penny cloud finished

A reader came across my post on the penny clouds and asked for finished pictures. Here they are! I love the penny clouds, particularly the one on the floor in the shower. I wish I had a chance to design another one of these: once you start, the possibilities are endless.

Master Bath with penny cloud at upper right and on floor at left

We used the basic penny tile family from a Chicago tile showroom. We had to use colors from one tile family because different pennies are different dimensions and heights. Penny tile is an inexpensive way to get a tile with some color variation in the glaze. Color variation can be an expensive feature as you get into larger tile because it is usually glazed by hand. We used blue, white, and bronze tiles to achieve this penny cloud.

the wall cloud

the floor cloud

The tub is a basic 5 foot jacuzzi tub with a custom Caesarstone surround. This is a tiny master bath--but it feels spacious and peaceful inside the wet room. One of the things I love about the way the Caesarstone is finished is the tiny lip at the edges of the counters which keep water from dripping off the edge. This quartz material has a matte finish which is easy to maintain and very lovely.

tomato farm next summer

Here is our new white roof. Yup, we'll need sunglasses up there! But I think things that like heat will grow like gangbusters. We'll have to see what the roof can handle. After nine months with a leaky roof, it is such a good feeling to see this new one go on.

the roof

One of the many reasons that we hired Wilkinson Blender Architects is their inclination to do roof gardens wherever possible. Our house had a pull down stair that accessed the roof, but not much going on up there. There was once an outdoor shower, and the architect envisioned much more. In this drawing from 1957 you can see the angled 'dog house' as a triangular wedge. It held the ceiling height for the stair going up, and then there was some kind shelter when the house was complete (you can see that in the image in the banner on this blog).

We are making the stair a permanent stair and adding a little bit of a room and deck up there. The intention stated for permit is access and storage for roof maintenance (our air conditioners will be up there) but we are squeezing in a little more function: a small place to work for Reed and a small deck to sit on. Over the course of a couple very rainy weeks, the carpenters have created the opening and built the shelter. From the inside, I had not anticipated that it would act like a new skylight.

This wall will be all bookshelves, as high and as wide as we can reach. The stair will be a 'secret' stair. You won't see when you look at it from a right angle but it will appear when you turn to head upwards. I can't find any of the renderings the architects sent, but here is the inspiration image that they passed on.

Here's a shot of the interior of the penthouse, with Greg, our architect/GC checking out the view from Reed's desk.

 

And here is a view from the across the street. Here is the old doghouse for comparison:

The new roof is going on this week. It will be white material, as opposed to the black composition material that is on there now. It did occur to us that we will need sunglasses on a bright day up there. Maybe we will eventually cover it up with photovoltaic panels! or sedum trays! we'll see what the roof can hold and what the budget and climate will allow once we are all moved in.

Gutnayer and FLW, continued.

You'll see in an earlier post that within a year of Gutnayer's arrival in the US he made a pilgrimage to meet Frank Lloyd Wright. I am slowly getting to know FLW's work, and am seeing more and more connections between what the Gute began doing in his residential practice in the 50s and what FLW had established in his practice in the 40s. As is pointed out on Wikipedia about FLW, a lot of the innovations laid out in the Usonian houses and Wright's ideas about suburban homes were picked up by developers and architects in the 1950s. PrairieMod posted a link to this Illinois farmhouse by FLW, and I was struck by the eave:

from prairiemod via dailyherald.com

because of the similarity of the later eave design by the Gute:

on this house in Lincolnwood ( JMG drawing above and my photograph below)

or this house in Highland Park

I had not really realized how much Gutnayer might have been influenced by the Usonian houses. Many of the Usonian houses were laid out on a regular module. Gutnayer has one built project here in Chicago that is designed on a strict grid and built: I am going to go down and take a look and actually knock on the door, which I have not really done yet with his residences.

Interestingly, there is one site plan (in the materials that went to the Art Institute) for a development in Westchester County by Gutnayer and his brother in the early 50s. Gutnayer's brother was also an architect and practiced in New York City. I am interested in researching this a bit because of the proximity to Pleasantville, NY location of the Usonia homes. Not to mention all the significant modern architecture in Westchester County. Oh, if I only knew or cared about any of this while my grandparents were alive and we were in Westchester on a regular basis!

structural corrections

temporary posts in the area where rot was found

you can see the two new columns inside the windows directly above the concrete columns

and the busted up sill

The sill of the front window was broken and sagging inward when we bought the house, which was attributed possibly to freeze and thaw cycles over time or poor load distribution around the window. When the carpenters got into the wall around the window, there were some odd choices made about how to carry the loads downward, but the real problem were some rotted members below the window on the underside of the second floor. The window had very little holding it up and a lot pressing down on it. The carpenters are now shoring things up inside. The steel header over the window is now being supported by (among other things) two temporary steel posts that run down to the concrete columns on the first floor. The original solution was aluminum columns under the steel header that ran down to wood, which then rotted out.

original aluminum column on right going down to wood
new temp steel going down to concrete column on left.

The architects asked the carpenters to try to use the temporary columns to lift the weight off the window and sure enough, they got an inch of vertical space back for the facade. They said that the first 3/4 inch was actually pretty easy, and you could hear the house sighing with relief when the weight was lifted off the window and the wall.

peeling away

The carpet has come off the circular stair to reveal these worn treads on the original wood.

 The circular stair with its plywood veneer siding removed.

In the rear you can see the space where the bookshelf was removed  and a temporary column to take weight off the window wall, which had an 'experimental' construction method that needs shoring up and re-thinking before the new windows can go in.

The Master Bedroom with the funky stair in front removed.

The current plan is for this room to have translucent sliding doors along the whole opening.to allow light to enter the living room and to keep some of this openness while giving the bedroom some privacy.

Plans

So for those of you for whom plans are hard to read, I apologize in advance. These are really hard to read, being photocopies of original plans that are now tiny and pixelated. But, in the interest of explaining my demolition photographs, I think I better give a brief sense of the layout of the house. Since we are fortunate to have both Gutnayer's original design drawings and a quick set of as built drawings, I will show both.

 

original design, main floor J. M. Gutnayer, 1957

To orient you briefly: the bottom of the drawing is the front of the house: the little dots and dashes along the horizontal line represent the window mullions of the ribbon window. The circular stair is how you enter the house from the ground floor. The beds and baths are on the right side of the drawing, with the kitchen/living and dining on the left side. The elements highlighted in blue are the things that changed when the house was built. The only major change was the orientation and scale of the fireplace. His design oriented the fireplace towards the dining room and had a smaller footprint than what was built. Also, he designed a 'skydome' over the circular stair that was not installed.

 

as built plan, main floor, J.M. Gutnayer, 1958

Here you can see the different shape of the fireplace, and also the different orientation of the exterior stair. It was originally drawn to head back to the rear of the house, but was built to move to the front by the garage.  The elements in red are the elements we are removing from the house, the elements in blue are being added. We are removing the stair on the north side of the house (the left side of this drawing) and replacing it with a stair down to the backyard from the lanai. The bookshelf and maid's room walls that interrupted the continuous ribbon window from the inside are being removed to create a very open main room. 

 

from inside maid's room.

 

from the family room, seeing the continuous window.

What will go in the space in front the window? We expect it will be very sparsely furnished, if at all. This floor area is designated un-programmed, lying in the sun, reading the paper, doing a project space.

What about our house?

We are awaiting approval of our permit, probably this week. We have been working on design with our architects and are hammering out a few details. I will post design sketches once I get their approval. We are really, really excited. I have two searches going on on Ebay: one for kinetic sculpture, which our house will really need, and one for a mid-century chandelier, to replace the crazy one that Gutnayer placed in the dining room. We are thinking about giving some of the furniture that we purchased with the house re-upholstering and cleaning. We discovered that the triangle table, at work in this post, is a Widdicomb (a well known midwestern furniture company) table designed by George Nakashima, who is a University of Washington Architecture graduate. It's not really a small world, it just feels like one.

Why I care

I've been thinking a lot about why, with this move and this legacy, I am now so interested in the architecture around me. Getting pulled in by one architect's projects has gotten me in much more deeply than anywhere else I have ever lived. Seattle and Berkeley, my two former homes, had lots of interesting houses and architects to see, but I never really connected deeply to the architectural traditions of the two places. I knew about Maybeck, Morgan, Ratcliff and Greene & Greene (in Berkeley) because of houses we drove by every day, but I knew little about the modern architects of the 50s. There are some great brutalist concrete buildings in Berkeley, including the University Art Museum, which is seismically unsound now and may not be with us forever. I love that building as a work of art itself. I never sought out the architect's name until recently.

The Puget Sound has a rich tradition of modernism, and a friend of mine is making a film about a number of the significant modernists.  I never drove around looking for their houses, or sought out names of architects and landscape designers, or looked at mid-century office buildings with interest.

I do think there is something about this part of the world: I am looking for books now on development in the 40s and 50s on the North Shore so I can learn more about the builders that worked up here. There is some good stuff to see! At the same time, I will be looking at buildings in my other cities with a lot more scrutiny than I used to. There is so much to learn and document.

I think this story is also part of the reason we extended ourselves and bought the house we are remodeling:

In the late 60s my parents lived in La Jolla, CA in one of the houses in the Triad, a Case Study project by Killingsworth. There are pictures of us as kids running around in dressup in the glass hallways. Drawings of this Triad that are in my favorite architectural drawing book (after Frank's, of course) and learned the houses and their wonderful layout from the plans. When we were down there looking at colleges we drove by the house and saw that it has been ruined: the glass atriums had been roofed over, the house had had a dreadful eave added, and as my mom said, the house was included in a show as an example of what NOT to do with a modern house.  Imagine a bit of a carbon copy of house C instead of what is there...

Here are some pics from  my partner-in-research, Google Maps:

 We lived in House B, on the left with the new added ugly eaves.

My parents' friends Mariane and Stuart lived in House C, on the right. 

Contrary to what it says on the modern san diego site linked above, the houses were designed as a triad that related to each other, and the two that shared this drive really worked that way. My parents tell stories of dinner parties night after night where they would carry the dining room table back and forth between the two houses. My mom said that M&S, who are still close with my parents, were the best neighbors ever!

 

Here is the other house across the street in the Triad, House A.

I totally remember the defeated feeling we all felt, sitting in front of that house on a sunny day in 1985. Pictures and stories of living in the glass house were a major part of our childhood, and we all wanted to see it like it was then. I like to think that that feeling has been sitting inside me, gestating. Being re-introduced to these houses (through teaching and the show at LACMA in the early 00s?) nurtured the sense I have now of wanting to learn about and preserve this architecture.

Ooof, gotta go feed the hungry kids. More soon.

The Things

by Donald Hall January 4, 2010

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

---------------------------

Reed read this poem in the New Yorker and sent it to me. I spent part of this morning preparing the studio for the arrival of Bill Hasbrouck, who will appraise Gutnayer's papers and things before they go on to their new homes. I found a stash of family photos from Poland that I had not seen before, and pieced together Gutnayer's father, mother, brothers. In a desk drawer we found a beautiful series of albums of Alice Gutnayer's father and family: he was a musician who worked with regional orchestras in Europe, and after emigrating here, in the Midwest. Her loving albums of his life and career are quite rich: there appear to be photos of their trip across the Atlantic, and photos of interesting musicians and artists in Europe that I wish I could identify. As I look at these photos and think about what the 30s and 40s were like for Jews in Europe, I am amazed at their persistent creativity. How vastly different our cultural landscape would be if they had not found haven in America and settled here.

So I have been thinking a lot about the fireplace wall and did a few quick photoshop perspectives to represent some of my thoughts. Apologies for the low quality of the photographs. I used my iPhone.

I love the light that comes in from the bedroom. I want to keep that entering the main space.

what is this mystery translucent material?

I love these resin products from 3form. Expensive, but so cool.

I added some solid wood to the right of the stone to represent the secret stair, which will be a permanent stair up to the roof, rather than the pulldown that is there now.

 

Here the translucent material reveals the stone a bit, for color and texture.

The connection at the top of the stairs is definitely closed.

 

Here the stone is covered by paneling but there is a peekaboo translucent section into the playroom.

 I tried shelves on this wall but it just felt busy and cramped. I think we also might need to consider embracing our inner pink and not covering up the stone.

The brass planter is off and the circular stair no longer blocks the view to the window. It lines right up!!

Aaaaah....

But now the tall central axis seems too tall.

Any reason it needs to be this tall? cut it off? Take it to the ceiling as one of our extra structural supports?

beautiful steel uncovered in the entry.

Can we keep it revealed?

Here's the crazy marble off the dining room table. Again...maybe embracing our inner pink?

I'll try to find some interesting examples of good design using this palette.

marcel breuer

So the book finally came in: Architecture without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard. Marcel Breuer came to the US in 1937, nine years before Gutnayer, to follow Gropius to Harvard. Breuer had studied at the Bauhaus and with Gropius, working in the woodshops of the two schools. He started designing houses with Gropius on his arrival, and worked with Gropius for a number of years. He established his own practice in New York in 1947. In 1951, he had two women working in his office, including one of the first African American woman architects, Beverly Green. Beckhard came into his office in 1951 and started working on major commissions in 1952.

The book has lots of nice photos of some of Breuer and Beckhard's houses with plans, which have been really useful to study in relation to the photographs. First a quote, from the afterword by Stanley Abercrombie:

[his work] also shows, when we look at the examples from the late '30s and early '40s, the originality and vigor with which Breuer greeted his newly adopted American and its construction conventions. The austere forms and anonymous smooth surfaces of European modernism were left behind in the old country, replaced here with durable, low-maintenance, natural maerials (most notably, wood frames, wood siding, and fieldstone) disposed in compositions that were becomingly modest and genuinely functional. These were not traditional houses in modern dress; they were genuinely new houses, thoughtfully planned to accomodate new patterns of living. Breuer invented a type of modern American house that was both more modern and more American than any that existed before it.

I am looking forward to looking at the plans with our architects. Meanwhile, here are some details that caught my eye...

I love this stair with the horizontal railing. There is a beautiful relationship of light and heavy.

This picture captures some of the common features of Breuer's houses: using fieldstone to build walls, glazing that goes floor to ceiling, and planes that push out in to space away from the main volume of the house.

Gutnayer built a massive fireplace in the center of our house. He designed significant fireplaces in a lot of his projects, and I wonder if he had seen Breuer's projects, which won awards and were published at the time. Our fireplace does not have as clear a form as Breuer's fireplaces pictured here. We are discussing ways of improving the form of our fireplace, and I like the prominent reveal in the fireplace on the left, and the asymmetrical volume (which maybe houses the flue?) that sits on top of the fireplace on the right. Lyrical and it activates the area above the fireplace.

 

 Here is ours.

A backside only a mother could love

I am hoping the architects come up with something wonderful for this rear facade. There is talk of connecting down to the garden from the back somehow.  The intersection of the brick volume and the main house volume is so odd. But the screen porch above my studio (the two parts of the brick piece) feels wonderful inside, and I look forward to candlelit dinners in there in the summer.

My studio is starting to feel like a studio, and is getting a lot more light! A cork floor and some white walls and I am good to go. While I think I am doing ok without painting, I am really not. I wander into the solvents aisle at the art store and think about stocking up, and Im hoarding jars at home. I think I will be moving in as soon as is possible.