Let the Frames Begin

Framing started late last week and by today they had mostly completed the floor framing for the guest pod and a good chunk of the main pod. I started a new photo album in the sidebar and will add images as it goes up.  There are lots of joist direction changes dictated by the structural engineer to handle the various sheer forces of the bridge structure, canopies, etc.

Design ideas come when you least expect it. You may have noticed in the topmost image in this post that there is a large rectangular opening to the left of Myron where our front door will be.  I was at the new Denver Art Museum in 2006 and they had used a lot of those municipal cast iron tree grates outside to protect the trees. I decided I wanted to use one of them in an interior space and logged that away in my brain and forgot about it.  Then last March I was staying with my friends Lisa and Peter in Scottsdale, AZ and found new inspiration. They have this amazing contemporary house and at their entrance they have a beautiful glass tile in concrete entrance pad and I decided it would be great to have something similar in our house and I went off on this tangent of trying to figure out how to backlight the glass tiles from below in the basement.  That got way too complicated and  then the tree grate idea reemerged and I decided that we could have a tree grate entrance pad and commission an artist to make a "cornerstone" of sorts to fill the circle where the tree would normally go.  While taking a class at Penland this past fall I worked with one of our instructors, Pablo Soto , to make a test glass casting.

We will see what moves us over the course of construction to fill the "hole in the house."  We plan to use another tree grate (round this time) in the living room beneath the Rais wood stove.  The stove will be on a turntable to allow us to direct the heat toward the living room or the dining room.

I guess I have rambled on long enough for today.  I will leave you with the quote of the day:

Let us be clear about this, the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country's history were intimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bringing them back to life; it is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye without realizing how empty form is without the life that once supported it. There is no such thing as a modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor house. If one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is a fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be. The great lesson of history - and this applies to all art - is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit.. Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunity of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit.

                                                                                                           Lewis Mumford

Comments

[Barbara]

You have to be there to experience the heights! The views are truly breathtaking from the gallery and bedroom areas. I loved climbing up the scaffolding even if it was cold.

[Perry Cox]

I don't know much at all about Lewis Mumford, but this quote kind of rubs me wrong. I may be misunderstanding this quote, but it sounds like he is slamming anyone who ever tried to conjure up images of an earier time or style, labeling his work as 'fake'. To me this is a denial of the significant reality of historic precedence in almost everything we do as designers.