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Architects always amaze me. They are generally broad thinkers that have to solve highly technical problems with visually beautiful solutions. Granted some solutions fall way short of the “beautiful” mark and sometimes the technical side may slip (Frank Lloyd Wright was said to have designed some pretty leaky houses). I enjoy listening as architects describe the thought process that they went through to arrive at the end product. Some descriptions are poetic, metaphorical, pragmatic or just whimsical – even funny. So what is this gene that allows architects to solve problems in such a distinctive way? Sometimes the solutions that look the simplest are actually the most difficult. Paring design elements down to their essence takes a skilled eye and facile mind.

I believe that bringing creativity to a solution or job makes everyone in any profession more successful. I remember going to a renaissance fair in Arizona and watching the guy in the parking lot direct traffic. It was hot, well over 100 degrees, but he would wave his flag dramatically and dance as he guided you into your parking space. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons! The creative approach (not to mention positive attitude) that he brought to a mundane job made it bearable for him and most certainly entertaining for us.

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Architects are always finding ways to take advantage of the creative energy that seems to pour out of them. An architect in our office, Scott, recently brought in the Halloween costume he had made. He and his wife were a “Day of the Dead” bride and groom and Scott had created paper mache’ large heads and painted them with glow in the dark paint. I’m pretty sure that the long and grueling architectural training that we all endured forces us to think that we have to come up with highly creative, sometimes difficult to build, solutions to almost any challenge that they choose to tackle. When my daughter was young, my birthday cakes and Christmas cookies were insane! Never mind that I was a single mother working full time and doing a little moon lighting to keep her in new sneakers … my cookies had to make a statement and inspire awe among the PTA group. Buy a tray of cookies at Sams and go to bed at a decent hour?? No way – not for me. I suppose staying up all night in the architecture lab trains you well for such situations.

I admire architects, but what I really admire is creativity in any form. My father was a structural engineer and my mother was an artist, but my father’s creative approach to engineering was certainly equal to my mother’s creative approach to her painting. As a result, he was always very popular with architects because no matter how hair brained an idea was that an architect presented, he would put his creative mind to work on solving the structural issues. It is all about thinking outside the box-trying something different-something new. Sometimes just looking at the problem upside down and backwards to see what you come up with-whatever that problem is, is the best place to start.

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The house has been dried in for a while and the interior finishes are starting to show up in force. One of the topics I discussed a while back were these custom mosaic wall panels that are getting installed in key locations throughout the project. The first one I covered was going up on the roof top terrace and I talked about it here. The other two locations are the Great Room fireplace surround and the wall behind the tub in the Master Bathroom. The first one here is obviously the fireplace surround – maybe it’s not obvious that it’s a fireplace but at the very least, you know it’s not a tub.

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The fireplace we are using is a 6′ direct vent Spark modern fireplace. They are very clean and suit the style of this home very well. To help you understand the scale of the Great Room, as well as the size of this mosaic surround, I included a partial interior elevation above. That is one of my infamous scale figures to the side – he’s 6′ tall. The overall dimensions of the surround is 12′-4″ long by 5′-6″ tall. This is a dynamic piece and once all the other finishes and cabinetry come together, I think everyone will be very excited by what they see.

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The artist who created these pieces for us is Ravenna born Italian mosaic artist Anna Fietta - and if you didn’t know, Ravenna, Italy is sometimes called the ‘mosaic city’ and  is renown for the beautiful 5th and 6th century mosaics that adorn the walls of its churches and monuments. Anna had to build all these mosaics on panels and ship them over to the contractor – so in the picture above, you can see an example of where the panels come together. Eventually these panels will be mortared into place, right now they are screwed to the wall to protect them from “walking” off the job site. Early next year (in 2012) Anna will fly over with a bag of smalti glass tiles to fill in the seams between the panels. The whole piece will flow together so that you won’t see any evidence that this large scale mosaic surround was anything other than one large installation.

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Since Anna is Italian – and has okay English language skills, and I only speak English (with a little international language of love thrown in), I relied on frequent quick sketches emailed back and forth to help her understand the specific size and shape that her panels needed to be. I also took advantage of Google translate more times than I can remember. I would write what I needed to say, plug it into the translate feature in Google and violá! A workable translation into Italian.

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Moving onto the Master Bathroom, this is the feature wall that will go behind the Victoria + Albert bath tub that is specified for this location. In this location, we did have a communication breakdown and the panels ended up being about 17″ too short for the space we needed. There is a light cove at the top of this wall and my original details (which were in English) said to “extend the finish into the light cove”. As a result, we have some more work for Anna to do for us. I spoke with the contractor and we were trying to decide if it would be easier to add the missing panel to the top or the bottom of the wall – we even did a quick profile cut-out of the tub so that we could see how the pattern would work (we were afraid that the silver wave would be too hidden once the tub was installed.

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I spoke with Anna and she said that the silver wave you see here is supposed to look like it is splashing down into the tub so unlike the photos you see here, these panels will move down to the floor. I redrew my original elevation of this wall to clearly convey to Anna the size of the missing area we needed to cover. This time, I ran some of my construction notes through Google translate and added them to my drawing (seen below).

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Here is another look at where 4 separate panels are coming together. All these areas will get filled in once Anna arrives.

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A look at the different smalti pieces – the ‘wave’ element in real life is far more vibrant and awesome than these photos show. I don’t like using the flash on my camera and since this room is on the interior of the house, there isn’t a lot of natural light making it’s way in and the contractor’s string of bulbs just isn’t set up for taking high quality photos – sorry.

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Here is a look up into the light cove above the Master Bathroom tub. To get the quality of light we want, as well as washing the wall for almost 10′, we are using a series of par lamps (think of it as a series of individual light fixtures) and as a result, the light cove is pretty tall (16″) and deep (12″). This is another area that I know will look fantastic. I would even bet that once the marketing people for Victoria + Albert see their tub sitting in front of this wall, they are going to fall out of their chairs.

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So that’s the update on the mosaic walls – I hope to feature some more of the finishes as they arrive on site. The house is coming together really quickly and I don’t want to bore anybody by focusing on this project too often – but you can let me know when I’m getting close.

Cheers

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In the picture above, you are looking up at the ceiling of  an exterior patio. More specifically, you are looking at 1×1 ipê wood strips attached to medium density overlay board that has been painted black with an ipê wood trim-ring around a recessed light fixture. This is a much more decorative way to finish out a ceiling over a space you plan on using rather than simply applying a coat of paint.

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I know that not everyone reads drawings but for those of you who do, this is a detail through the section of the roof that covers one of the patios on the large modern project we have been working on for the last 2 years (it’s a big house…). Most of the notes above can be ignored for our purposes today but the ones worth paying attention to is the 1×1 WD @ 2″ O.C. (on center) with finish nails right above the one that calls out for 1/2″ MDO (which stands for Medium Density Overlay) board painted black. These two things coming together are what will make this ceiling something special.

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I thought I would include a little photo montage showing what MDO looks like. It’s basically plywood but it has a smooth weather-resistant resin overlay bonded to the wood by heat and pressure that is suitable for taking a finish (in our case, the finish is paint and then 1×1 ipê wood strips). The resin surface helps the wood resists water, weather, wear and degradation over time … we don’t always use it on our exterior patio ceilings but since we were planning on nailing wood strips to it, it was an obvious choice.

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I took the picture above one day during a site visit when the MDO panels were getting installed. On the right, the MDO panel, and on the left you can see the underside of the metal decking from the floor above the patio ceiling.

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This picture shows the MDO panels after they have been installed and have been painted black. You might have noticed that we did not call out for a particular wood species for the 1×1 wood strips – that’s because we were going to take our cue from the landscape architect and match wood species. The final selection ended up being the ipê, a FSC certified cultivated Brazilian hardwood noted for its durability and resistance to rot and insects. It also happens to be gorgeous wood and we use it frequently whenever we use wood on the exterior of our projects.

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Here is a look at the almost finished product – it stills needs to receive a final finish coat to help even out the tonal variations in the strips. We generally don’t add too strong of a color, and in this case, the final product will have a slight honey tint added to the finish coat. I would like to point something out that you might not notice unless you are me (because if you are, why aren’t you writing this post?), take another look at the spacing of the wood strips in relation to the wood rings around the recessed can lights … did you happen to notice that the ipê wood strips are tight to both sides of the wood rings and the spacing between the wood strips is still consistent? That isn’t on accident and was figured out early on before the MDO was installed.

That’s why we get to design and construction administration on these sorts of projects … we are fanatic about the end product.

Cheers – and thanks for reading.

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Things are really starting to heat up on our modern infill project and so I thought I would focus on one of the exterior finishes before most of the attention turns towards the interior for a while. This is the stainless steel metal screen that is very prominent on the front elevation, covering the large window just above the front door. This screen element has been in place early on from the schematic design phase.

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This is a sketch I drew up while sitting at a conference from almost three years ago. We had design meetings to discuss what objectives we had for this piece and I knew that in order to make this screen look the way it needed to look, it had to be incorporated into the structure of the building rather than looking applied after the fact. It was also important that the way the screen be built be reflected in the design – a concept that is very important to our office.

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This sketch just above is pretty explanatory even if it isn’t a work of art. Maybe if I knew that I would be using it here, explaining the design and construction process I would have drawn it differently (I can understand my thought process with fewer strokes than what others might need). All that having been said, it is still an efficient diagram of the final product and how it was assembled.

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This is the front entry way … looking at the large window, all that is in place are the long vertical members. You can see that the stainless steel members are welded to beams up above the soffit and align with the window mullions.

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In this picture, the horizontal members have been added. In the picture above, this is the corner of the front window. There is a detail here that I think is pretty interesting and was important in the original design concept and assembly technique. Lets take a closer look…

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You can see on the horizontal members that there are square notches at a regular interval. These are the spaces where the square stainless steel rods will get placed. The spacing is just under 4″ and the rods themselves are 3/8″ x 3/8″.

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Everything is in place (well, as far as you know it is…) This is what the stainless steel screen looks like once all the pieces are put in place.

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A close up look at the 3/8″ square stainless steel rods … that zinc standing seam metal siding behind the screen. If you missed the post on the zinc siding, you can play catch-up and read about it here.

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If you were walking up the front steps and about the ring the bell on this house, this is the view you would get. Part of the reason we installed this screen was to provide visual interest at the front elevation, but that’s not the most important reason. This house is pretty large and we have made many moves so that the scale of the building fit in well with the other houses in the neighborhood. The screen provides another layer of scale to the massing and helps bring the size of the entry component down to human size.  The layering of the different materials and the size of their pieces will help the building be readable to people viewing the house from the street.

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This photo is looking up at the backside of the stainless steel screen between it and the zinc siding.

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This picture probably doesn’t mean much to anyone other than me but I took it because of the shadow on the wall. We spent a lot of time trying to determine just how far the rods would extend down beneath the lowest horizontal support member. I built several 3d variations of this screen and entry wall in SketchUp and the shadow studies I looked at eventually helped us make our decision. When I was on-sight and saw the shadows seen above, I thought we had made the right decision.

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The latest look at the front entry. There is a handrail that is very similar in design to the entry screen that will eventually wrap the roof top terrace you can see on the upper left-hand side. In addition, the landscape will make a huge impact on this project … right now the house looks like it landed on this site from outer space.

Cheers

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The weather in Dallas changes from unbearably-hot to almost-manageable, the carnies mill around the midway carelessly assembling the rides, the food vendors anxiously await the results of the fried gastronomic creation contest to be judged as the paramedics standby with their defibrillators … that’s right, it’s Texas State Fair time!

Which brings us to the officially unofficial 1st Annual Bernbaum Magadini Architects Fair Day.

WOO HOO!

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(BTW, I’m the slightly balding 6′-4″ bearded guy in the back…and no, I don’t model professionally. It’s more of a “on the side” kind of gig.)

Moving on.

One of the Fair’s main attractions is the Iconic mascot “Big Tex” purported to be the world’s largest (and creepiest cowboy). Standing at 52’ high and adorned with Dickies brand attire, Big Tex – the state fair’s mascot – actually started out in 1949 as the world’s tallest Santa Claus and over the years has transformed into the creepy animatronic people eating cowboy you see today.  Legend has it that every morning before dawn, the park’s carnies sacrifice one of their own to Big Tex to satisfy his insatiable appetite in an attempt to avoid an “incident” later on in the day.

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Kinda creepy, right?

Since we only had a precious few hours at the fair we had to be quick and diligent.  There was no time for games or rides … we were in hot pursuit of fried food!

Since 1886 Dallasites and Texans from all over have flocked to what has been considered (by me) as the Mecca for fried food connoisseurs. Everything from the standard must have Fletcher’s Corny Dog, fried peanut butter banana sandwiches to this year’s newbie, fried bubble gum.  For the BMA group the hot commodity was the fried buffalo chicken flapjack. Think chicken breast – dipped in buffalo wing sauce – fried in spicy batter – on a stick … and with syrup.

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I thought it was great….my cardiologist did not. The rest of our afternoon went as follows:

-Eat fried potato chips

-Eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwich

-Digest

-Walk to next fried food area

-Eat corny dog

-See the butter sculpture

-Proceed to the world’s largest/fattest pig (I’m not sure if it was the largest or fattest.  I do know that it was large and fat though.)

-Continue on to what I call the “Tent of Incessent Sales Pitches and Other Useless Things You Don’t Need” where we got our signature’s analyzed.

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When I received the results of my signature I was amazed at how accurate it was….

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Well everything was right except for the date…

After a quick tour of the blenders, Sham-Wows and worlds sharpest knife booths our afternoon was coming to an end. We walked by the fried food stands one last time.  As we traversed through the fried food stands, thick with oil laiden air, I realized I didn’t get any fried bacon! I wanted to eat those thick-cut beer-battered slabs of bacon so bad I could feel it in my chest. Turns out, the feeling was actually my pounding heart…telling me (in morse code I think) that the fried bacon would be there next year and that it was time for me to leave.

Can’t wait for next year!

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