Sometimes there is just no way to make a home addition blend seamlessly with the original house.
So architect Robert Gurney didn’t even try.
Instead, he designed a glass and steel pavilion for dining and entertaining so the owners of an 18th Century farmhouse could enjoy the magnificent views of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains unimpeded.
The result is a sort of roof with transparent walls with a stone fireplance and chimney — an arresting, improbably beautiful combination of old and new. This project was named one of 11 residential designs judged the best in the 2004 Housing Professional Interest Areas (PIA) by the American Institute of Architects, who met in Chicago last week.
“The farmhouse was restored and meticulously maintained,” Gurney said, so there was no way to replicate its authenticity in an addition. “You had to let the farmhouse remain the farmhouse,” told the clients, and let the addition be the addition.
“I knew it was the right thing to do,” he said about his contemporary extension, and he suspected his client would agree because “my work is all modern,” said Gurney of Alexandria, Va.
“Modern,” a style that for years was out of favor in a turn to “postmodern” designs laced with details from classical and historical styles, may be staging a comeback.
“The jury was impressed that modern style is working its way back into all categories,” said jury chairman Gita Dev of Dev Architects, San Francisco, of trends the jury of six saw as they sifted through more than 100 entries in three categories: community design, single-family and multifamily housing. Winners were selected not only on excellence in design but also creativity in the face of site, monetary or other constraints.
A disproportionate number of the awards — six — went to Californians. Two San Diego-area firms won four awards. One of those firms, Jonathan Segal of La Jolla, took three of the single-family and multifamily housing awards.
Kevin deFreitas of Kevin deFreitas Architects, San Diego, suggested the reason the two firms from that city won so many awards is because San Diego is a relatively new and growing metropolis without the “historic constraints and weather constraints except for seismic concerns” of older, more established Eastern and Northern cities.
Another reason may be that both architectural firms eliminated the necessity of pleasing and compromising with clients — either developers or individuals — from the building equation. Segal and deFreitas designed, developed and built these projects.
“Developers are way too timid to do this,” said Segal of his award-winning designs, including 22 lofts next to the San Diego Freeway and his own custom house and office on the site of a former Shell service station.
In his comments when accepting his awards, Segal challenged the other architects in the room “to take the client out of the equation.”
“We are building a better architecture and a better city” without them, he said.
In his comments, deFreitas echoed that view, telling those in the room, “Clients are completely over-rated. Instead of taking inspiration from a client” he said, he was inspired by his attorney, insurance agent and the local public utility.
He explained that Californians have strict construction defect regulations so he designed the homes to reduce the possibility of litigation liability. With current consumer concerns, he wanted construction resistant to mold, termites and fire. And finally, with energy costs a continuing concern, he wanted to build energy efficient homes.
The 17-unit Row Homes on F that he designed and built are on extremely narrow lots — 17 feet wide and 50 feet deep — in a mixed commercial and residential area near Petco Park, San Diego’s new baseball stadium.
Using “tilt-up” construction — 5-inch concrete panels similar to those used in Costco or other big box stores — deFreitas created live/work houses that have 3-inches of air space between them. The construction method is durable, reduces the possibility of mold and is about 42 percent more efficient than the government energy standards, deFreitas said. In addition, the concrete panels are excellent sound barriers, allowing residents who like rap to enjoy their music without bothering the neighbors.
The homes, each with a one-car garage, sold from $308,000 for a 960-square-foot unit to about $625,000 for a unit of about 2,000 square feet. A mid-size unit initially sold for $475,000 and was re-sold 18 months later for $720,000, he said.
Segal also won for a small-scale project that took a 50-by-100-foot infill lot and developed two alternatives with rentable office or living space, allowing the owner to subsidize the mortgage. He also won for the 22-unit loft project with two-story living spaces and ground-level parking next to the San Diego Freeway. Dubbed the Titan, Segal said he did the complex for $87 a square foot, compared to more typical cost of $120 a square foot for his city. The architect is developer and owner of 141 lofts in downtown San Diego.
“We’ve built more individual buildings downtown,” he said. “We only do urban housing” and all of it “on throwaway properties” others do not want.
A case in point is his home and office on a wedge of land in the tony suburb of La Jolla, Calif. The site of a former Shell station, the property was a “brownfield” that required buried fuel tanks to be removed and contaminated soil replaced if necessary.
Segal said when building began, they found some overlooked fuel tanks. Removing the tanks and dirt from the site made room for a 2,000-square-foot basement, which is somewhat unusual in Southern California housing.
The custom-designed residence is a stucco box resting on and supported by Corten steel wall planes, which provide privacy and muffle noise on a lot that’s not buffered from traffic. The 3,800-square-foot living area has a reflecting pool on one side and a glass floor on the other. The glass floor is a ceiling to the studio/office below and allows natural light into the lower level.
Segal noted the residence and studio, including all custom-made furniture, was built for $190 a square foot. Still, considering the size of the residence that is a $1 million project. Similarly, Gurney’s glass and steel addition cost more than $500,000, including a renovation of the existing kitchen.
“We bled into the house,” he said for a better interior blend of the old and new.
Other good ideas were less costly. One of the best was a simple, low-maintenance corrugated metal wall for a beach house in Rosemary Beach, Fla. Architect Darrell Russell of Looney Ricks Kiss, Memphis, put a row of hooks on the wall inside a beach house. Below the hooks is a narrow strip of sand, seashells and broken limestone that allows bathing suits to drip and dry without getting water on the floor.
Russell’s use of strong color outside and inside the West Indies-influenced cottage illustrated a trend to the re-introduction of color, outside and inside, said John Klockeman, principal of Blumentals Architecture Inc., Brooklyn Center, Minn. Klockeman was a past chairman of the PIA housing awards jury and a presenter of this year’s awards.
He and 2004 jury chair Dev agreed the cottage’s drip wall also reflected a move by those submitting designs to highly textured combinations of materials particularly of shiny finishes with others such as glass and wood and to “a lot of daylight, painstakingly designed” into housing.
Perhaps no winner showed that more dramatically than Norton Towers-on-the-Court in West Hollywood, Calif., a six-unit townhouse project designed by Michael B. Lehrer of Lerner Architects, Los Angeles. Each townhouse has a four-story glass tower which allows daylight to penetrate deep into all the levels of the interior of the tall, narrow units.
The effort to provide the light is part of a “real trend to denser urban” housing while “incorporating all the elements we think of as home,” Dev said.
