Honored to be featured in @dwellmagazine recognizing my advancing age. Hopefully they don’t know something about @alexandrafuller and
my marriage that we don’t.
We are honored to be an @architizer A+ Award top 5 finalist in the small house category for our project @theperiphery.co . Incredible to be recognized alongside some of our most admired peers. The winner is chosen by popular vote!
The small team of Boulder craftsman deserve the credit here - Mike Ryan, Nick Vincent, Evan Mabry, Tylor Robison and Keaton Feiler most notably. With a special shout out to @manda_greenhalgh and Loa Builders and the Wayne County crews. Head over to the link in our bio or at /yc3fxnu7 to vote.
Often I think we architects and designers default to a deck or other extension of a dwelling to provide a place to be outside. To connect with the land in which we dwell. And i include them, celebrate them, use them. But I find some separation from the dwelling itself is desirable, necessary, for another kind of space. In this case 23 steps from the door down sculpted concrete plinths leads you to this small triangle of concrete floating over water. Two supremely comfortable chairs, sitting low, provide solace and intimacy with the water, the dragonflies, birds and cattails, that provide an emotional and spiritually experience the deck cannot. The scale only allows two people. It’s not a gathering place. It’s a place for listening, not talking. And for diving in the wild and cold, clear water below, at times.
Decks and railings. After at least 20 personal deck design / builds and working on perhaps 50
Others as a member of a project team, I’ve reached a rare milestone in the design of houses in the west - a specific approach that is close to ideal. Concrete surface, a minimal but proven 1/3” steel flat bar site welded assembly and specific cable assemblies at very high tension that last. I’ve tried composites of all kinds, Ipe, cumaru, redwood, fixed and floating attachments, exposed, hidden, open, closed and every kind of drain, oils, poly, no finish and wood just will not last without pretty significant maintenance in high and dry sunny climates. Plastic is plastic and composites get hot on bare feet, expand and contract a ton. Concrete poured think with lots of steel and special countertop style mixes, Don’t slip, don’t fail, don’t rot and don’t need anything. They are challenging to slope, to install and to finish. And yes they are heavy. Note the pour integrated steel drip and water edge and highly finished exposed edge. This is the way.
Glass. As a material I used to think of it as a necessary evil, necessary for the magic of transparency in dwellings, for its absence. For bringing in light and erasing boundaries. I’ve come to learn that glass is a lot deeper than that. A reflector, a mirror, a dimensional multiplier. It’s magical and I needed experience to learn to leverage it. To understand it. And modern European triple IGU’s and high performance profiles have changed the energy calculus immensely. It’s often cheaper to build a wall out of high performance windows than building a clad insulated assembly. But glass still demands a deep and often counterintuitive awareness in terms of its emotional and visual tonality.
Of the land, not on the land @theperiphery.co . This dwelling was exhaustively designed to settle amidst five very old juniper trees and sits almost entirely on steep exposed rock.
