square – Page 4

the courtyard variations

2017⋅04⋅14 NS Coleman1 Comment

More than just a Bach reference, that title could really be the title of this entire blog, since the vast majority of what I post here are really just different takes on courtyards. Blame it on my being a SoCal native, blame it on my love of squares, palazzi, and any other architectural trope you can. I love me some courtyards. So here we go again. At the top, a more detailed elevation of a previous project, and below, a different take on that same floor plan, this time more loudly echoing Giorgio Grassi and Louis Kahn.

square + barn

2017⋅04⋅102017⋅04⋅10 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Another trip to Oregon with my wife has yielded yet another flurry of agriculturo-vernacular projects. This one is a barn, made a square, with exposed gothic-arched framing inside, and two shed-roofed wings to the side. Two planters reflect these wings to create a larger cruciform plan. Exposed diagonal beadboard makes up the wall treatment inside, while white painted board-and-batten the exterior walls and roof.

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.

two stair towers

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One square, one circular. The square has a radial winder stair inside (but cut as a square), while the circle has a square stair inside, with habitable spaces inside of that inner square. This particular example is a rift on a project by Oswald Mathias Ungers, where circular and square towers are set alongside one another (and of course, I can’t track it down, though I know it’s in the Electa monograph. . .).

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. . .

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.

kahn, mies, and an impluvium

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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.

cabins & courtyards

2017⋅01⋅102017⋅01⋅10 NS ColemanLeave a comment

As a part of my Christmas traditions, my family and I spend a weekend in the mountains here in Southern California, where we can play ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ and safely return to our warm weather when our fingers are sufficiently numb. The so-called ‘cabins’ we stay in are often over-sized log mansions, and kitschy as can be expected.

This project is an answer to them: a simple nine-square plan with a central courtyard, and a circular infinity-edge spa at the middle; the kitchen-dining-living trio lines the north edge, with sliding glass walls fronting a supposed lake view; and private sleeping quarters located on the lower level.

square church, once more

2017⋅01⋅05 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Continuing the formal explorations of the German hallenkirche typology of a few weeks ago, today I’ll share some more detailed takes: from a traditional half plan and section to oblique wormseye axonometrics and a section of the Brunelleschi-esque cupola with half a traditional oblique axon on one side and a womseye axon on the other. These interrogations of representation are not just fun to draw, but actually aid in figuring out exactly how the timber roof is made up, and how that roof relates to the overall modular system.