day job, continued

Our exhibition, Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy, opened Wednesday night at the Frost Art Museum on FIU's main campus. My colleague, Elysse Newman, took some great photos of the opening with her iPhone. The exhibition is open until April 14. On February 1, I'll be giving a brief gallery talk at 6pm.

day job, exhibitions edition

Four new exhibitions open tonight at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, including Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy. I curated the show with Jon Mogul of the Wolfsonian-FIU. The exhibit uses materials from the Wolfsonian collections to explore the relationship between material culture (all of the physical and visual stuff a society produces) in Italy and its colonies during the 1930s. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between Italy and its African colonies: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Libya.
[update: photos from the opening]

ornithology, again

A peacock in the park next to tin box. Our site visits are getting more colorful.

ornithology, continued

There are some amazing birds around tin box. We're not sure what this creature is. It looks like a cross between a chicken and a vulture. We have no shortage of vultures here. And, apparently, we have chickens, too...

varnishing

At the risk of running afoul of child labor laws, we also put Lydia to work varnishing the new construction site sign. The sign is made of MDF (medium density fiberboard), which cuts very smoothly on the CNC milling machine, but which swells and disintegrates when exposed to water. We don't expect the sign to last long (it doesn't have to) but we thought we'd try extending its life with a coat of marine spar varnish. We were also just curious what varnished MDF looked like...

peeling

The insulated wall panels have a layer of plastic on the exterior side that protects the finish. Peeling it off is somewhat addictive, and makes for a fun, Saturday afternoon family activity.

color

A quick site visit this evening with friend of tin box, Peter Lang. It was an unusually overcast afternoon in Miami, but that gave way to a beautiful sunset, which gave us a chance to see the house's silver skin react to the rapidly changing crepuscular colors. When we decided on a silver metallic finish, we anticipated that it would respond elegantly to the changing light conditions. So far, so good.

milling

We've been playing with the CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine at FIU's School of Architecture. This is a new technology for us (though it's pretty standard for architecture students nowadays) and we're trying to figure out how to use it. In the next two weeks, we'll use the CNC to cut metal sheets into custom trim to use around the beams and purlins that pop through the exterior walls of the house. Today, we carved a large piece of MDF (medium density fiberboard) into a large construction site sign. This little project was a dry run for another project (an exhibition that opens in a couple of weeks) and gave us an opportunity to play with the technology. Eric Peterson, scholar, craftsman and fellow faculty member at FIU, was instrumental at making this work.

Admittedly, the video of the CNC machine at work is not exactly gripping. The system includes software that translates three-dimensional data into carving patterns, and instructs the milling machine on how to subtract areas from solid materials. The video is backwards (reversed left to right) because the only camera I had available was the built-in video on my laptop.

more wall panels

Our installer is making progress on the wall panels. They've put up about half the panels, but still have some tricky areas and a lot of trim to do in the coming weeks. For now, we're enjoying having a chance to see the front of the house (left, with the porch in the foreground) and the courtyard (after the break) take shape.

ornithology

Tropical Park isn't a sublime landscape on the scale of New York's Central Park, nor is it a vast constructed wilderness built to contrast against an overly dense metropolis. It is a collection of highly programmed play spaces (baseball, soccer, tennis, boating) interspersed with picnic pavilions and barbeque grills. There's also an equestrian facility. The park is well used, which means it produces a lot of refuse. And in South Florida, trash means vultures.

The huge vulture population in Tropical Park illustrates how even after trash has been thrown "away" it continues to transform our ecology. Nourishing dump buzzards is probably not what William McDonough and Michael Braungart meant when they wrote Cradle to Cradle.

Below, iPhone video of vultures circling over the football field at Tropical Park. Better than flying toasters...

toxicity and politics

New Jersey, 1972. photo: National Archives

A few months back we posted an appreciation of Richard Nixon's environmental record, which included signing the 1970 Clean Air Act. The National Archives just digitized a huge collection of images from the Documerica project (1971-72), which documented the state of our natural and built environments at the outset of this and other pioneering legislation (Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and so on). It is amazing to see how badly polluted the country was forty years ago, and, conversely, how far we've come.

gott nytt år

Nothing says Happy New Year like a trip to IKEA. While we're having our kitchen cabinetry custom built by Surface Workshop, we're leaning toward using IKEA cabinetry and sinks for the bathrooms. We'll write more about this after we make some decisions. For now, we like the flexibility and design of the IKEA cabinetry. We're less sanguine about their durability, but we think we can make it work for a few years.

Of course, it's not just the merchandise that inspires us at IKEA...

rethinking the grid

Spending the last few days of 2011 in Southern California has been a wonderful opportunity to see how far the state and its cities have progressed in their efforts to repair and protect a fragile ecology. Los Angeles still suffers from a layer of brown smog that hangs over the region, but the air here is much clearer than it was in the past. Policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel combustion are working - incentives for buying fuel-efficient cars have led to consumers and taxi fleets adopting hybrids in extraordinary numbers (Priuses are ubiquitous here) and programs meant to increase renewable energy generation have made this the leading state for rooftop photovoltaic installations. The best part of this progress is how visible it is.

unintended irony, parking meter edition

It's great to see how seriously California and its cities are working to increase the state's sustainably generated electricity capacity, and to establish an infrastructure for charging electric cars. But you still see stuff like this: p/v-equipped parking meters with their panels pointed east (huh?), shading each other. Oy.

more wall panels

The insulated steel wall panels are going up at the garage and the front porch, and by the end of next week we should have most of the wall panels in place. We'll write about the installation process (and sing the praises of our installers) later. Right now, we wanted to share some photographs of the panels in different light conditions, to show how the color and texture change with the weather and time of day...

wall panels, continued

The erection crew put up the first two wall panels this afternoon, in between solving one problem (the screws provided were too short) and running into another (the third panel would line up in a spot with no supporting girts or other structure). Nonetheless, the installed panels give us a good idea of how the exterior is going to come together. The silver finish (seen here with Holly peeling back the protective plastic wrap) is really beautiful. Because it reflects so much of the ambient light around it, the silver finish appears to change color as the viewer moves. It also changes as the light fluctuates between direct sunlight and the indirect light of an overcast sky.

wall panels

For the last few days, our steel erectors have been preparing to install the insulated steel wall panels. At 3" thick, these panels are thinner than the roof panels, but still have an insulating value of at least R-24. Like the roof panels, they are held in place with clips designed to avoid breaking the thermal barrier, and they use two kinds of sealant (gooey stuff from a tube and self-adhesive strips) to maintain a continuous moisture barrier.

Preparing the panels and the frame is taking some time and care...

day job, unexpected honor edition

I just heard this morning that the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the Journal of Architectural Education awarded my article, "Misprision of Precedent: Design as Creative Misreading" the 2011-2012 Journal of Architectural Education, Best Scholarship of Design Article Award. This is a huge honor, and I feel very, very fortunate.

I owe a great debt of thanks to Holly, who first suggested the idea for the article, and our friends, Tony DeLeon and Nate Zelnick, who read drafts and encouraged me to send it in.

solar decathlon

FIU just produced a video of the university's entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the US Department of Energy. The FIU project was terrific in a lot of ways, especially in the way it incorporated passive solar shading and hurricane protection elegantly. The project was designed by an interdisciplinary team of students, led by my architecture department colleague, Marilys Nepomechie and including Eric Peterson (who helped assemble the project in both Miami and Washington) and Brett Moss.

The accompanying news article is online.

audience

Last night, tin box recorded its 15,000th page view. The blog started as a way to keep friends and family up to date on our progress, and so social media sites (like Facebook) and email servers remain the major sources of traffic for the blog since its inception. However, two-thirds of our visitors now come via Google and other search engines. This is probably a good thing, since it means a broader audience has access to the record of our experiences. We're happy to help make design and sustainability more accessible to a larger audience.

day job, peer-reviewed edition

By sheer coincidence, two scholarly articles of mine are appearing in print at the same time. One is excerpted from a chapter on Italian fascist-era urban design in my forthcoming book, and is published in the January issue of Planning Perspectives. The other is an essay on urban design in Italy's East African colonies, which came out in the December issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. It's a real honor to print work in two journals I respect profoundly.

Above, an image of the Esposizione Universale di Roma from the exhibition "Metropole/Colony," which I'm curating with Jon Mogul of the Wolfsonian. It will open in the Wolfsonian's teaching gallery at the Frost Museum on FIU's main campus next month.

roof panels complete

Late this afternoon, the steel erector installed the last of the insulated roof panels. There's still a lot of work to do on the roofs, including trim, gutters and photovoltaic panels, but it's really nice to see all the panels in place.

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...

walls

Social sustainability hinges on the ability to foster community, which, in the built environment, emerges from public spaces - streets, squares, parks - that engage, excite and reward the people who use them.

One of the best developments in Miami in recent years has been the explosion of large-scale graffiti in the Wynwood district north of downtown. These murals transform neglected streets into vibrant public space.

roof, again

An addendum to our earlier post about the upper roof. The first photo shows the upper roof with its b-deck sheathing, while the lower image shows the insulated roof panels installed. One difference is reflectivity; the galvanized b-deck is almost mirror-like, and reflects light much more brilliantly. In fact, it casts the kind of harsh glare that caused the Miami Marlins to revise the finish on their new stadium in Little Havana (see below). The duller finish of the galvalume paint on the roof panels, however, moderates the amount of sunlight reflected into our neighbors' houses, which is a good thing.

The other difference has to do with grain and pattern. The wider spacing of the standing seams in the roof panels makes the roof - and the house as a whole - seem less broad than it did when the roof was covered with just b-decking.

We're curious to see how the roof changes when we install the photovoltaic panels. In the meantime, bonus photos of Miami's biggest tin box, the new Marlins stadium:

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:

lumber

We've designed the house to avoid using softwood lumber as much as possible. This is the kind of wood that's typically used for framing (as 2x4s and 2x6s) or furring (the thin pieces of wood used to attach gypsum drywall to concrete block walls) in conventional construction. The two major problems with using softwood lumber in Miami are termites and mold.

However, it turns out we need to use a few 2x4s in the house...

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: