Author: NS Coleman

Nicholas S. Coleman received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California and his Master of Architecture from Yale University, where he studied under Peter Eisenman, Robert A.M. Stern, and Demetri Porphyrios. After a two-year stint in Chicago under Thomas Beeby, Nicholas returned to his native Southern California. While the warmer weather gives him the opportunity to display his extensive bow-tie collection on a day-to-day basis, his fair-isle sweaters haven’t gotten much use.

bruce price goes diagonal

2016⋅06⋅242016⋅06⋅24 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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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.

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bruce price and dueling chimneys

2016⋅06⋅23 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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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

2016⋅06⋅222016⋅06⋅22 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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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.

2016⋅06⋅212016⋅06⋅21 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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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.

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a skylit temple meets circle

2016⋅06⋅20 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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This is dumb. Mondays are dumb. A four-square temple with skylights intersected with a circular metal screen. That’s it.

a music hall

2016⋅06⋅172016⋅06⋅17 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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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?

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of all the burger joints in all the world

2016⋅06⋅162016⋅06⋅16 NS Coleman1 Comment

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I was waiting in the drive-thru line at that iconic California burger stand when I began to think of all the ways that the concrete masonry building was banal. And yet, with a few interesting moments – the angled drive-up windows, for instance. My proposal takes that window and wraps it over the entire rear of the building, Mies-like, allowing customers in the car to watch their burgers hop off the line. The dine-in patio is flanked with stylized palm tree columns, hinting back to Hans Hollein and John Nash before him. A central oculus sits over the point-of-sale, with the iconic red standing-seam metal roof rendered as a hip.

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a bay window

2016⋅06⋅152016⋅06⋅15 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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A bay window topped with a full-width gable, leaving small triangular soffits at the eaves. I noticed this feature on my way to a site meeting in South Los Angeles, and since then have seen it recurring throughout my library – Richardson, Bruce Price, Peabody & Stearns, et al. So here’s my version: covered in shingles throughout, battered stone walls at grade, four-square windows, the gable becomes a full pediment, and the big reveal – a rounded interior wall.

a mountain-side courtyard home

2016⋅06⋅14 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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This house is a line of three squares: a central tree-filled courtyard flanked by a garage/studio impluvium volume on one end, and a large, hip-roofed residence on the other. The rafters of this roof extend to encapsulate a long porch, the majority of which is screened. A spiral staircase descends to the bedrooms, which are located below. The complex is imagined to be sited on a hillside, with the garage square nearly underground, and the residence looking out over the valley below.

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lewerentz’s crematorium at malmö

2016⋅06⋅132016⋅06⋅13 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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An unbuilt project for a crematorium complex at Malmö, Sweden. Three conical brick chimneys top square window-less boxes, with small temples linking them one to another. An elongated temple-fronted portico acts as the formal entry at the center volume.