• Ted Wells’ Living Simple: a new book

    My single favorite writer on architectural and design issues is Ted Wells. Unlike here, where I’m constantly filling in the space between interesting issues with notes of very minor importance, Ted’s  puts articles up on Living Simple only when he has something to say. He’s a really good writer and teacher (and designer, of course; that is his primary profession), and in my few conversations with him I’ve learned a lot about architecture and our responsibility to art.

    Living Simple’s motto is "Do your work. Be honest. Keep your word. Help when you can. Be fair." Even when Ted is critical – as he sometimes is, especially of communities (and homeowners) who are unable or unwilling to maintain architectural and aesthetic responsibility or historic character through either a lack of education or simple greed, or historic homeowners who are dishonest or inattentive stewards of their homes – he is always fair, and takes his responsibilities seriously. He even writes on his personal website that his "most important job is helping guide the stewardship of notable historic architecture, art, built and natural landscapes, and thought and culture."

    Ted has a new book coming out next year with Gibbs-Smith, one of the world’s best publishers of books on American architecture and design. Ted and John Ellis are currently finishing up work on the book, which is about the mid-century modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Twenty-two of Harris’ homes will be profiled in the book, which will be published next year.

  • more houseporn: brown shingles for sale

    The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me – partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they’re not especially interesting to me, or – I imagine – to you.)

    Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.

  • Small Houses and the Question of Need

    Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:

    Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

    This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
    who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
    next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
    and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
    California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
    space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
    magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
    old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
    an apple orchard in full bloom.

    But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
    calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
    Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
    feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
    isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
    writ tiny.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Greene & Greene properties: a map

    So, I’ve created a map – using social-mapping tool Platial – of all the existing Greene & Greene properties I’ve been able to find record of. I’ll also be adding a new layer of no-longer-standing Greene & Greene projects, but that’s a few weeks off.Take a look, and let me know if you like this style of map and if the tool is easy to use; if so, I’ll revive our Craftsman Home Registry (above) using this, so you can all add your own homes.

  • new books, April 2007

    A number of books which look like they’d be very interesting to Craftsman (and other old-home) aficionados have been released recently. I’ll try to get my hands on copies of some of these for full reviews. If you are a publisher and would like to have your book reviewed here, drop me a line.

  • Urban Archaeology: architectural salvage in New York City

    Urban Archaeology, with showrooms in Manhattan, Bridgehampton, Boston and Chicago, has been in the business of saving urban architectural treasures since they opened their Manhattan store in 1978.

    In addition to a large stock of salvaged materials, they have also developed their own line of lighting, bath accessories, washstands and medicine cabinets based on popular historic designs.

    As far as salvage goes, though, this is no scrapyard, but rather the highest end of the collectible architectural antique sellers.

  • Rest & Restoration: Volunteer Vacations at Historic Sites in Need of Some TLC

    Jamie Donahoe at the Heritage Conservation Network sends us the following note on their hands-on building conservation workshops. A number of photographs from recent workshops are available in a special Flickr set. Thanks, Jamie!

    If you had driven by the Francis Mill in Waynesville, North Carolina in July 2003, you might have stopped to take a photo of the picturesque but dilapidated structure nestled in Francis Cove. If you were to pass by the mill this summer, you would see a structure that’s neat and square, strong and weathertight. The difference: volunteers who joined a series of summertime hands-on building conservation workshops organized by Heritage Conservation Network in partnership with the Francis Mill Preservation Society.

    HCN, a Boulder, Colorado-based non-profit dedicated to the conservation of the world’s architectural heritage, specializes in recruiting volunteers to assist with hands-on preservation projects in association with local preservation partners. Volunteers spend a week or more at the site, working under the guidance of a technical expert.

    Back in 2003, with the mill in danger of imminent collapse, Tanna Timbes, great granddaughter of the man who built it and founder of the FMPS, contacted HCN and asked for assistance in saving it. Over the course of three workshops at Francis Mill, a total of 48 volunteers contributed more than 3,700 hours of labor, and that made all the difference.

    HCN volunteers are not necessarily experienced preservationists, with only half having experience in the field. Instruction and supervision are provided by the technical expert leading the hands-on work, and participants – of all ages – quickly find themselves replastering walls,
    documenting decorative paintings, shaping adobe bricks, chiseling mortises and tenons, or chipping out old cement mortar to replace it with lime mortar. The focus is on the use of traditional techniques and materials – the prescription for keeping historic buildings sound for many generations to use and appreciate.

    HCN has organized workshops at more than a dozen historic sites in the past four years. In Oplotnica, Slovenia, last year, volunteers worked painstakingly to discover the original decorative paint scheme of a 17th century chapel. The workshop, led by one of Slovenia’s foremost conservators, brought nationwide attention not only to the project but also to the need to safeguard Slovenia’s cultural heritage.

    HCN will return to Slovenia in 2008, when volunteers will help restore the oldest known vintner’s cottage in the Šmarško-Virštanj wine district; it dates to the 16th century and is in poor condition, much like the Francis Mill was four years ago.

    Volunteer opportunities this year include work at a Queen Anne style parsonage in Jonesboro, Illinois; the Old West town of Virginia City, Montana; and colonial and traditional buildings in Ghana. All still have space available and can also accommodate groups looking for a meaningful way to volunteer. Information about these and other opportunities to help build a future for the past can be found on HCN’s website or by calling HCN at +1 303 444 0128.

  • video, video and, what’s this? more video

    Lots of folks have put great videos up in the last few weeks on Google Video / YouTube / GooTube / whatever you want to call it.

  • old homes make way for strip malls in Lubbock TX (and everywhere)

    Lubbock’s North Overton neighborhood – once sparsely populated with sprawling ranch-era Craftsman bungalows – is slowly being reseeded with strip malls, tract developments and other signs of the coming apocalypse. One such home is being picked up and moved to make way for that harbinger of class, culture and the real building block of a modern neighborhood, the strip mall.

    "This
    was called a craftsman-bungalow house, it was built in 1911. It’s one
    of the oldest houses in Lubbock, it’s also one of the most historic
    because of the people lived here the first 75 years," said former
    resident, Frank Potts.

    In 1924 A.B. Davis moved to Lubbock.
    Soon after moving into the home. A.B. served as the manager of the
    Chamber of Commerce and later as Lubbock’s City Manager. His family
    called 1724 Main their home for 60 years.

    Frank Potts is A.B.’s grandson, he
    said, "lots of memories here, there really are. As a child it was a big
    world out there, World War II was going on when I first moved here and
    I just remember everything just seemed, the house seemed like a huge
    mansion and I was just a little bitty guy and wondering what happens
    next."

    The original plans for the home show a 4,500 square
    foot house with wide overhanging eaves, deep porches with large square
    brick posts and beautiful wood paneling, all adding to the charm of
    this old home. With the vision and financial help of Lubbock attorney
    Ted Hogan, this old house will be able to stand for another hundred
    years. He said, "a lot of heavy lifting (will go into moving the
    house)! and quite frankly the fellas that the credit goes to are the
    movers because they’re the guys that have the technical knowledge."

    With
    the development in the North Overton area, this old houses days were
    numbered as a strip mall is slated to go here. But in 5 weeks, 1724
    Main will get a new address on the corner of 16th and Avenue R after
    it’s moved, piece by piece, down Avenue R.

    Hogan said, "we
    have about 5 weeks to get it done, we have a May 1st deadline. There’s
    new development coming in here. If the weather permits and if it
    doesn’t rain, we should be good to go at the end of April." Giving this
    old Lubbock home a new lease on life.

    It should be noted that Lubbock’s Overton Park project is currently the largest private residential development in the state. Questions regarding the number of homes destroyed or moved directed to the McDougal Company, the firm tasked with making rubble of old homes in the way and clearing it, were not answered

  • if you live in Wisconsin, turn on the tube tonight

    The always-dependable Douglas Anders notes on his Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog that there will be two good FLW-related documentaries on Wisconsin Public Television this week, one tonight and one Wednesday:

    Expo: Magic of the White City
    is on tonight at 8pm. I saw this documentary a few months ago and it’s
    not bad (despite the cheesey historical re-enactments). Some of the
    photographs and other images are jaw-dropping awesome — including some
    of the Japanese section (the Ho-o-den) that so influenced Frank Lloyd
    Wright.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo will air
    Wednesday, March 21 at 7pm. this hour long documentary follows the
    friendship of Wright and Darwin Martin, and the buildings that they
    built in Buffalo. This is worth watching, but I thought that it was too
    short — an hour isn’t long enough to do justice to the three buildings
    Wright build for Martin (the brevity of the Larkin Building segment
    will make you weep). But it is still a good effort, and great
    introduction to this aspect of Wright’s life.