Running Around October 30, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Residential Design.Tags: 149 Hoxie
add a comment
Been a pretty hectic day, but it had a bright spot: I (finally) was able to get the drawings for Lendell’s house finished and stamped and take them over to the municipal building to submit for a building permit. My first house plans are out in the world! (Runnn!)
Nothing too extraordinary, but I think it’s comfortable plan, and the kitchen/dining area has a window box and a high roof with clerestory windows that I think will make it pretty special. Straight from the super triple secret plans:
In which Jami and LEED keep us entertained October 22, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Design/Build.Tags: 145 rosetti
add a comment
We got a visit this week with Jami, designer, cinematographer, and lovely human being who worked with the group that designed and began building Patty’s house this summer. (An aside: the new web page for the house is up!). Jami arrived Wednesday from Chicago and spent most of the next four days lending us her experience with the LEED-certification side of the project and filming various people speaking about their involvement with the house and their life stories. Plus, she’s very energetic and smart and pleasant to hang out with and we talked and played pool and had a good time.
(LEED for Homes (short for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is standard for certifying homes that meet certain “green” requirements. It’s challenging and frustrating: as a pilot program, they need it to be rigorous so it will be taken seriously, so every step in the planning and construction process, every waste-reduction measure and energy-efficient design detail, must be documented and verified. Because it’s a pilot program, it’s not as streamlined as it should be, and there’s no established support network of LEED-certified products and services. Still, it wouldn’t be that bad if our studio were big enough to hire a full-time LEED-accredited professional. Instead, we share out the responsibility as best we can. And with people coming and going on this project, we struggle to not let too much knowledge get lost in the transition. Luckily Jami has been very helpful and proactive in this regard.)
We (Jami, Jonathan, Kiwi Brian, Price, Jason, myself) also had an on-site work day Saturday. Without meaning to sound negative, it wasn’t very productive. But we got some bracing up and Jason put in a floor for the quirky little attic/loft that we have discovered in the living room.
In which a bonfire, permit drawings, car repair and more happen October 22, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Life, Residential Design.Tags: 149 Hoxie
add a comment
The past weeks have been ambiguous. The everything-is-new-and-exciting stage is giving way to a facing-the-realities, be-they-financial, geospatial, professional, or-personal stage.
My car is fixed. I went to pick it up, armed with a credit card and checkbook. Well, Coast Transmission Specialists, as it turns out, does not take any form of money known to modern man: they don’t have a credit card machine and they were extremely reluctant to take an out-of-state check. No, they wanted a thousand dollars in cash. Now, it would seem that running a transmission repair business would entail regularly charging people rather large sums of money, but clearly I have not been drinking hard enough to understand the business logic at work here. I wrote them a check, which they poked with a stick and grunted at for a while. The guy went to cash it right away and said the credit union wouldn’t take it, so I looked into how much I can withdraw from an ATM before hitting a limit (answer: $500 plus fees). Never mind; the guy ends up being able to cash the check, and my car seems to be running well with approximately the same number of engines, wheels, and so forth as it had before.
Summer is turning into fall: it’s still 80’s or 70’s most days, but it’s definitely cooler on average. When it’s not raining, it’s not so oppressively humid and hot. This is peak season for volunteers: warm down here, cold up north. It’s a mixed blessing to meet so many interesting people that I’ll almost certainly never see again. Even the longer-term ones rotate out, like my Americorps friends who had a going-away beach bonfire on Saturday (fun people, though very weird).
Construction documents have been the tedious forced march of the past week; I’m working my way towards finishing my first set, for Lendell’s house, which of course requires learning almost everything from scratch. In a way, it’s exciting: in a few days, I’ll be applying for a building permit on a house that someone will hopefully soon live in. At the same time, it’s the kind of endless nitpicky revision that, though I’m pretty good at it, still drives me crazy.
I’m learning a lot from this process, and next time I’ll be more on top of it. I know this is definitely the work I want to be doing and I love doing it. Still, it’s an ambiguous and transitional moment. I don’t know where it’s going and I can’t even fully articulate why it’s strange. But I’m getting settled in for a long and productive and hopefully interesting autumn.
Rain October 22, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Life.add a comment
It is raining. It is raining a lot. It has been raining all day, a lot. It is 94% humid. There is also thunder and lightning, which is nice, but there is rain, which is not. According to the National Weather Service, we may get an inch of rain tonight, which might be true, if by “an inch” they mean “several feet”. I have terrible terrible cabin fever.
I wish it would stop raining. The rain can’t decide how much it wants to rain; I open the window to get a little breeze and minutes later the rain is raining rain into my room. Rain is even posing construction difficulties. Patty’s house has no roof or siding and yet the electrician is scheduled to come in this week.
Blah.
Weekend with Sergio’s UT Austin studio October 14, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Design/Build.Tags: 145 rosetti
add a comment
We built some great and quirky window boxes for the Rosetti Street house this weekend, thanks to design/build help from a group of University of Texas architecture students: Sergio Palleroni’s studio and miscellaneous students including Ross, one of the group who originally designed the house (and who we can therefore blame for everything that is difficult about it).
Trying to do meaningful design and build work in a weekend is hard. It takes time to learn about a project, to identify the design considerations at work, to brainstorm ideas, test those ideas, reevaluate and refine them, and finally build (and perhaps take apart and build again). However, this group was up to the task and we were able to throw them right at some of our biggest unresolved design issues at this point: the window boxes, and bracing (we’ve been counting on ‘hopes and prayers’ to hold the house up for a little too long).
A few pictures from today (hope to receive more from the students):
Sergio working with the team assembling the front-room window box, featuring a large window seat and an enclosure that frames a view of the trees across the street:
The bedroom window box team (sans moi) standing in the finished frame, as we ponder how to get it out the window so we can slide it into place.
Ross and Kiwi Brian as seen through our successfully installed bedroom window box. As you can see, Brian is still astounded that we managed to get it into place (which required maneuvering a very heavy frame through the wall opening, out onto the 15-foot-high scaffolding, and then back into position in the wall) without anything going horribly wrong. That’s why it was important to think everything through very carefully. I can’t count the number of times somebody said “Hmmmm.” and then pointed out a potentially fatal flaw in our design.
The window projects out pretty darn far, leaving room for a wide seat and a shelf for plants and things. I hope to use metal panels (which the summer studio salvaged from Frank Gehry’s destroyed art museum in Biloxi) as cladding for the window boxes, which should set them apart and make them look quite special.
Finally, from the inside. To me, it looks like a really inviting place to sit, and the view out (especially considering that all the houses are gone for blocks) is phenomenal.
It was great to see the window boxes being developed by the students in this thoughtful way. The vision for the house is really coming together and it gives me a lot of faith in what we’re doing to see the effort start to pay off. So it’s been a fun weekend and I hope to see all the UT folks again.
P.S. I definitely deserve at least Monday and Tuesday off.
Oak Grove October 10, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Life.add a comment
Our street name is, in an increasingly uncommon phenomenon, actually more or less accurate. The area has plenty of Southern live oaks, not just cleared and subdivided lots where the oaks used to be. Whether they form a “grove” of oaks or just a “bunch” of oaks is a matter of opinion.
In the past I promised pictures of our house, so here she is:
And the view from our house Gulf-wards:
And the beach near our house. With my shadow. (Yes Ursula, I found it). As you can see, the casinos are back and thriving (that’s the Beau Rivage in the distance).
Volunteers October 10, 2007
Posted by Vincent in Architecture, Design/Build, Life.Tags: 145 rosetti
add a comment
Are cool. We’ve made good progress on the Rosetti Street house the past several days. Also, we have internet in our house now! I’m tired from building; also, it turns out the windows, which we were going to start putting in today, may (?) never have been ordered (it’s complicated). Also, my transmission is going to cost a million dollars to fix and I might need to look for a part-time job. Oh and ultimate frisbee is fun (Tuesdays at 7, Salvo — be there). This has been your stream-of-consciousness experience for the day; please return your seatbacks and tray tables to the full upright position.
