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The Front Porch and "The Garden"

HISTORY

As an architect, the design of place has always held an incredible fascination to me. To be able to be a part of creating a built environment that is beautiful and useful has always held an appeal that is hard to describe. I first wanted to be an architect when I was in fifth grade; and that “desire of my heart” stuck throughout my teen and young adult years.


The place of homes has also always intrigued me. The places we live and eat and raise our kids have held a special place in my passions. Even in my junior high years, I would design houses for classmates for 25¢ or 50¢ on taped-together pieces of typing paper.


Homes are an incredible place where we live and interact with those we love and care deeply about. Even Jesus is “going to prepare a place” for us that where he is, we may be also. This is a huge part of who we are as humans and what we need physically, emotionally and spiritually.


CULTURAL HISTORY

Culturally, porches have been around since ancient times. In Greek and Roman architecture, porches were common. Also called porticos, loggia or verandas, these covered, open structures attached to buildings were everywhere.


And, in the history of the United States, porches were brought here with the melting pot of cultures coming into this country from Europe and Africa and were also common throughout our early history until right around World War II.


CONNECTION TO NATURE

Porches are a splendid connection we have to nature. It’s about how we feel when we’re outside. The refreshing aspect of sitting out enjoying Creation. I think this can be traced back to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve walking in the “cool of the day” with God. We have within us that God-given connection to nature, that desire to be part of the Garden.


Even in the US, this connection to nature was so strong that we established the world’s first national park in 1872. There is an innate sense in our being that we are somehow connected to nature and the outdoors. The fresh air, the activity. It’s live, not YouTube.


CONNECTION TO NEIGHBORS

Porches also are a wonderful way to interact with our neighbors. To sit on the front porch in a chair or a swing, sipping ice tea or lemonade in our present “cool of the day” still holds an amazing appeal to us. To be able to greet our neighbors and have a short chat fosters a very spiritual concept called “community”.


While our connection to nature could be part of the first great commandment of loving God, our connection to those in our immediate community could be part of that second commandment to love our neighbor. Do we really love our neighbor? Do we even KNOW our neighbor? We’ve fallen out of touch with those around us.


DEMISE OF THE FRONT PORCH

Three events in the mid 20th Century had an almost fatal effect on the front porch and our connection to our neighbors: the automobile, the air conditioner and the television.


In the summer time, we would often sit outside in the evenings to escape the heat inside our homes. Little insulation, no air conditioning, no TV made this a viable, even necessary alternative. And we didn’t have large back yards with large decks, barbecues and spas. So we’d sit on our front porches and watch our neighbors and friends walk by. We walked more then since we maybe had one car per family and not too many places to drive to.


With the growing availability of the automobile, we became much more mobile as a society. We could go places, and we did. We weren’t home as much. Most people could afford a car, some two. We spent less time in our neighborhood, on our porches. At first, garages were detached buildings at the back of our property. Then, they were attached so we could go directly inside our homes. Then the garage to “house” our cars became a dominant architectural feature. And when electric openers gained even more popularity, we could drive home, press a remote-control button, open our garage door, drive inside and never have contact with any of our neighbors.


With the advent of the air conditioner, we also didn’t have to escape the heat of our homes. We could stay inside in a thermally-constant, comfortable environment. And we had something to occupy our time while inside: television. Television literally exploded in the late 1940s. In 1948, there were 350,000 TVs in the US. By August 1949, there were 2 million. October 1950, 8 million and by 1953, half of all US homes (25 million) had TVs.


Houses didn’t need front porches anymore, so there was a trend toward the ranch house and a simple box with maybe a small roof over the front door… or maybe not.


LONGINGS AND THE NEW URBANISM

I was born in 1956, after World War II, so I don’t remember growing up in a house with a front porch. I designed our first two houses, and both had front porches; but they were really just token porches; they weren’t “real”. They were just for show or as that transition space between outside and inside. It happened during the period of the late 1980s and early 1990s when we started putting porches back on the front of our houses, but I’m not sure we really knew why.


I’m thinking now it was a longing for what we no longer had in our connection to the outdoors and our connection to our neighbors. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we remembered a time when we had those connections and it was a time of the front porch. Our connection to God (vertical, through nature and the outdoors) and our connection to our neighbors (horizontal, through a chair and some lemonade) is, I believe, fundamental to the way we are created.


There is a trend in planning that is what I’d call a sort of return to our roots. It’s that desire to regain some of what we lost with the automobile, the air conditioner and the television. It is a desire for the simpler, more basic lifestyle where we can breathe a little easier and be a little calmer. It’s a Sabbath of sorts, where we don’t feel compelled to produce, we can just be.

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TV Commercials

I was trying to think of a blog topic that relates to “halving it all” and started to feel like I had exhausted a lot of the topics. Then I thought of TV commercials. And that sent me down an interesting path of thought.

My wife and I some time ago cut our cable TV subscription back to the bare basic minimum. In fact, we would have cut it out completely, but with our internet service, the basic cable TV is almost free, so we kept it. What we discovered some time ago was iTunes and AppleTV. We have found we can buy our TV shows (the few we watch) for less money than the expanded basic cable service. So we did. And while that didn’t “halve” our costs, it did something much deeper.

It eliminated the commercials.

Not only can we watch a one hour show in 42 minutes (yes, a typical one hour show has 18 minutes of commercials), we don’t see the commercials. And while that can sometimes be a conversation blocker in a social setting when someone asks “did you see the new Pepsi commercial?”, it really hasn’t hurt us any. What it HAS done is we now find we want less “stuff”.

We realized in kind of an epiphany yesterday that we are much more content with what we have. We’re not bombarded with the constant 18 minutes per hour of all the stuff we can’t live without. And we’re finding we can live without a lot of it. We don’t need the latest this or that or the new whatever.

And we’re much happier.

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theFERN – Marathon, Texas

Here are some pictures of Steven Jones’ progress on theFERN that he’s building in Marathon, Texas.

He is using SIPs panels from EH Systems (http://www.ehssips.com/) and their panels will be featured in the Easter Edition of Extreme Makeover Home Edition on ABC.
I’ll be posting more pictures and following Steven’s progress as he builds theFERN. I’ll also be uploading to our website more pictures and information for you to see.
The beauty of the SIPs is these exterior walls and roof panels were installed in two days.
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The Lawrence Street House – LEED for Homes

We have officially registered our home with the US Green Building Council. This is the first step in pursuing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification.

In addition to this registration, we hire a LEED rater — Earth Advantage from P-Town. Our local rater is Eli and he worked with us on theSAGE.
He is starting some preliminary calculations for the building shell (walls, floors, roof insulation and windows) so we can establish a baseline of where we’ll be for energy efficiency.
One concept we’ll be incorporating throughout is the idea that the most efficient heater, the most efficient light, the most efficient (insert item here) is the one you don’t have to use in the first place. This saves on many levels: initial cost (you don’t buy it), operating costs (you don’t use it) and maintenance costs (if it ain’t there, you don’t have to fix it).
I do have to insert here that there are some up front costs associated with some efficiency measures (extra insulation to reduce heating and cooling needs). But in the overall life-cycle cost of a home, only about 10-15% is the initial cost; virtually all of the rest (about 85%) is the operating and maintenance costs: paying for the energy to run the furnace or turn on the lights.
So we will be looking at efficiency measures up front. The house is already designed to take advantage of natural lighting and we’re looking at every other component with these efficiency measures in mind.
As an aside, I think we’re going to love our new neighborhood. Brenda and I went down last week to mow the weeds (trying to be a good neighbor), and met our soon-to-be neighbor, Jim. We had a very pleasant conversation with him and I’m sure we’ll enjoy living on Lawrence.
Stay tuned.
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The Lawrence Street House – SDU (finally)

Finally. We have the design for our secondary dwelling unit (aka SDU). It’s amazing how challenging it has been to design a two-bedroom, one bath home in under 800 square feet.

City of Eugene code allows for a second dwelling on the same property if the lot is large enough (it is), if the owner of the property lives in one of the houses (we will) and the second house is no larger than 800 square feet (it comes in at a relatively lean 776 square feet).
Having the mindset of small homes and having done this before with theFERN plan, I thought this would be fairly straightforward. Was I wrong. theFERN is a generous 1,024 sq ft. It’s interesting when you get this small how every inch counts even more.
Our SDU is 250 sq ft SMALLER than theFERN. That’s the equivalent of a room 15 x 16 feet. Pretty large. And we still wanted two bedrooms.
After lots of pushing and pulling, reviews, sketches, redraws, redesign, hair-pulling, we feel we have a really good plan. It blends well with our main house and will have similar details. You can download a larger pdf version of the picture by clicking here.
I’m actually very happy with the way it laid out.
AND, we met with our Landscape Architect yesterday and he’s starting on the site/landscape. I’ll talk more about our design goals and philosophy about the landscape in a future post.
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The Lawrence Street House – Refinements Pt 2

We have refined the exterior as well as the floor plan and are now very happy with every aspect of the design. Click here for a larger image of the south elevation.

We’ve added arbors over the south windows at the living room and over Brenda’s potting bench area off the garage. The front porch is reminiscent of the Craftsman Bungalow houses from the early 1900s. We want to blend in with the rest of the neighborhood. We also want to capture the front porch concept that is missing in our culture. More on that later; this is something stirring deeply in us.
I’m also meeting in a couple of days with our LEED Rater to get started on our LEED certification. And, I’m now starting on the design for the Secondary Dwelling Unit that will be located along 15th by the alley. More as that progresses, too.
We’re getting more and more excited about our new home!
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The Lawrence Street House – Refinements

The design is progressing. We’ve been in the refinement stage of design development, taking the thoughts and ideas that came out of our design charrette and massaging the design.

We’ve been working 3D and in plan together; that’s always a good thing. Many designers start by getting the plan worked out then “forcing” an elevation on it. That’s dangerous and can lead to amazingly mediocre design.
We work in plan and 3D at the same time, going back and forth, thinking about how a change might affect the exterior as well as how the spaces work.
One thing that came out of all this is a relatively major rearranging of our bath/utility core. Primarily this was due to walking out of the Master Bedroom and looking right into the Main Bath and the double doors into the house from the Garage (one in the Utility and one into the Kitchen). We looked at a way to improve both of those layouts and the attached picture shows where we’re ending up.
Utility: is close to the kitchen door, so coming in from working in the yard will be less obtrusive (I think we’ll have a bench in the Garage to remove shoes at least). Nice linen closet and ironing board. We’ve moved the water heater into the ceiling space above the Utility (with a drain pan) which will be insulated and adjacent to the furnace. Nice folding counter over the washer and dryer.
Main Bath: is now even a little more private from the rest of the house. By moving it where we have it, not only do we not come out of the Master Bedroom and look into the Bath, we have a great wall for artwork there and probably will do a shallow recess niche to accentuate that wall.
Master Bath: much better storage (a huge linen), nice window over the toilet and still have our large shower.
Glass Block and Natural Light: we have tried various ideas to get natural light into the interior rooms (Main Bath and Utility). Some of my initial ideas involved translucent ceilings and skylights, but simpler is always better and did prevail. You may notice on the plan small openings at the master shower and the Main Bath tub. These are glass blocks as thru-wall “windows”. The one into the Main Bath tub is a vertical stack of blocks and the one at the shower is a horizontal row just above the counter in the Utility. This will allow borrowed light from the Master Bath to filter into the interior rooms. And, if you’re concerned about privacy, they make glass blocks with filter inserts which allow the light and maintain privacy.
We’re refining the exterior, too and I’ll post that soon.
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The Lawrence Street House – Design Development

>Well, the charrette spurred some creative juices, as I mentioned. I’ve spent the last few days refining some things and developing the plan a little further. Refining it a little more. Tweaking it. Making it better.

The last sketch was an exterior idea, very rough. I’ve refined it a bit more and put a little color to it. Amazing what the 3D modeling, sketch paper, a little PhotoShop and some time will produce.
We’re actually, day by day, getting more stoked about our new house. The way it is coming together, the refinements and the minor changes that lead to continual improvements, is amazing.
I mentioned in an earlier post about how well this sort of design process works. It is proving to be true… again.
Our thoughts on the exterior are grey shingle siding above a golden stucco base. That may change when we get down to the final design, but is what we’re going with for now. I’ve also made a few changes to the interior plan — main bath, utility core and den. I’ll post those soon.
I think we’re getting close to jumping into working drawings and details. Just a little more refinement and we should be there.
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The Lawrence Street House – Charrette

What is a charrette? The classic definition is an intense period of design activity. It usually consists of gathering several of the involved people, clients and designers in one room for an uninterrupted time of brain-storming.

We have found this to be valuable, resulting in incredible results with our previous project, theSAGE, so thought we should do this with our home.
So Friday, January 29, myself, my wife, my business partner Dan and one of our staff, Ryan, sat down for about 2 1/2 hours to go over our schematic design I have shown you here over the last few posts. It was a time of collaboration and exchange of ideas, as well as a fresh look at the home.
Sometimes, we can be too close to a design. With that, it takes an “outsider’s” perspective to give some input. This time yesterday was incredibly valuable. Both Dan and Ryan understand my wife and my lifestyle enough that they gave us input and insights we hadn’t either thought of or considered.
With that, we are making some refinements to the plan layout, specifically in the main bath, utility and den areas. We also had a chance to refine the exterior direction, which is the rough sketch you see above. Our first “hit” on the exterior was good, but this is better, so we’re heading this way.
Over the next few days, I’ll be refining the plan and developing the exterior a little further. We are now entering what we call the design development phase. This means the schematic is on track, we can develop things with a little more detail and refinement before we enter the working drawings stage.
My wife and I are even more excited about the direction our home design is going and are looking forward to this next phase. The process is working. And it’s working really well.