The Larkey Remodel will be remodeled, again. Watch this space…
MJ Speaks
Duval Studio
The program was to provide workspace for a multi-disciplinary creative studio. The location was in the last remaining intact interior of a small completely masonry (interior and exterior) strip center designed and built in the late forties.
New additions are of wood and steel to contrast the existing raw masonry. Everything new is installed so that when removed, the integrity of the raw space is maintained for the future.
Careful allocation of funds and tricks like kerfing the ¾” plywood to provide the “poor man’s curves” where used to meet the extremely low budget of twelve thousand dollars. New materials are formaldehyde free plywood with a tung oil finish, cold rolled steel, and paint.
Update: this project won a Merit Award at the AIA, Austin 2010 Design Awards.
First Wolfe Den Night Shots
Macho Minimalism
The Wolfe Den is in it’s final stages. Little details are being completed like the front door handle and the landscaping is being installed. Becca of Rain Lilly Design has dubbed the front stone entry design “macho minimalism”. I really like that! I’m going to steal it;)
Enjoy, I am.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Creative Process Sneak a Peak
I was opening files and this Skype chat between MJ and I came up. We were in the same city, yes, but in different houses, late at night (noooo we didn’t have a fight… it’s a loooong story… to be told another time) We had a deadline on an article we had been asked to write for our good friends at the Good Life Magazine so we both got on skype…
You won’t see a post like this every day on this blog, no sir
Chat History with
Created on 2006-12-07 22:51:33.
- mj:22:23:52
- test
- barcelonaloca:22:23:57
- hello
- mj:22:24:03
- yes
- mj:22:25:17
- so we’re working remotely for this article. the beuty and the beast of technology
- mj:22:25:36
- how are we to maintain a physical community with this?
- barcelonaloca:22:25:57
- it would be a long story to explain why we are not doing this in person, but it IS related to housing
- mj:22:26:09
- or not
- barcelonaloca:22:26:23
- ok the absence of housing then
- mj:22:27:00
- well maybe it is also the absence of the ability for most to be “neighbors” these days or maybe that is a little to harsh
- barcelonaloca:22:27:40
- I liked your perception of the fence around our house, I’m going to paste it here
- mj:22:27:58
- it is a beautiful metophor
- mj:22:28:11
- a physical thing
- mj:22:28:19
- a real thing
- barcelonaloca:22:28:21
- Our current house has a low chain link fence around the back yard. You know the type, the one your parents put up to keep the family dog from getting into their friend’s–read neighbors–yard and digging up the tomatoes. The fence dad would lean on while talking to Mr. Jones. The fence where Mrs. Jones would trade mom some tomatoes for zucchini. Well this fence of ours, has gates in it to the neighbors’ yards. Imagine that. Openings to my neighbors’yards. A gesture to the sense of community right there in my own back yard.
But these gates are covered with vines and have been wired shut. When? Why? What a beautiful thing those gates are.
(this is a goo “last line)I wonder if my neighbors would like some Squash? - mj:22:28:24
- tactile
- mj:22:28:41
- is that goo or good?
- barcelonaloca:22:28:47
- good
- barcelonaloca:22:29:10
- maybe we should skip the IM thing and go home and get in bed
- barcelonaloca:22:29:13
- together
- barcelonaloca:22:29:19
- I like the tactile part
- mj:22:29:26
- yeah..
- barcelonaloca:22:29:38
- ok back to the article
- barcelonaloca:22:29:40
- rats
- mj:22:29:48
- double arts
- barcelonaloca:22:30:12
- somehow I think that the point you make about community is also related to “truth”
- mj:22:30:15
- that should be double rats
- barcelonaloca:22:30:29
- or double star
2006-12-07
(…)
One Step at a Time…
The Wolfe Den stair progresses. The middle partition that ties into the rift cut white oak guardrail is in. And a preview of the Ipe treads. Kilean made it by with me today to check it out and generally reek havoc with everyone…
Vodpod videos no longer available.
more about “untitled”
Some nice progress! Here’s three weeks ago.
Stoned! Casa Miquel
stone, transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): stoned; ston·ing
13th century
1: to hurl stones at; especially : to kill by pelting with stones
stoned (slang) adjective
1952
1. Stupefied, excited, or muddled with alcoholic liquor
2. Stupefied, intoxicated, or otherwise influenced by the taking of drugs
3. (one I particulaly like) under the influence of drugs, under the influence of alcohol, drugged, ripped out, high, spaced out, tripping, turned on
These definitions sum up the week and what I’m going to do about it…
The post was going to start out, “So you want stone? Well here it is, all of you fake Tuscan-lovin’ sons of bitches…” But then, because of the week it’s been, the post has shifted to the fore mentioned theme.
Anyway, the house is for a small site in Barcelona that has a four story building close to one side of it and a two story retaining wall about a fourth of the way into the lot. Fortunately, a garden could be placed around the side and front on the lower floor of the house, to achieve privacy and give a sense of the exotic and intimate.
The house is simply organized around a pool/living area that opens onto a front garden. All interior spaces open onto the pool and are defined by rustic (rustico! Pepe) structural stone walls. The pool area has a wall of translucent and colored glass block. A traditional material that has been manufactured in Spain for, who could say, 80 years.
This wall allows a wonderful diffused light into all the interior spaces and controls the view of the multi story building. At the bottom of the glass block wall there is a low continuous ribbon of clear operable windows that look onto the small side garden allowing the eye to expand beyond the boundary of the wall. The problematic back yard, two stories in the air, was tied into the roof to make an extended garden and terrace. A green house on this upper level of land continues over the two story living/pool area to become a skylight.
Most of the sketches shown were done on the flight back from Barcelona.
It’s happy hour so see ya, what ever happened to those days of three for ones in Lubbock (that story will have to wait…).
Zumthor is the man
That would be “the man” as in the good, iconoclastic, sort of James Brown way not the governmental, controlling, fascist (I won’t mention any names) sort of way.
so check it:
Zumthor goes to the essence of things
Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007)
The thing I love most about Ettore Sottsass is his beautiful, poignant, often ironic writing. The following was in The Reader (a compilation of architecture writings from news papers around the world) put out by Abitare. The writing was originally published in Terrazzo, n. 12
HOUSES HAVE AN INTERIOR
Those who build a house will also be building an inner void.
People, I mean the infinte, diverse, ancient and new people, fill the empty spaces of their houses, and their workshops, with whatever they think may somehow count as protection, precisely, against the unknown.
There are also the protections of so-called “culture”, the protections of rooms full of books or maybe full of “works of art”. “Culture is the most detached, the subtlest protection, the protection that seems to exist beyond the protection itself; “culture” is imagined as a total way out, as the place nearest the truth, as the place that protects more than all the other places, as the place that rubs out all daily sins, as the place farthest from the storms and the becalmed seas, farthest from the unkown, from frailty, farthest from the dreams of guilt, from syphilis and impotence, as the place ever blessed by sperm, as the final place never disclosed by moans.
Ettore Sottssas
mj neal architects - blublog 