September 29th, 2008, No Comments »
In several recent talks, I’ve opened with a story about the De Witt sketch. It’s a depiction, in 1596, of the stage of London’s Swan Theatre. It is, for all intents and purposes, the only image that theatre historians have that shows the interior of an Elizabethan theatre. It’s the best picture we have of the stages that Shakespeare acted upon and for which he wrote.
The man who drew the sketch was Johannes De Witt, a Dutch visitor to London who recorded his observations in his journals. In fact, De Witt’s original sketch is lost. The ‘De Witt’ sketch is actually a copy by fellow Dutchman, Arendt van Buchell.
Then I show photos of the Globe Theatre (here’s a big panorama of the interior), a present-day replica that sits on the Thames river, very close to its original location. For theatre and history buffs it’s a real pleasure to stand inside this space, which is reknowned for its historical accuracy. In fact, if theatre historians discover new information about the Globe, they modify the building to match .
Then in my talk I jump to images of the New Globe Theatre in Second Life. It’s a model of a proposed actual theatre on Governor’s Island in New York. It doesn’t look much like the original or the replica, but I like the connection of the past to the future, and of the actual to the virtual. I then make some connections to De Witt’s sketch as user-generated content, his journal as a blog and Arendt’s copy as a copyright violation. And things roll on from there.
That’s a long-winded introduction to say that somebody recently emailed me with a link to an actual, apparently accurate replica of the Globe Theatre. This appears to be a sort of showcase piece for a Second Life architect named Ina Centaur. It’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, and will make for a smoother metaphor in future talks.
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July 3rd, 2008, 8 Comments »
This is a third in a series of posts about the process of building a house on Pender Island. If you’re just joining us, you may want to read the first and second entries before this one.
We recently got a series of sketches from John, our architect. These were the first drawings he’d done–really just starting points to foster further discussion and narrow our options. In theory, John has parsed and processed our site visit, conversations, questionnaire answers and his observations, and distilled it into an approximation of the house we might like.
John presented the sketches without a lot of interpretation or recommendations. He explained how they worked, and the general ideas, but left them with us to mull over. I appreciated this–it enabled me to turn my largely uninformed eye to them without a lot of preconceptions.
To begin, John proposed that we put a single-car garage (we really hope to stay a one-car family) a good distance–60 or 70 feet away from the main house. The two buildings would be connected by a walkway, built with a retaining wall into a slope of the land.
This appeals to me at some fundamental level. Our property is on Hoosen Road, a typical rural BC road. It’s densely lined with tall cedars, and the walls of green are only occasionally interrupted by narrow driveways. Our driveway is one of these. Turning into it, the trees close in as you mosey another eighty or a hundred yards to the proposed site of the garage. With this layout, you’d have a final green-walled leg to your journey as you walked up to the house.
In terms of the main house, our architect provided three options to work with–two narrow, two-floor designs and a squarer, three-floor floor plan. We immediately rejected the three-floor option. We want big, airy rooms, and splitting our limited square footage between three floors seemed counter-intuitive. Plus, our house in Malta had five floors (though it probably wasn’t 1500 square feet). Vertical distance feels different from horizontal distance, and I see no need for more than the minimum number of stairs. This is also a minor consideration for resale. We’d likely be selling to an older couple, and they’d probably want fewer stairs.
The ground plans that follow are from the two-floor design we prefer. We’ve got changes in mind, certainly, but our architect has done a great job of capturing and responding to our requirements.
Some notes on aspects of the design that appeal:
- The pathway ends with a kind of tunnel that runs through the house to a terrace or deck on the far side. This invites visitors to meander through to check out our view before they even enter the house. This extends the gradations of public and private space that begins back on Hoosen Road. You’re on our property, ‘in’ our house, but not inside yet.
- Whether joined by a roof or not, the office section has the feel of separate building. I’ve never needed to ’shut the door on work’, but I do like the sense of a house composed of more than one ‘pod’ or structure.
- Separate office spaces for Julie and I, stacked on top of one another. We have different lighting requirements for our work spaces (I want a cave, she doesn’t), and this solution satisfies those nicely. We could probably put a hole in the floor of some kind so that we could talk to each other without the phone or one of us moving.
- A big, fluid kitchen, dining room and living room space and only one eating area. We both grew up in big houses where the dining room was, at best, used once a week. None of our houses since then have had breakfast nooks or other secondary eating locations, and we’ve never missed them. We really don’t want unused space in our home.
- An indoor/outdoor fireplace. In temperate BC, this might extend the sitting-on-the-deck season a bit.
Next Tuesday, we’re going back the our property with our architect to have a look at it again. We plan to roughly figure out where the house would sit, and Julie and I will provide feedback on these initial ideas. Then, ominously, we talk about what we can and cannot afford.
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June 22nd, 2007, 6 Comments »
Via this Wired promotion, I visited LivingHomes.net. They make great looking pre-fab, eco-friendly homes. I was immediately impressed by how they’d built their site. It’s totally Flashy Flash and the Flash bunch, but it’s artfully done and reasonably easy to navigate.
When you first visit the home page, you’re presented with a wonderful time-lapse video of light passing through a living room. It’s a subtle and brilliant approach, and a really pure expression of what architecture and interior design are all about. I was immediately reminded of a lovely time-lapse film of the Waterfall Building that entranced me as part of the Arthur Erickson exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The tour is narrated by Steve Glenn, the company owner. He takes you on a friendly tour of his own home, pointing out the home’s features, but also cracking little jokes and pointing out the Lego he still has from his childhood. There are also plenty of visual cues to click and navigate through the tour.
It helps that the product itself–the homes–are gorgeous, but I was really impressed by the elegant, functional site design.
Their pricing is pretty steep, but I guess that’s what it costs to build a reasonably guilt-free home. Like so many of these cool, modern, prefab home companies, they’re based in the States. The duty to ship a house across the border makes it financially impractical, but we already know a local architect who does a lot of this style of work with prefab elements.
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