entire buildings – Page 6

a retreat

2017⋅03⋅302017⋅03⋅30 NS ColemanLeave a comment

This began as a small retreat house, in two halves connected by a central skylit entry, with full-height sliding doors on two sides and blank walls on the entry facades. But, then I got to thinking, and decided to put it on stilts up in the air, like the fire lookout towers that dot the American West’s forests. Obviously, this necessitates a staircase, which I suggest making a conical spiral. To increase livable space in what would be an otherwise stuffy cabin, the entire steel structure has been wrapped to create an over-sized screened porch. While I started with a butterfly roof and tried out a hip roof, I find the dichotomy of the butterfly against the spindly supports to be rather compelling.

a house in four towers

2017⋅03⋅21 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Today, I’ve got something a little odd here at frame, four ‘L’-shaped towers surrounding a nine-square cubic courtyard. The exterior walls are bare brick, but for small observatories in the upper corners. The ‘house’ itself is broken into four independent towers, with public spaces grouped on the ground floor, connected via the large tree-filled courtyard, which acts as the main living room of the house, with baths and bedrooms located on the upper tower floors. In contrast to the bare brick exterior, the courtyard walls are detailed in a strict classical vocabulary, with pilaster colonnades wrapping floor upon floor.

kahn, krier, and a kiosk

2017⋅03⋅092017⋅03⋅09 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Three ‘k’s. Three drawings. Three ideas:

Kahn – an homage to Louis I. Kahn’s Center for British Art at Yale, where one of his pyramidal concrete skylights is placed above a more classically detailed library, contrasting the stark materiality of his modernism with the richness of the English country house which inspired it.

Krier – Starting with a plan very much like Wright’s Charnley house, but facing its street façade with a stuccoed language taken from Leon Krier’s Perez Architecture Center at the University of Miami, all for the domestic scale of the single family home.

Kiosk – Almost an exact reduplication of a small Tokyo ‘warehouse’ featured in a book by Atelier Bow-wow, ‘Pet Architecture Guide Book’, with a triangular floor plan topped by a butterfly roof, centering the downspout on the front façade. All I’ve done is perfect the geometry and replace a roll-up garage door with a french glass door.

cruciforms & dogtrots

2017⋅03⋅072017⋅03⋅07 NS ColemanLeave a comment

It began easily enough, a simple linear plan with two entrance porticoes per side, opening onto a square central hall with a circular stair its center, flanked by two sitting rooms, all sitting beneath two large deep-eaved hip roofs. But then my love of iterations got the best of me, and I began to chop off the side porticoes, play with roof forms, and open up the central hall into a dogtrot type house. . .

elevating a courtyard

2017⋅03⋅03 NS Coleman1 Comment

A week or so ago I promised elevations for a courtyard plan. Well, here they be. The front and back feature vernacular porches, complete with columns and hip roofs. The sides, however belie the modernist floor plan inside, with floor-to-ceiling Mies-ian windows at the dining room and bedroom (what’s privacy?), and counter-height butt-glazed windows at the kitchen. The roof forms cannot be seen from the exterior, as they all slope inward to the impluvium-like courtyard. I really aught to do some sections. . .

yet another courtyard

2017⋅02⋅132017⋅02⋅13 NS Coleman1 Comment

I normally like to post a number of drawings of the same project together, but I’ve been backlogged with scanning in some of my sketchbooks. Excuses aside, here’s a plan. A courtyard plan. Another courtyard plan: square court in a square volume, off-center to allow for a variety in the sizes of the surrounding rooms, but on axis from the entry to the rear porch. Large modern floor-to-ceiling windows paired against vernacular hipped roofs. Elevations, sections, and details forthcoming. Ti promeso.

not-so-lightly sketched

2017⋅02⋅03 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Most of the time, the drawings I post on frame are more complete, polished, and thought out. Often, they are the reworking of previous ideas, or different ways of representing an already designed form. But that is not to say that I never do quicker, rougher, sketches. Indeed, often these early sketches lie buried underneath more ‘finished’ drawings. But today, I thought I’d share a few nascient ideas before they got worked through:

The top drawing began two discussions of halls-and-hearths (here and here); the below sketches reflect some agricultural forms I encountered on a long road-trip; a small cubic ‘house’ with a telescoping tower; another small cubic structure, with a large spire and a funky base condition; and a constructed mesa, a futile and humble attempt to capture the grandeur of those immense landforms (and not wholly unalike Hans Hollein’s landscrapers).

kahn, mies, and an impluvium

2017⋅01⋅302017⋅01⋅30 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Today’s post is super simple: square house with notched out corners and a circular impluvium in the center. Hints of Louis I. Kahn’s Goldenberg Residence prevail, set against Mies-ian open planning.

more dueling hearths

2017⋅01⋅252017⋅01⋅25 NS Coleman1 Comment

Following the last post, this long hall also features two heaths, though here they’re in the form of the modernist cone fireplaces popular in the 60’s, and are placed along the length of the structure rather than at its ends. The most defining characteristic of this project though are the long roof rafters that are extended past the walls but without carrying any projecting eave of the roof itself. This was taken from a derelict barn building I drove past over the winter break, where the eaves had been completely bereft of their roofing, leaving only bare joists.

a hall with two hearths

2017⋅01⋅23 NS Coleman1 Comment

My apologies for a lack of posting in recent months, between the holidays and another licensing exam, my drawing and posting output has been admittedly underwhelming.

But enough of that. This is a long, gabled hall with a large hearth dominating the principal axis and full-height windows along the middle, topped with a square pyramidal skylight set at a diagonal. Entry is by low porches at either end, flanking the hearths. Formally, this takes influence from the main dining room at Charles Whittlesey’s El Tovar hotel along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where my wife and I enjoyed a Boxing Day brunch. My own predilection for Mies-ian staircases, the diagonally-placed skylight, and the half-round dormer windows make it worthy of a post on frame. Elevations follow.