Modern Sustainable Addition
We strongly believe in two things: Sustainable Architecture looks different because it performs differently. Modern living is about how people ACTUALLY live and Architecture can be a mirror and a catalyst for it.
This inside/outside space pierces a blank wall a few blocks from Barack Obama's home. Thermal mass for night cooling and heating, light shelf for natural daylighting and operable windows for natural ventilation.
Victorian II
The desire to have a dinner party for more than 10 guests all the while being able to connect to the guests from kitchen inspired this gut rehab with new colors and materials, the addition and a re-skinning of an asbestos-clad, balloon frame with stained cedar siding.
Victorian I
Reskin, new colors and materials, addition and renewal of balloon frame
Creating an Open Plan and a New Lifestyle
We grew up in these split level houses and today's lifestyles ask that the open dining and living room plan be expanded to include the kitchen. How is this done?
I think Architecture is all about lifestyles and effects. In fact, if I were to name a firm today, that's what I would call it. These older split levels have a separate kitchen. Today's lifestyles bring the cook and the cooking into the Great Room.
Barca Chairs
We took the profile of a Barcelona Chair and lofted it into
a flexible seating arrangement. It is a riff meant to evoke the classic chair
while at the same time being a meditation on the relationship between
Architecture and Furniture. Is furniture merely architecture at a small scale
or it is something else entirely?
Cafe Millwork and Menu
We realized quickly that our client was a good fit as he hired GRIP design to create his logo. We ran with it.
Messy Mies + MASSIVE middle
The terms of engagement used to frame this exhibition deal with a duality of Mies’s work and life: in effect and scale.
Messiness looks to the different effects achieved by Mies’s architecture, namely those ambiguous conditions enabled by his control of details, finishes, scales and structures.
The idea that Mies solved problems of building construction or social consideration does not adequately address the different affectual problems created by his architecture. In this way, an ambiguity in effect is motivated by his interest in the ways to achieve it through his “one less thing” methodology of construction and detail.
“Massive” denotes the scalar changes in his projects, as well as the different ways he would alter his methods to achieve similar effects in different sizes. The other idea behind “Massive Middle” is the amount of time and place within the center of Mies’s life where the Brussels Pavilion was lost, from 1934 until 1966.
Messy Mies + Massive Middle does not try to create a goal-driven Miesian project of rational solutions to modern problems. Instead it accepts the inherent complexities behind his work, life, and ideas, contending that Mies’s genealogy is not a static cheat sheet to copy, but a fluid and open-ended project to misread and create.
16th Church of Christ Reading Room
This was a design for the addition of a reading room to the 16th Church of Christ.
200k sf Modern, Naturally Ventilated Office Bldg
We worked on this project at the last firm we worked for previous to beginning make Architecture. Our involvement began with the pre-design discussion and developed into programming with diagrams and pink foam massing models and then schematic and design development and then into construction documents.
Design Process
The Design Process separates us from many of our peers. We can draw and think on a sheet of blank paper. Creativity requires stripping away that which doesn't matter and narrowing in on the essential. Graeme Ogg and I worked on this extension. The last of the series was displayed at the 2D3D show at Woodbury University in 2011 in Los Angeles.