We were encouraged to read last month that the non-profit, Architecture 2030 announced some rare good news from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that shows that energy usage by commercial and residential buildings in the US has dropped so dramatically in the last 7 years that the EIA’s projections for building energy usage in the year 2030 are now almost 70% lower than their projections were in 2005.  While the reduction in energy consumption by buildings contributes dramatically to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, these lower energy usage projections also translate into an astonishing savings in energy costs, projected to be $3.66 trillion between 2012 and 2030 in the US alone. If we continue to incorporate the most ambitiously sustainable building technologies at our disposal, these savings could top $6 trillion, and energy consumption and CO2 emissions in 2030 could actually fall substantially below 2005 levels.

One reason for this dramatic improvement is that architects and our builder collaborators have aggressively integrated sustainable building technologies into our daily routines, and our clients have enthusiastically joined our efforts. How can you help build on this momentum? Hire architects who not only care, but have the knowledge to help you design and build sustainably.  We love helping our clients benefit from lower utility bills while they contribute to a better future for our planet.

To read the full Architecture 2030 report, click here.

Drawing, designing, and dreaming are all gratifying aspects of being an architect, but we also really love when the projects we’ve designed begin actual construction. That is after all the primary goal of what we do all day in the studio! We work with some fantastic general contractors, and working closely with them until the day our clients move in is an exciting, collaborative process. Check out the projects below, and we’ll keep posting updates in the coming weeks.

The renovation of this Boston rowhouse includes opening up the middle for a dramatic, three-story living space, with natural light eventually pouring down from a large skylight above.

A couple we met when we designed new faculty housing at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, MA, asked us to design a small addition to their two-room house in the Berkshires. The new space will provide additional living space as well as a bedroom and bathroom; the existing house with only an open sleeping loft, lacked the kind of privacy needed with older children. The flat roof of the addition is accessed from an exterior stair tower, and will eventually have a railing around it for small rooftop gatherings for star-gazing and enjoying views extending deep into Vermont.

A view of a steel stair above the front entrance of a new house in Lincoln. The stair treads and partial risers will be solid red oak, and the stair landing will have red oak flooring and red oak veneered plywood below.

Major earthwork is evident at this substantial renovation project in Chelmsford. Here you see the beginnings of an excavation that will become a landscaped garden and terrace cut into the ground in order to bring daylight into new lower level living spaces. Natural light is so critical! Only small parts of the existing house will remain untouched when the project is finished later this year.

We are really excited about several new projects in the early stages of design, including new houses, two new lofts, and a master plan for a small school in northern New Hampshire. We will share some more information about each of these projects in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, check out the images and information below.

I had the great pleasure of a tour of Isaac Julien’s video installation, Ten Thousand Waves, as well as Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ show (her first solo museum presentation) at the ICA last night.

Jenelle Porter, Senior Curator of the ICA, presented Hutchins’ show first, sharing her fascinating assessment of the artist’s transformations of everyday objects into art, and you can read her comments on the ICA blogsite here, as well as her interview with the artist here. Almost like being there! Although you missed a lively discussion of the comma and other punctuation marks in Hutchins’ work. Perhaps you can tell from this blog how much I happen to also love commas, transitional punctuation that both separates and mediates between linked thoughts, not unlike my architectural obsession with planar forms…

Anna Stothart next led us into the Isaac Julien video installation, an incredibly dynamic, spatial experience, as well as deeply poetic. I won’t try to compete with the more scholarly ICA summary as well as an interview with the artist, which you can see on the ICA website. Absolutely stunning, and I could have stayed for hours.

The ICA will be presenting Jenelle Porter’s next major curatorial effort, Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, which opens on February 17^th. Visit the ICA website for a preview.

Will Ruhl

Credits:

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston: www.icaboston.org
Jenelle Porter, Senior Curator, ICA: Jessica Jackson Hutchins introduction by Jenelle Porter
Isaac Julien: www.isaacjulien.com

Architects are sometimes perceived as design aesthetes, imbued with an overabundance of “creativity” but only a modicum of common sense about how to build things and solve real world problems. A savvy homeowner, however, understands that architects are actually uniquely trained as problem-solvers, with fluid analytical skills and the ability to visualize what others cannot. More and more we find ourselves applying these skills with residential projects by engaging with our clients in pre-purchase feasibility studies, to help determine if a particular plot of land, or an existing building to be renovated is actually suitable for the intended purpose.

Recently one of our clients was negotiating with a developer for the custom build-out of an already gutted 5 story row house. Because the developer was proposing traditional detailing where the owner preferred modern, we were hired to prepare a design to the owner’s liking that the developer could then price out and presumably build. As with all of our projects we learned a lot about the owner during this exercise, and helped him better understand his own likes and dislikes and the kinds of spaces that would be best for him. We worked out some really interesting ideas around a double-height space that solved a lot of problems with the row house format’s limited daylight and multiple, cramped levels. In the end, our client determined that pushing these ideas in this particular project would be too expensive and the results would be compromised.

Undeterred, and armed with our work, he was able to negotiate a great deal on another project where others hadn’t seen its possibilities. Now we’re designing a great apartment, with a dramatic three story skylit atrium as an unexpected surprise, bringing light and a feeling of spaciousness to the innermost reaches of the apartment.

Check back soon and we’ll be posting construction photos!

A December 30, 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Journal focused on architectural regionalism and its reemergence in house design. After decades in which well known architects designed houses that could be seen as idiosyncratic homages to their previous artistic preoccupations and that paid little attention to local climatic realities, architects (and their clients!) are once again finding joy and artistic inspiration in the house’s local surroundings and reinterpreting local traditions in fresh, inventive ways. We can only hope that this catches on with mass production and speculative house builders, which represents the vast majority of our country’s new housing stock…

Here are a few examples from our own portfolio that express our preoccupation with important regional architectural issues.

Did you see the recent Maurizio Cattelan show, “All”, at New York’s Guggenheim? While the Guggenheim is a favorite of many architects, it has often been criticized for the inherent difficulty of hanging art on its curved walls, to be viewed from spiraling ramps. Fortunately, as the museum passes its fiftieth anniversary, art sometimes seems to be catching up to it, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda has inspired more than a few amazing site-specific installations. Cattelan’s assemblage of hanging objects has to be one of the best.

See Aaron Seward’s recent article on how the exhibit was hung, “Get A Rope” in The Architect’s Newspaper here.

Credits:
The Guggenheim Museum: http://www.guggenheim.org
The Architect’s Newspaper: http://www.archpaper.com/

Having worked on several cool projects in Hawai‘i over the last few years, our eyes have really been opened to architectural possibilities that rarely exist in New England. For example, we collaborated with Rhoady Lee Architecture and Design on the Big Island on a new house near the Four Seasons at Hualalai that had custom motorized rolling walls of glass and teak (detailed by our own Sandra Baron and Lilly Smith!) that disappear into lava rock walls, opening virtually every room in the house to trellised lanais, an edge-less pool, lushly landscaped courtyards, and sweet tropical breezes. So, how can we introduce these exotic possibilities to the custom houses we design in New England?

One answer is through bi-folding glass walls from companies like Nanawall, and we’ve designed several recent houses that utilize their exceptional technology. Our clients wanted to have large screened porches so they could live outdoors spring, summer and fall without the ubiquitous New England mosquitoes and flies, and wondered how they might join those porches to the rest of the house. Voila, we proposed Nanawall doors and something that has traditionally been a barrier in older New England houses becomes an opportunity. Added benefit: makes a great party house even better!

After a very long, exhausting day flying from Boston to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, and after a bizarre drive across seemingly endless miles of lava – usually at night with little sense of scale – harried visitors are often welcomed by a warm “aloha”, friendly faces, cool towels, fresh guava juice, and hotels unlike anything most of us have seen before. Who knew that hotels didn’t really need walls? As with Hawaiian houses, the main public spaces of most Hawaiian hotels are essentially large open air lanais; no screens as you would find in the Caribbean since flying insects are less prevalent in Hawai‘i, and it is rare to see the discrete bi-folding shutters or sliding skylights closed. The next morning you wake up, and you see views like those below.  Pure heaven! And fresh ideas for how these design possibilities might translate into our own work on custom vacation houses in New England…

Credits:
Mauna Kea Beach Resort: Mauna Kea Beach Hotel
Four Seasons Hualalai: Four Seasons Resort At Hualalai

Having just returned from the Big Island of Hawai‘i – the first time in five years not related at least partially to working with the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center – I still have Hawai‘i on my mind… It doesn’t help that the temperatures dipped into single digits this weekend, with wind chills below zero!

Architects have a hard time traveling without focusing obsessively on local architecture, and Hawaii’s – the openness to the elements, the blurring of inside and outside, the direct link to Asian architecture in both form and spatial flow – is particularly alluring. One key element is the “lanai”, a term first used in Hawai‘i in the early eighteenth century, and elsewhere known generically as a porch or veranda. The Hawaiian Islands are well known for their steady tropical breezes, a benefit and sometimes curse of being located so remotely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaiian lanais are often a house’s primary living space, and provide much needed shade and help Hawaiian buildings breathe by catching the trade winds and using that constant supply of fresh, naturally cooled (by the Pacific) air to remove hotter, more stagnant air. Below are a few of my favorite examples of modern lanais.

Send us your own images and thoughts! And look forward to future posts showing how we bring this “exotic” knowledge to our New England projects!

Will Ruhl

Credits:

Belzberg Architects, Santa Monica, CA: Belzberg Architects
Olson Kundig Architects, Seattle, WA: Olson Kundig Architects
Craig Steeley Architecture, San Francisco, CA: Craig Steely Architecture
Legoretta + Legoretta, Mexico: Legorreta + Legorreta