Last December, Katherine Grove of William McDonough + Partners and Richard Maimon, of Kieran Timberlake, shared the stage at Ecobuild in Washington, DC. They were invited to discuss their work at the Make It Right project in New Orleans, where Cradle to Cradle provides a framework for the design of the community and of individual homes by several firms.

Make It Right is a pro bono effort to rebuild a community of safe and healthy homes. The emphasis is on affordability, high-quality, design, and sustainable construction. To date, 80 LEED Platinum homes have been built making the neighborhood a living laboratory of construction and material processes. Grove’s and Maimon’s presentations focused on the collaborative approach of the Make It Right interdisciplinary team, which has achieved remarkable effectiveness and efficiencies. They lowered the cost of building eco-friendly homes by managing the economics of the home designs, the costs of materials and labor, the education of staff and labor on site, contractor profit margins, insurance, legal and governmental fees, staff education, and the speed of construction.

Grove gave an overview of the Make It Right project and talked about how Cradle to Cradle was applied here: specifically with respect to materials assessment, target diagrams, and key performance goals for homes. Maimon presented an in-depth analysis of the Kieran Timberlake prototype house, including a look at how the design has evolved over multiple construction iterations, continually improving its effectiveness with regard to affordability, materials, and other factors. Grove followed this with a look at some lessons learned and initiatives under way, which include multiple modes of construction, workforce training, cross-training of builders, and more. After their presentation, I talked with them about the goals, lessons, and promise of Make It Right. Read more…

Several weeks ago the residents of Tingo built what is known locally as a chosa, a circular straw house of a type native to the high sierra, where long, resilient paramo grass grows abundantly. This particular chosa — framed in wood and tied with hand woven, straw rope —is enormous by local standards. While such vernacular architecture tends to be used in the service of tool sheds or detached kitchens, the Tingo building is intended as a community kitchen and dining hall. Its centerpiece, both in the sense of engineering and aesthetic drama, is a massive wooden pole, cut from a magnificent pine, harvested in the next town over. To bring it back to the village, 14 people labored for seven hours, using rope and muscle to drag the tree uphill to the closest road. Read more…

Deep in suburban southern California, the future of architecture has already arrived. This future is not just about more complex forms and compound geometries. It is not simply about software but how to make what is generated with software a reality. It is about processes, ways of working, and materials. It is also about more control for the architect. This is what Guy Martin had in mind when he started his own firm.

Guy Martin Design is quite possibly the most famous firm you have never heard of. He’s the guy who figures out how to make some of Philippe Starck’s more complicated creations, translating the digital into the physical.

He works behind the scenes in a non-descript warehouse with no windows. Thankfully, he has a huge ventilation system. He spends most of his time here with Marie, his robot accomplice. He’s moved up in the world. He used to operate out of a shipping container (also without windows) in the parking lot of SCI-ARC—until he graduated and was asked to leave and take his container with him.

Photo courtesy Guy Martin

Guy Horton: What was your motivation for starting a design firm based on robot technology and in-house fabrication? You were trained in architecture. Didn’t you hear that architects are supposed to draw stuff?

Guy Martin: Yeah I did not get that memo. In fact I find a lot of richness and potential in being very close to the means of production and the materials. It is a dialogue that the profession has shied away from. There was a time when a sociological need was met by distancing the profession from these two issues, but I believe that this no longer serves the profession. With these technologies and methods we can remove that barrier and regain some of the control and craft that the architect used to have when he was master mason. It is an emphasis on demonstrating concepts and having to wrestle with the resistance materials and methods expose to us in the process. Removed from having a hand in the craft and being somatically distant from the materials and methods we are not witness to the expressive potential inherent in these steps of design. I am more interested in working at reintegrating these concepts back into the architectural process. There is also the desire to push the automation of building so that the built work can economically allow for material expressiveness. Then there is also the concern of re-integrating more craft into building through digital means.

Read more…

A conversation between an architect and his client, first in their youth and later in old age, sets up Carl Stein’s argument for Greening Modernism, a book just released by W. W. Norton.  While drinking wine and playing chess, the young client says to the architect, “We may not have a lot of money but we know how to live well.” Later, when both men have grown successful in wealth and circumstances, they sit and drink wine at the same table, again. This time the client says, “We may have a lot of money, but we [still] know how to live well.” Stein believes in a quality of life — and architecture — that’s dependent on a thoughtful, frugal consumption of natural resources.

He also believes that the quality of architecture was lost when Modernism got de-railed and forgot its original philosophy. Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier, he writes, would be “appalled at the notion that their work was connected by style rather than philosophy.” Modernism, after all, originally revolved around such ideas a Corbusier’s claim that a house should be a machine for living in — like an airplane, free of extraneous materials or parts. Stein believes that if Modernism had stayed with its philosophical tenets through the years, it would have landed firmly in sustainable, ecologically-aware design. Read more…

The curtain-wall is perhaps the defining innovation of twentieth century architecture. Since the heyday of high modernism, a search for new building forms has usually meant grappling with a glass and steel grid. But as the demands on architecture have changed, in terms of energy performance and sustainable materials, we’ve had to completely rethink the role of a building’s skin.  Earlier this year, the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued an open call for innovative designs of curtain-wall systems. Six of the entries they received were selected to form the “Innovate” section of the exhibition Innovate: Integrate at New York’s Center for Architecture (CFA.) Read more…

Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read her previous posts.

Most of the public-space projects I’ve blogged about involve encouraging developments for all residents of New York, but the urbanSHED competition should be particularly exciting to architects. Prior to now, I didn’t even know what a sidewalk shed was by name, though I am plenty familiar with the plywood-and-steel-tube hoods that so often frame stretches of my walk. At best they are an invisible part of the city’s noisy background; at worst, an eyesore. I was certainly happy to hear the city was soliciting a redesign (note: the competition is not restricted to locals), but it wasn’t until I listened to buildings commissioner Robert LiMandri talk at the Center for Architecture last week that I truly got inspired. Not only will his department produce construction documents for the new standard, but the winning design will definitely be built at the end of the process. The city wants something that delivers more natural light to the sidewalk below, is safer, and, of course, looks better than the current shed. There are 689 miles of this stuff in New York—just imagine what a difference a more beautiful version of it will make. Read more…

All summer long, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture have been blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Next Monday we will post the final installment of the Building Project blog. Click here to read the entire series thus far—and, as always, leave your thoughts in the comments form below.

Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

Wow, the house looks great—what a lot can change in four weeks!

My reaction when I visited the Yale Vlock Building Project site early this week was one of surprise and enthusiasm. I am not a member of the crew working to finish the house over the summer, and have been away from the project since the end of June. I was impressed with what my industrious and exhausted classmates have been able to accomplish in the last month: siding, flooring, plywood sheathing, and dozens of details. One team designed and built custom cabinetry with the help of Breakfast Woodworks; it was ready and waiting to be installed when I visited. “Jimmy”—barely a rough concept when I left—has emerged in the fine points of the design: plywood sheathing details and the hotly debated choice of a bright red color for the exterior porch spaces. Read more…

Every Monday until mid-August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

The siding saga has finally come to a close. Perhaps more momentous than nailing in the final ridge pieces on the front of the house was taking down the scaffolding, revealing the fruits of our labor. This was the first time we were able to stand back and view the entire house with the siding in place, taking in the sea of Plateau Grey. With the few remaining patches of Tyvek covered over, few of us will miss the paint-crusted rollers, the sawdust of the chop saw, or the balancing act on the scaffolding. Like it or not, the so-called siding blitz is over.

With this mammoth task behind us and the interior entirely painted, the beginning of this week brought a new flavor to our workday: specialization. Read more…

Every Monday until mid-August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

The crew mounts scaffolding to paint the interior of the owner unit. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

The issue of affordability has been a subject of discussion since the very first day that our class met with our program director, Adam, back in February. We had all gathered in the basement of the architecture building for our weekly meetings, during which we were introduced to the history, clients, schedule, process, and constraints of the annual Yale Vlock Building Project. Adam raised a question on an issue that many of us were not anticipating to be open for debate: he asked if we were interested in pursuing donations for the house or if we would rather work within the budget we were originally given. If I recall correctly, choosing to stay within budget would result in the use of cheap carpet (gasp) and standard vinyl siding (which, come to think of it, after three weeks of custom cedar siding, sounds amazing!) Naturally, as with the years before us, we thought that the former route would be beneficial to both the process and the outcome. And so, with 49 classmates alongside me (this was possibly the closest thing we’ve had to a class-wide consensus since my classmate Matt was offered free bagels for the site), we agreed to pursue donations as a substantial source of funding for the house.

Fast-forward to July 27. Read more…

Every Monday until mid-August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

The presence of “Jimmy” is noted through the changing board sizes. The denser the boards, the closer you are to Jimmy (cue suspenseful music). Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

As week 13 of the Yale Vlock Building Project draws to a close, many of us are finally feeling the effects of the long 40-hour weeks. And rightfully so, for the last few weeks have been anything but slow. We left last week with a certain sense of accomplishment; we had finished painting the exterior siding, begun installing the birch-plywood ceilings, selected our interior paint color, and cleaned up the interior window trim. The roof was finally complete and the drywall was ready for a fresh coat of paint. All the rapid-fire installation and site work, made possible through our use of prefabricated components—the subject of several previous blog entries—seemed to live up to its promise. That said, none of us was prepared for the task at hand, or the trade-off for using so many standardized elements in the early phases: the tremendously arduous art of fine needlework, known to many of us as the exterior cladding. Read more…