Farnsworth update

Here are photos and an update that arrived this morning in an email from Caroline Barker, Communications Coordinator, Communications & Marketing Department at the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

Two days after floodwaters inundated Mies van der Rohe’s architectural masterpiece, staff from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois are working feverishly to assess the damage and take initial steps toward cleaning it up. It’s a huge job when any house is flooded, but one that is also a National Historic Landmark carries additional considerations. Before major clean-up work can commence, for example, professional conservators must be consulted to ensure that lasting damage is minimized.

As the accompanying photos make clear, the damage to the house is significant, but the larger problem might be the landscape surrounding the house. The full extent of the damage to the landscape won’t be clear until the water around the house – still about a foot deep in most areas – clears out.

Help from the public is urgently needed. Please visit the web sites of Landmarks Illinois, www.landmarks.org and the National Trust for Historic Preservation www.preservationnation.org to learn how you can help save this iconic Modernist masterpiece. Landmarks Illinois manages Farnsworth House on behalf of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns it. – GF

Sage Modular House - 2 years in, revisiting a ground breaking house

A real treat today. I just received an email from Sara and David Sage, the owners of a modular house I helped them design back in 2004. They have been in the house for about 2 years now, and they are well moved in and at home. They shared many pictures of the house which I'm posting here.



A panoramic view of the Sage home interior.



Sara and David's big goal for this house was to bring it in for $100 a square foot, no small task in the expensive Los Angeles county construction market. But they had a plan, to do copious research on their own, to get the most value out of every consultant they used, and every vendor and contractor they engaged, they resolved to build the house modular, to source their modules from a market with much lower labor cost in Utah, and to complete a good deal of the work themselves as sweat equity. It was their dream to have a modern house and I must say they succeeded on every count. From finding the best materials and vendors, to researching planting material and submitting their own landscape plan for permitting, Sara and David did it all and tracked it in detail in their blog on LiveModern.com. It was a tremendous inspiration and people cheered for them every step of the way. Its hard to know how many other people they inspired to dig their heels in and pursue their own dream of a modern house.



When the work was done, well, almost done, and the smoke had cleared I believe Sara calculated that their cost worked out to about 114$/sqft. This was pretty remarkable at a time when there were literally dozens of prefab house start-ups trying to get traction. The lament was how everything was costing much more than expected, and much more than hoped. In that milieu of dashed hopes Sara and David fought and struggled to make their house happen at a cost that was a pipe dream for the rest of the market.



The house is a reasonable 1400 sqft, 3 bedrooms, with an open kitchen, living/dining, family room space, it really is a wonderful plan that lives much larger than it appears on paper. The modular units in different colors tell the prefab story. You should be able to orient yourself to the photos using the plan. The house site is unusual in that the back yard of the house is really at the side, so the front porch wraps around to the side, and that is the main back yard like space. The rear and other side have proximity to neighbors, more like a house typically has at the sides.
My favorite thing about the design is the three spaces you see in the photos - the kitchen, living/dining, and family room are each small square rooms that overlap at their corners, each space well defined, and very open to one another. It really walks the tightrope between open plan and discrete rooms. David and Sara brought a rough version of this floor plan to the table when they hired me, so they deserve the credit for its design, my role being more to refine, and adapt it to division into modules, and to resolve the plan into the 3d massing and window placement. It was truly a collaboration of the best kind. More photos in the browser below.

Technorati Tags: modern design, modern house, modular house, prefab house

Mies's Farnsworth House is Underwater

All the flooding in the midwest has inundated Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, near Chicago. Check this out, from the National Trust for Historic Preservation's blog. As of two days ago, the house had a foot of water in it:

... All the furniture was raised but there is nothing further that can be done, and in fact the house is pretty close to being unreachable, as the entire community is underwater and it is a very dire situation. Three bridges between the town and the house are now out. ... The house and tours are closed for the foreseeable future. Access to the house currently is only by boat, and this is not safe.

(In addition to being known around the world as a modernist masterpiece, the Farnsworth House also has the lesser but still interesting distinction of making architect John Black Lee's list of five great houses, here, the other's being the Philip Johnson's Glass House and Boissonnas House (both in New Canaan), Neutra's Kaufman House, in Palm Springs, and a house Lee himself designed in New Canaan.) -- ta

more of that inside / outside thing

I saw this little courtyard today at Trendir and Design Milk. A tiny bit of a thing, it serves to open up the whole living area by joining 2 "public" areas of the house by way of floor to ceiling sliding glass.

How beautiful it would be in winter to look out from the living room through a cool, blue, snowy pocket back into the warm glow of the dining area. But in the warm weather, I wonder if they suffer the occasional wildlife visitors like we do: birds fly in and poop all over, chipmunks and squirrels find their way in (mostly by way of a cat's jaws), and this year our under-deck tenant made his first indoor appearance.

The courtyard of the Szirtes House, created by Chenchow Little Architects in Australia, reminded me of this post from a while back. – GF

3030 House - waiting for the steel erector

The next step for the 3030 EcoSteel House is to assemble the steel framework, but the owner is waiting in line right now. Plenty of other tasks to do in the meantime however. And us, we've had a request to see what the front of the house looks like, so a new image of the model is posted as well.



This illustration shows a different color scheme than the previous images.

On site they applied a void filling top coating to the foundation wall and ground it smooth. This creates a mottled patina on the concrete surface which looks pretty cool.



The rest of the crew is sanding reclaimed oak barn boards which will become the ceiling of the ground floor.



Tune into the 3030 House flickr group to see all of the photos forwarded by the owner.

Technorati Tags: 3030 House, 6030 House, 6040 House, ecosteel, modern design, modern house, prefab house

Arkansas Plat House to be on HGTV

The Arkansas Plat House will be making an appearance on HGTV's program Beyond the Box.



The episode covers several different house projects, but the Plat House no doubt is the segment described as "a couple who found almost everything used to build their home through Internet shopping."

The first airing of the show will be September 17, 2008 9:00 PM ET/PT with several other airings to follow. See the entire scheudle at the HGTV site.

And for anybody who did not see the link to the Plat House catalog page in the first line of this entry I'll give you another link right here:
CLICK HERE to go to the PLAT HOUSE catalog page!
In case you missed the sentence before this one, that link goes directly to the catalog page for the PLAT HOUSE, the one from TV!

Technorati Tags: house plans, modern design, modern house, Plat House

Inviting the outdoors in

The past couple of evenings, the temperature has been just cool enough that we have closed the double glass doors that open from our kitchen onto the lower deck, and we have sat down to dinner at the table inside instead of out. Even the bank of windows in the dining area were closed against the chill. As much as I love our house in winter, with a cheerful fire every night, I hate to say goodbye to outdoor living when Autumn forces us inside.

Almost without exception, everyone who visits us in the warmer months remarks on the airy, spacious feeling of our small house which is due, in large part (unless it's actively raining or too humid) to those double glass doors being open first thing in the morning until well past nightfall, when I start worrying about confused bats swooping through.

Our totally conventional, boring double doors (small photo, with butterfly chairs) are a poor substitute for what I REALLY want someday. . . Here are some pix that inspire me to keep dreaming. – GF

p.s.: I am totally frustrated not being able to control photo/text placement in posts like this – Blogger has really got to get with it! Sorry for the lousy layout.







1. moomoo Architects
2. Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects
3. Guilherme Machado Vaz Arquitecto
4. Our back deck – good enough for now
5. Arthur Casas
6. Barton Myers Associates (photo Ciro Coelho)
7. Barton Myers Associates (photo Richard Powers)