More Ignite Philly photos via Flickr

Hand waving ensued

via flickr users relaxing and Rob Bender.

And a time lapse of the first half of the night - I am the third presenter:

by YouTube user claan1.

You really gotta love New York for this kind of renovation

Big doors, walls and whole sides of houses that open up have always appealed to me, but the ones I've seen in the past have, for the most part, been in rather private settings. The current issue of New York Magazine's Home Design Fall '09 Was/Is story features an East Village brownstone whose street-level façade is perforated and the second story opens up wide – on overhead garage door tracks – to the street. The architects did interesting stuff to the back of the building as well. – GF

Top photo: original sealed-up façade
All photos by David Sandberg

A Modern Giant

Because we live in the wealthy suburbs, not far from the big retro buildings where sports guys play, lots of sports guys live near us, or roughly near us. Mariano Rivera, for example, and Joe Torre. Dave Checketts, who used to run the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, and who I now hold in low esteem because of his attempt to buy a football team with Limbaugh, lives up the road, in New Canaan. Tom Seaver used to live in Greenwich. But of course they all lived in fake colonial mansions, or McMansions, I'm sure (I'm guessing here, of course, but it makes sense.

That's why I loved it when I was clicking through the blogs on our blogroll, which I hadn't done in months, and found this post from the MidCentury Architecture blog about the modern house in San Francisco that Willie Mays lived in. Check out the furniture though! There's no word of course about where Willie lived when the Giants were in New York in the 1950s or after he got traded to the Mets in the early '70s.

We went, We spoke, 300 listened

It actually happened, Greg spoke at Ignite Philly 4 on Tuesday night, 13 October. With 300 people in attendance it was probably the most eyes and minds ever thinking about modern house plans at the same moment!

The short format of the talks is a great challenge to force you to get to the essence of the idea you are presenting. We got a great reception from what was obviously a thoughtful crowd. What would you expect from a room full of people who came out on a Tuesday night to listen to people talk about ideas! The other speakers were just great and inspirational and the entire experience very uplifting. If you ever have an opportunity to present what you do at a venue like this by all means take advantage of it.

Videos of the event are to be forthcoming and we will post them when they surface. In the meantime there is a great review of the night on the Technically Philly Blog (photos above via Technically Philly). Thanks to the organizers for such a great venue and thank you to all that came to listen.

Solar village pops up in Washington

I'd meant to post about this yesterday, but things got away from me as they often do. Inhabitat did a nice job, so why not go there to read about the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, a competition in which 20 teams of college and university students from around the world compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

I love the use of the Mall in Washington D.C. as the venue for this. Here's the sort of dorky video:


– GF

Historic Buildings of Connecticut, Including a Few From the Modern Era

On Twitter, I follow the Jay Heritage Society, which runs a terrific historic site with a great Greek Revival house (built by John Jay's son), in Rye. This morning they pointed me to this blog, Historic Buildings of Connecticut, which is organized in a number of ways, including by architectural style.

The blogger, a fellow named Daniel, seems to interpret "modern" simply by date, but it's worth looking through his dozen or so photos of buildings from the modern era anyway, including this terrific lighthouse.

If you live in or near Connecticut, the entire site should be fun.





The buildings shown here, which I photographed last week, are near an abandoned factory in Stamford and were, probably, housing for factory workers. They are not from the Historic Buildings of Connecticut site, although I hope someone who knows what he's doing has documented them. -- ta

Pound Ridge is More Modern than New Canaan

Pound Ridge, which is next door to New Canaan, has dozens of modern houses. I started a list a few years ago and came up with 39 without trying all that hard, and we've since come across others. Most are modest and from what I can tell very little attention has been paid to them as artifacts of the modern era or to who designed them.

New Canaan is obviously far more well-known as a modern town. But per capita, Pound Ridge has more modern houses -- at least 39 in a town of 4,800 people, compared to New Canaan, which has 91 and a population of 20,000. - ta