhood. In this cartoon I used one of my design sketches of a two story house based on modular units at the perimeter and a resultant space between them roofed with a pre-engineered building system.

My first design study was to create a small dwelling within a single 40ft unit. I saw as a small cabin, and as an IBU from which larger multi unit dwellings could be built. In 2005 I created the schematic model, and later that year designed two sketch proposals for a multi-unit in-fill building for a site in Los Angeles. They had a revision of their zoning code to promote multi family densities in existing neighborhoods in order to create more housing in the city. One of the schemes used the single 40ft module design. The other used a stack of two module layouts that followed the units on the perimeter+large space in the center model, again with a pre-engineered roof system.

There was a little bit of a lull in my activity in 06 but during this time David Cross helped found and joined a new company whose sole mission was to build with shipping containers - SG Blocks. Here they pulled together all of the experts who had worked on their projects to date, now ready to advance the practice.

I did not advance the concept again until the end of 2006 when I was approached by a friend Jeff Rous to enter a competition for student housing. It seemed like a perfect application for IBUs and we came in a respectable second place. In the course of preparing the competition entry I was able to work through much of the concept for how the single module units would combine into larger multi unit buildings. At the root the single module multi unit buildings come together in the same way as the multi module dwellings. In the case of of an apartment building the occupants have shared common space between their units, just as in a multi module home the family would have shared living space between the modules. I worked my way through much of the concept work including various accessory pieces that would join to the IBUs to add functions.

The competition was completed in the winter of 2007 and following it I continued to work on the logic of the system. That summer I presented a brief outline of how the system would work in total. The first part was the spacial problem as I've described above - making positive quality space for a dwelling. The second part was a discipline for modifying the containers into modular units. I'd envisioned limiting the set of alterations that had to be made to a small set of door and window openings. This would reduce the amount of engineering required and make the manufacturing more routine. Next I needed to use the opening designs to create again a limited set of container modifications that supported several different interior fit-outs. In this way a limited stock of modified boxes could be used to create a range of floor plan solutions. An outline of this very system was presented on the blog in July of 07 two years ago. The sample floor plan published harkens directly back to the first sketch posted with my ISBU essay from 2005.

Forward a year to 2008 I was engaged by artist John Unger to design a home and studio using shipping containers. John brought a competent concept to the table which while not congruent with my system shared enough characteristics to serve as a test bed and a platform for working through numerous details. Together we discovered many solutions such as utilizing industrial mezzanine structures, and hanger lift doors, and some things such as the corrugated steel arch roof which have been incorporated as options for the system. Currently it appears the multi story scheme will morph into a single story scheme and in that process I'm sure we will discover more applicable to the system. Its been a very useful process and as near to prototyping the system as I could hope.

Which brings us to the present. I've finally had the opportunity to model and briefly document the expansive possibilities that this system brings to building with IBUs. I've extensively documented the range of variations for a simple house design. More designs remain to be elaborated, but this sample reveals the great range of more to come.

Chichester Road and Modern New Canaan

I've been taking detours down Chichester Road in New Canaan for almost two decades, just for the fun of it, the way you might stop into a museum every so often to see paintings you love. There are five modern houses on Chichester, and while I can't say they are the most beautiful modern houses in New Canaan, I'm absolutely sure there is no cluster of modern houses in New Canaan that are both so beautiful and so easy to see from the road.

It is because the houses are so visible and so beautiful, and because of the way they were developed, that I think Chichester stands as the epitome and symbol of Modern New Canaan, more so than the houses of the Harvard Five. The Harvard Five houses are terrific, but they are widely scattered and generally hard to see, and so they exist mainly for their owners, for participants in modern house tours and for readers of the large format books that the Harvard Five -- demi-gods that they are -- seem to inspire.

None of the houses on Chichester were designed by Harvard Five architects. On the contrary, the modern house neighborhood on Chichester is the work of two men -- John Black Lee and Hugh Smallen.

Lee and Smallen bought the land and they planned it as a subdivision of modern houses -- in fact, they required that the houses be modern. And then they designed four of the houses (a fifth, which was not part of the original subdivision, was designed by William Pedersen).

So when I think of Chichester's history, visibility and beauty -- its prominence in New Canaan -- I'm compelled to say that Lee and Smallen are seriously undervalued as important figures in New Canaan modernism. They've been overwhelmed by the adoration of the Harvard Five, which has left other good modern architects in New Canaan unjustifiably overshadowed, Lee and Smallen prominent among them.

Gina and I have always thought the house John Black Lee designed on Chichester (known as Lee House 2) to be probably the most beautiful house we've been in (the picture above, which I borrowed from the Modern House Survey, is of Lee 2). My one visit was on a humid day several summers ago, when I noticed a newspaper ad for a realtor's open house at one of the other houses on Chichester; it turned out to be Smallen's Becker House and as we drove to it along Chichester we noticed that there was an open house that day at Lee 2 as well, so we got to see both. Smallen's house was beautiful, Lee's both exquisiite and, it seemed from the short time we were in it, extremely livable. Here's what the Modern House Survey says about it:

Lee House 2 was designed by John Black Lee for his family after they had outgrown their first house on Laurel Road. Lee acquired the lot in 1955 ... and the house was completed in 1956. This lot was part of the twenty acres on Chichester Road that Lee and Hugh Smallen had purchased in 1954 to be subdivided into six parcels with the provision that the new houses built on the lots were of Modern design.

The other houses on Chichester are the Parsons House (with a garage designed by Lee) and the Smallen House, both designed by Hugh Smallen, and William Pedersen's Beaven Mills House. Take a slow drive down Chichester to check them out or, better yet, park and walk. It's a beautiful road and the history and context provided by the modern house survey makes it all the more interesting and reveals its significance. -- ta

Julius Shulman

Julius Shulman, photographer of modern architecture (California houses -- Neutra, Eames -- in particular), died Wednesday. He was 98! Here's his Times obit.

His ost recognizable image may be of Case Study House 22, which you can see here. (This appears to be death week on Modern House Notes.) - ta

Thank you, Edward Durell Stone, Jr. 1932 – 2009

Edward Durell Stone, Jr., son of modernist architect Edward Durell Stone, Sr., has died at the age of 76 in Florida.

Born in Norwalk, CT, Stone received his bachelor's degree in architecture from Yale and his master's in landscape architecture from Harvard. In 1960 he founded Edward D. Stone, Jr. and Associates in Fort Lauderdale, FL, which became one of the preeminent planning and landscape architecture firms in the world, receiving over 140 statewide, national and international awards. 3 different U.S. presidents appointed him to the Presidential Commission of Fine Arts. He seemed to focus on tourism and community-living projects in Florida, but had some pretty far-ranging projects as well, like helping design a panda preserve in China, working on high-end resorts in France, and other projects in the Caribbean and Europe.

But, being from Westchester County, NY, and having gone to SUNY Purchase for art school, I was most interested to learn that it was he who designed the sculpture gardens at PepsiCo's headquarters in Purchase, NY, over 30 years ago. Of course, his famous father designed the corporate headquarters itself.

Read what the NY Times wrote about the Donald M. Kendall sculpture gardens, and try to squeeze in a visit if you are ever in the area. We live only 35 minutes away, and I think I've only been there once! No excuse for that, as it is a really wonderful place – and free! – GF

Island Modern

Some time in the past 10 years or so, my friend and client from New Canaan CT, Donna Gorman started visiting Vieques, the island off Puerto Rico where the U.S. Navy used to play with their missiles and stuff. First, she brought home a funny-looking stray dog, and then another (even funnier-looking), from a subsequent visit. Finally, she brought home the title to a piece of property that she and her husband, Roger Johansson, would build a vacation house on.

A surface / textile designer by trade, Donna does nothing without terrific style, and their house is yet another embodiment of her vision: playful and bright, yet serene. Simple and practical, but with a sparkle. Modern, always, and – wow! – the house is fully solar-powered.

The house is featured in Metropolitan Home magazine's July / August 2009 issue. (Hey – that's Donna on the cover!) John Hix was the architect; you can see more of his work here.

Welcome Home, Donna, it's just beautiful! – GF

Photographer: Peter Murdock

Another Plat House surfaces in Texas

Once again a house built by one of our customers resurfaces after it is done - a surprise Plat House!

This Plat House was built outside of Austin, Texas - and yes, that makes three Plat Houses in the Austin area and the surrounding hill country. The owner made extensive changes to the stock design, some which you can see in the photos. There is a large window wall in the main living space and the recess between the kitchen and living room has been closed in. They have used a stone facing on large portions of the walls, and the places with lap siding are a painted a terrific almost tropical green. The side overhangs are also modified, having a bit of a ranch country feel to them. All in all a fantastic Plat House. Click through to see a photo browser with more pictures.

Austin Plat House set at Flickr

I Feel Bad Complaining About Something that is Otherwise So Good But...

I love the New Canaan modern house inventory. The house descriptions are interesting. The information about who owned each house and when they owned it contains little nuggets of social history. The chronology and photos are useful.

But I have one small complaint and one bigger one.

The small one is this: The site would be easier to use if you could click through the houses in succession instead of having to click back to the main page each time you've finished reading about a house. A "previous/next" button would do it.

The bigger problem for me is this: It is hard to read. The type is too small and the contrast between type color and background color is too weak for my middle-aged eyes. Bigger might help, but a little darker might do it too (Gina will know for sure, but I think we're using the same type size on this blog, but it's darker and, to me, easier to read). Thanks. -- ta

The Glass House: Retold by Witold (Rybczynski)

Our friend from Atlanta, Joey Asher, kindly passed along this link to a short piece that appeared on Slate last week that includes couple of little anecdotes about Mr. Johnson and his house. It's author, Withold Rybczynski, has written about architecture for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and is the author of many well-known titles like Home and A Clearing in the Distance. – GF

Photo by Withold Rybczynski

New Canaan's First Modern House

I was under the impression that the house we live in, in Pound Ridge (which is next to New Canaan and which is nowhere near as well known as New Canaan is for modern houses, although there are dozens here), was built before any of New Canaan's modern houses.

But I was wrong. Sherwood Mills designed and built a house for his family in New Canaan in 1939, the same year as our house was designed and built, by John C.B. Moore (the Mills House is on the left, below). That's one of the things I learned while clicking through the new inventory of modern houses in New Canaan that went online last week.





Coincidentally, Moore lived in New Canaan for a number of years, although he doesn't seem to have designed any houses there. Moore's firm (Moore and Hutchins) did however design an addition to the New Canaan library and when I mentioned that to Mills's son when I had occasion to call him on the phone a few years ago, he knew of Moore and Hutchins and told me that he himself had also designed an addition to the New Canaan library. -- ta

ibu_revolution - the system has a name

Yup, we gave the system a name. LamiDesign IBU Building System, while perhaps more descriptive and accurate, really says much less about what this is really all about.

If you did not notice the blog is sporting a new ibu_revolution tag, and we have also begun a twitter feed for ibu_revolution. You can find that here: https://twitter.com/ibu_revolution Much of what gets posted there will get the RT treatment and show up in the lamidesign twitter feed, and the mini-blog you'll find in this blogs right side bar. But if you want the news first hand direct, then follow up ibu_revolution on twitter and you'll get the scoop.

French Cutie

This house by Franklin Azzi in Yport, France (in Normandy), is just so delicious. . . All that lovely wood and light and smooth open spaces in a neat, petite footprint. The windows and their hardware are so sophisticated – where does the water go when it sheds off those recessed skylights? Very clever. Can you imagine trying to get upper decks like those passed by your local building department? Seen on Materialicious (the most delicious!) and MoCo Loco. – GF

New Canaan Inventory

The folks at the Glass House have put the new inventory of modern houses in New Canaan online. I just started clicking a few minutes ago and have only gotten through three or four of the 91 houses, but I already came upon some interesting stuff, in a mildly gossipy vein, written by a homeowner who was trying to decide whether to hire Victor Christ-Janer or John Black Lee.

The website is www.preservationnation.org/modernhomesurvey.

Christy MacLear, director of the Glass House, tells me that it's not quite complete but that they felt compelled to go live with it because the New York Times wanted to scoop it in today's Home section. -- ta

LamiDesign IBU Building System - working on a longer animation

I'm putting together a longer animation that I hope will explain the exponential potential of the system proposal. All this video and iMovie stuff is new to me so bear with me while I work on it!

Right now I'm shooting to do it in Hi Def 720p since it really does not appear to be any harder than doing it in old school formats. Files are just bigger and eat up more hard drive...!