cleaning up, continued

Night views of the kitchen and courtyard, staged with gorgeous furniture from PIE Studio in advance of professional publicity photos.

furniture, couch edition

Another piece of the house fell into place today when our new sofa arrived. The sofa is more than a place to park your tuchus. It is a key piece of the three-dimensional composition of the living and dining room. We chose this sofa based on its scale and proportions. It defines the sitting area without forming too heavy a barrier (it helps to have the mass of the couch lifted off the floor on light metal legs, which pick up on some of the other silver finishes in the room).

garden, pole bean edition

We harvested our first batch of pole beans yesterday. These insanely long (and surprisingly sweet when sautéed) guys grew from beans we planted in April. Beans like to be sown directly into the ground, and pole beans need an armature to climb on. These vines produce elegant violet flowers which then turn into two quickly-growing beans.

infrastructure and inspiration

I passed through Madrid to change planes on the way to Milan, and found it striking that a number of passengers stopped to take photographs of the airport. I don’t blame them – it’s a beautiful airport, after all – but it occurred to me that I had never seen travelers take photos of any of my “home” airports in Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, or Newark. Why not?

paving

Our paving crew spent much of Saturday installing the concrete pavers for our porches, courtyard, front walk and driveway. The pavers sit on a bed of compacted sand, which establishes the slope for the paving and provides a dense supporting medium to distribute the weight of whatever the pavers are carrying (people, cars, elephants)...

contrasts

With the construction fence removed today, the transparency of the living/dining room and its relationships to the park and courtyard have become more visible. Here's the covered patio facing the park, seen from the park with the sun setting behind. The rest of the landscape is coming into shape vey quickly.

garage door

Our garage door installer completed the installation of the garage door this afternoon. The house is now fully secure, so we can move ahead with a lot of work inside this week. We're expecting the air conditioning system to be complete (through the rough inspection) and the remaining parts of the interior partition framing should be complete this week, too. If all goes well, we should have drywall going up by the end of the week.

international style

Eytan Fichman, my undergraduate thesis advisor - and the very model of a mentor whose example as an educator is never far from my mind - sends this photo of "the Vietnamese precedent for tin box" in Haiphong. It's nice to see so many of our formal gestures, like shed roofs and deep overhangs, appearing in a building that seems to be designed around functional concerns and the simple modular dimensions of available materials.

Boy do I wish we could have ducks, too.

Boston

Flying home from a few days in Boston for the centennial ACSA Annual Meeting offers a chance to reflect on architecture and education. Boston is where Holly and I started studying architecture (at the Boston Architectural Center) and it’s clear that the city itself remains one of the most influential components of our intellectual formation. How so?

progress photos

Some photos of the house, now that the doors and (nearly all the) windows are installed. The front door is large (8 feet tall), which makes the porch seem smaller in photographs like this. We're trying to imagine how to furnish the porch, and how to (legally) install the supergraphic street number I've always craved.

landmarks and milestones

At some point yesterday, tin box recorded its 20,000th page view (hello, Reykjavik!). Our steel exterior panels are complete (except for a few pieces of trim), our windows are in place (except for one unit that needs to be re-ordered), and we're looking forward to seeing doors installed and rough plumbing complete in the coming week.

A view of the front of the house, looking through the porch to the park. 

digital precision

Over the next week we'll fabricate trim pieces to cover the rough openings between the panels and the structural members. We're using the CNC milling machine at the FIU School of Architecture, with the guidance and extraordinary expertise of my colleague, Eric Peterson. The process is more complex when cutting through steel sheets than when we carved the construction sign. Here is a sample piece fit around one of the W10 beams in the courtyard (the final version will have the same silver paint finish as the wall panels). The fit is pretty precise, and we'll complete the weather seal with a bead of sealant.

further progress

With the last exterior panels installed at the living and dining rooms, we have a stronger sense of the spatial qualities of that part of the house. We're particularly heartened by the amount of natural light that comes through the door openings (to the courtyard) and the windows (toward the park), and by the soft reflections of light off the concrete floor and galvanized roof decking and ductwork.

progress

The shell of the house is nearing completion. We needed to have several exterior wall panels remade, and they are being installed this week. The windows and doors should start going in Monday, and some bathroom fixture might start going in Tuesday.

In the meantime, here are some progress photos of the house. The view of the house from the park gives you a sense of how the color and scale of the building work with the vegetation and topography. This week's rain made the park especially lush (note the thick carpet of resurrection ferns on the limbs of the live oak to the right). We're eager to see the effect of planting the low roofs of the house with flowering plants and vines, though that part of the project will have to wait for at least a year.

We're also psyched about the transparency of the living/dining room. In this photo, you can see through that wing of the house, into the courtyard. And the courtyard is looking good, too...

Design Miami

"How much does your house weigh?"

Buckminster Fuller's famous aphorism-in-the-form-of-a-question brilliantly raised concerns that had escaped the focus of architects, but would become central to the practice of many of the twentieth-century's key figures. Fuller's interest in efficiency and his close study of natural forms led to the invention of the geodesic dome, the dymaxion living units and the concept of synergy. Design Miami worked with Fuller's friend, Norman Foster, to bring two projects - a restored fly's eye dome and a new dymaxion car built by the British architect - to the Design District this week. It was spectacular to spend time poring over both, as well as the accompanying exhibition of photographs and drawings. And that's not all Design Miami had for us this year...

roof

Our steel erector set the insulated panels in place on the upper roof yesterday. These panels, each 42" wide, run the full 18' length of the roof slope in order to eliminate the kinds of lap joints that might leak. The standing seam joints between the panels also eliminate leaks (by raising the seam well above the roof surface) and hold the panels in place by crimping around the stainless steel clips that are screwed through the corrugated b-deck and into the z-purlins.

The installation process includes two kinds of sealants to complete the moisture and thermal barrier:

circulation

One of the truly elegant things about the National Gallery is the way I. M. Pei uses movement through the building. The structure makes reference to the city plan of Washington in several ways, beginning with a series of diagonal rifts that split the solid block of the building into triangular prisms, echoing the Baroque geometry of the streets outside. Inside, the theme of diagonal circulation reappears in the cascading stairs and escalators of the main atrium. Diagonal movement gets translated into the vertical dimension. It produces a beautiful space which offers just the right amount of room for the small number of extraordinary works on display.

The National Gallery is a good example of how poetic circulation can be. Besides referring to the city's streets - the horizontal circulation of the metropolis - the stairs and escalators generate shifting views of the art displayed, allowing multiple perspectives onto each work

Here's what the stairs and escalator look like in motion, as recorded on an iPhone.

touch

Walking to the National Mall in Washington today, I remembered how hard it is to pass by the East Wing of the National Gallery without stopping in. It's like visiting an old friend. And while pausing to say hello to the sculpture by Richard Serra and the painting by Robert Motherwell, we were struck by that other famous quality of the building - the way it invites the visitor's touch.

I. M. Pei's building has always compelled people to touch it, and I'm not sure why. It makes sense in the parts where the whole building comes to a sharp point - you just want to touch that prow, or whatever it is - but throughout the building there are stains on the walls right at the height of a visitor's hand, where countless museum-goers have left a little oily trace of their visit. It's the remarkable gift of this richly complex building that it engages people in such a warmly physical way.

You've got to love a building that makes you want to touch it:

ductwork

Our mechanical contractor began installing ductwork this week. The segment in the living and dining rooms (pictured here) is the most prominent piece in the house, and it was the first to go up. It will remain exposed, along with the structure and the electrical conduit.

The ductwork has a layer of insulation between two walls of metal to keep the air as cool or hot as possible between the air handler and the register. This kind of ductwork is more expensive, but the insulation makes the system more energy efficient and prevents condensation building up on the ductwork, and the metal lining inside helps keep the air free of dust and mold.

The ductwork also responds beautifully to the changing light conditions inside the house:

view

An exciting moment at the site today. The subcontractor responsible for putting up the roof and wall panels took down the construction fence to give their forklift better access around the house. For the first time, we got to see the park from the house, without the green vinyl fencing in the way. It was spectacular.

Since we started planning the house, we've been anticipating that the living and dining room windows would frame a view of the park, with the street edited out by the low wall beneath the window sills. Today, we got to see this relationship for the first time. We also got to see the house from the park...