• Alfred Faber, Portland architect

    James Heuer has put together several SmugMug photo galleries, including one on homes built by Portland-area architect Alfred Faber, who was active as a residential designer from 1904 to 1917. I stumbled across that gallery this morning, and was struck by the level of detail and the tight symmetrical grids that Faber seemed to enjoy. I was very surprised that he dropped off the map, as it were, after moving to Los Angeles for a very early retirement, right when these elements were very much in demand by builders throughout the Los Angeles area.

    The M. B. Nease House is a particularly attractive example of Faber’s work, with all kinds of attractive woodwork – builtins and other architectural detail – still intact.

  • Frank Lloyd Wright in Buffalo: a podcast conversation with Neil Levine

    Caroly Batt with the Buffalo-Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau writes to tell us about a very interesting podcast:

    Harvard University professor and noted Frank Lloyd Wright
    Scholar and author Neil Levine recently discussed Wright’s important
    architectural contributions to the Buffalo area. Buffalo is the home to many acclaimed Wright
    achievements including the Darwin Martin House Complex and Graycliff
    Estate    . The interview is available
    as an audio podcast on the Wright Now in Buffalo website.

  • Frank Lloyd Wright & the house beautiful

    From June 28 through October 8, the Portland Museum of Art is presenting a new exhibit showcasing "Frank Lloyd Wright’s passion for creating a new way of life for Americans through architecture."

    In particular, the exhibition focuses on his legendary skill in
    creating harmony between architectural structure and interior design
    while fulfilling the needs of a modern lifestyle. Featuring
    approximately 100 objects, the exhibition includes furniture,
    metalwork, textiles, drawings, and accessories from the collections of
    the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and other public and private
    collections. Curated by Dr. Virginia T. Boyd, professor at the
    University of Wisconsin-Madison, Frank Lloyd Wright and the House
    Beautiful conveys the methods through which Wright implemented the
    philosophy of the “house beautiful.” The exhibition explores how Wright
    sought to develop a modern interior reflective of a uniquely American
    spirit of democracy and individual freedom, illustrates his development
    in integrating the space with furnishings and architectural elements,
    and shows his experiments with bringing these ideas to the homes of
    average Americans.

    Several podcasts and audio programs relating to the exhibit are also available:

  • a modern Craftsman kitchen

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    Taunton publishes lots and lots of good books devoted to historic architecture in general and the Arts & Crafts movement specifically. I was happy but not surprised, then, to pick up a few back issues of The Inspired House, an (unfortunately out of print?) at a local used bookshop.

    The magazine seems to have halted publication mid-2006, but mining their online archive yielded lots of good stuff, including this article by Debra Judge Silber on a very modern yet classically attractive Craftsman kitchen remodel in a 1915 historic foursquare:

    When they found their brick foursquare in the
    mid-1980s, Ed and Kathy Friedman couldn’t believe their luck. They’d
    spent 10 years building a collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and
    decorative objects, and here was the perfect home in which to display
    it. The 1915 foursquare, with its built-in benches and bookcases, was
    as well preserved as if it had been locked in a time capsule.

    Except for the kitchen. Remodeled in the ’50s, the boxy room had plastic tiles running halfway around it and
    white metal cabinets backed awkwardly against the walls. Not just
    outdated, it was completely at odds with the purposeful beauty of the
    rest of the house.

    Visit their site for the full article. Floorplan by Martha Garstang Hill, whose illustrations and architectural drawings adorn many Taunton books.

  • Russ Billington: Arts & Crafts mottos from England

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    Russ Billington is an artist living and working in the village of Pimperne in Dorset, England. He’s recently begun producing a line of hand-drawn and painted mottos, as nice as anything I’ve seen from the Roycrofters and other great graphic artists of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Each is on 100% cotton Arches, and in addition to his stock of standards, he will also adapt or customize any motto of your choice. Russ takes personalized projects as well; do drop him a line if you have something unique in mind.

    Each piece is 8 x 12 on a sheet approximate 12 x 16 inches, and they start at US$125.

    For enquiries in the US and Canada, contact David Ford at fordcraftsmanonline.com. To contact Russ for a custom project, email russlisa2@yahoo.co.uk.

  • Floorplanner.com – the single most awesome thing I’ve seen all week

    I guarantee you will be as hooked on this as I am. Floorplanner takes those mediocre house-plan / design packages out there (including the really crummy online, browser-specific, super-crashy versions like Home Despot’s) and puts them all to shame. First of all: it works. All the time. In every browser I’ve tried it in. It’s fast, colorful, has an enormous number of colors and patterns available, lots of furniture, easy wall / door / window / angle drawing tools, and it’s just so much darn fun! Plus they are constantly adding new tools and objects. Play with it and email me your best Craftsman creations – I’ll put them up on Flickr!

  • Preservation Brief 33: Historic Stained Glass

    I find that all of the National Park Service’s Preservation Briefs are interesting, and several have been especially useful in my own home repair projects; take, for instance, brief #33, which I had reason to consult this past month. It’s a general primer on historic stained glass, written specifically for those of us with stained glass windows or panels in our old homes and the need to either maintain or repair them. Neal Vogel & Rolf Achilles‘ essay on historic stained glass windows is full of extensive information on history, dating, identifying and documenting, composition (even going a bit into chemistry and other materials sciences issues), ways to halt deterioration, tips on photographing stained glass and various repair techniques. If you have stained glass in your home, you need to read this. And, like all the other briefs, it’s full of useful technical information but not written in an overly-technical style; it’s accessible, readable and (as always) interesting.

  • Arts & Crafts gems shine in Berkeley’s velvet hills

    I was going through SFGate.com’s home section archive and found this great piece by R.W. Apple, Jr. (the New York Times‘ architecture critic), originally published in that paper in 2003:

    "Westward the course of empire takes its way," wrote the 18th century
    Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th century founders of a
    little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western
    extremity of the American empire, chose to name it after him.

    Many famous men and women have walked its streets — Ernest O. Lawrence,
    the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped
    develop the nation’s best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio,
    the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and
    in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation’s greatest restaurateur.

    Another — too little known, at least beyond Northern California — is the
    architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner
    in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and
    the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena.

    Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands
    today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of UC Berkeley and in the hills
    above it, in the north side neighborhood where Maybeck lived for most of his
    life (1862-1957). More than anyone else, he made Berkeley one of the nation’s
    architectural treasure-troves.

    read the whole thing

  • 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.