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.
Month: June 2016
two square bathrooms
I was sketching up a bathroom for a small house renovation when I began to ask ‘four square or nine square?’. These two simple rooms are the answers to those problems. That is all.
a reliquary
This is not architecture – at least not in the traditional sense – this is a small piece of furniture with architectural referent. It stems from Michael Graves and his explorations of architectural tropes within product design. But it asks important questions regarding architectural language, offering the position that the language of building can be adapted and applied to other parts of our lives, even if it be devoid of true tectonic value (see the small ‘windows’ and ‘acroteria’ on the above drawings).
shingles, circles, and squares
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.
bruce price goes diagonal
In a seeming break with the previous two Price projects that were relentlessly symmetrical and modular. This project would seem to diverge – seem to. The reality is that this cottage is just as systematic as the previous two, but its symmetry is diagonal rather than axial, and its modularity is only shifted one half bay to turn a regular square plan into a rectangular one. The ground floor is all ashlar cut stone, while shingles cover nearly everything else. A large tower takes up one corner, where the ashlar rises up into the second story, even to the third at a small circular corner column – see wormseye axonometric below. Rounded corners abound – a continuous wrapping surface of shingles consumes the rigid geometry.
bruce price and dueling chimneys
Once again, Price regulates the picturesque qualities of the Shingle Style on a strict module and with intense symmetry. Two chimneys dominate the principal facade, which has a Richardsonian Syrian arch dead center, flanked with expansive glazing and shingled balconies on the sides, which top long portico-ed porches. The symmetry only breaks at the entry facade, where a small porch sits next to the stair hall.
bruce price @ tuxedo park
Today I’ll start a short series on four summer cottages located in Tuxedo Park, NY, by Bruce Price, who also designed numerous other buildings in the masterplanned community. This cottage of 1886 takes the aesthetics of the Shingle Style, but meets them with a rigid modularity and symmetry. More to come.
two squares, unalike.
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.
a skylit temple meets circle
This is dumb. Mondays are dumb. A four-square temple with skylights intersected with a circular metal screen. That’s it.
a music hall
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?
frame 