So I had to prepare some construction drawings to pass along to the contractor who will be building this playhouse. His name is Barry Buford and he has his own construction company – Buford Builders, Inc., and he and I have collaborated on projects before. Barry has successfully bid and built some of our best projects and he built one of the playhouses I designed for CASA last year (surprise – it was the ORIX USA Japanese theme playhouse). Since I put together the AIA/ CASA playhouse competition event, I wasn’t going to design a playhouse this year; but ORIX USA asked for us specifically I couldn’t say no – it’s a good cause.
Since I basically used my sketchbook to work out the concept and beginning geometry, I did most of the fine tuning in a modeling program called sketchup which I use all the time and have been for the last 10 years. I could have exported the sketchup model straight out to AutoCAD but I am fairly particular about the pen weights in my drawings so I like drafting out my own details. It is important to me that on these intrinsic playhouses that all the fine details be worked out and that everything is resolved. This is important in all my projects but particularly so on a project of such small scale.
When these playhouses get built, it’s easy to think of them as things instead of a collection of parts. From the earliest stages of design, I think about what materials I want to use while keeping a budget in mind. The materials I select and the design I try and put together is intended to reflect all the actual joints and patterns that the materials will make when they are used in the construction of this particular playhouse. I think about things like:
- If I move this pattern to this spacing, I can get all the pieces I need from a single 4×8 sheet of material, or
- I can layer this assembly and use fewer 2×4′s for structure support and create the imagery needed with lighter members (which will cost less), or
- If I put a batten pattern on running horizontally, I can protect the playhouse from people entering it while it’s on display (CASA playhouse requirement), which will be more cost efficient than installing plexiglass around the bottom.
So here are the construction drawings I prepared for Buford Builders. I realized that because of the time left to get this built, and the fact that I am leaving for Paris in a few days, I needed to get these drawn and over to Barry pronto. I spent about 4 hours drawing these – I don’t know if that seems like a long time or not. I like to think I draft really fast but these were a little fussy. I will go over them with Barry to discuss options and some of the finer details we need to get right but I’m lucky that I have Barry building this for me (and so is CASA and the eventual owner of this little beauty). Barry is one of the very best contractors I have ever had the pleasure to work with – maybe the best. If I won the lottery and was able designed my own house from scratch, there is no doubt that I would get Barrry to build it for me. I have seen him go out of his way – to his own financial detriment – to make sure a client is happy. I have never met a more honest, direct, and genuinely considerate person in my life. If everybody’s experience with a builder was like working with Buford Builders, contractors would would have a fantastic reputation.
I will come back through later and post some progress photos and certainly some final construction photos. I am really happy with how this playhouse is shaping up. I hope everyone else is as pleased as I am.
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“Music and the creative process”
“Architecture and Music”
These are phrases within questions that I have been getting asked since I was 18 years old but I should probably provide you with some of my musical background first. Everyone in my family is pretty musically gifted and despite the tales my father would tell you about his trumpet playing, most of our natural abilities most likely came from our mother. My mom graduated with her college degree in music education and had herself a sweet little recording career (even if it was short-lived). She was in a singing group in college called “The Chordettes” who recorded such timeless classics as “Mr. Sandman” and “Lollipop, Lollipop” and I would bet that no matter your age, you are familiar with these songs. Yes, I know – that is pretty cool.
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I grew up with literally musical instruments in every room of my house; we had a multi-tiered organ, a baby grand piano, an upright piano, multiple violins, a french, horn, an oboe, and at one time or another, a clarinet, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, tenor saxophone and a marimba (and no, we didn’t moonlight as stand-ins for the Partridge family). This was all for me and my two sisters, and it was pretty cool until I got to high school and it wasn’t really that cool anymore. Other than the french horn and oboe, I played all the others. I started on violin in 4th grade, moved onto clarinet in 5th grade, than bass clarinet in 7th (clarinet’s were for girls…and adding bass to the front made it more masculine) and when I learned that I couldn’t be in the jazz band with my rocking cool bass clarinet, I taught myself saxophone during the summer before 9th grade so I could be in the jazz band in high school. It was a grade requirement that we try out for All-City bands but I also tried out for All-Region band and All-State band. I made All-City and All-Regions every year starting in 7th grade and All-State my junior and Senior years in High School. Sounds great right? I HATED band more than I can possibly describe without working blue; it had a serious impact on my social life as I perceived it. So why did I do it? Those who know me know that I have a teeny-tiny competitive streak and while I hated what the perception of band did to for me, I didn’t actually hate the music part.
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This pattern continued into college where I was in the Marching Band in the Fall semesters and Jazz Ensemble in the Spring semesters. I could only manage to keep up with it for 3 years before it starting creating problems with my architecture studios. Anyone who has gone to architecture school will understand what I mean – studio is incredibly demanding of your time and I couldn’t afford to have a extra curricular activity that required so much attention and dedication, so I finally quit. To this day, I think my mom was a little disappointed that I didn’t pursue a musical career. A little known fact – I made it through 3 years of roommates in college who never knew I was in the marching band – pretty impressive feat I’d say.
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I told you all that because being around that much music for that long has broadened my understanding and appreciation of music. I generally believe that I listen to music differently than most people. I break it down without thinking about, pulling apart bass lines, rhythm patterns, etc. and then I put them back together. When I was in my formative teenage years, I had already put a lot of time in listening to classical, big band and more traditional jazz standards. Despite the wasteland of music that the early 80′s provided (sorry Whitesnake, but you sucked), I was still pulling out albums from my parents collection of vinyl and listening to BB King, Stan Kenton and Tommy Dorsey. Once I realized that I wasn’t helping my street cred in high school, I started going more indie (e.g. the Cure, Depeche Mode, Yaz, etc.). I still liked all that other stuff, I just kept it to myself.
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In design studio, where you are trapped for 12+ hours a day, I was the one who played my tapes for the room. Since I didn’t listen to just one type of music, I generally covered the collective musical tastes of everyone (although we did institute a rule that if 1 person didn’t want to listen to what was being played, it got changed). Just like back then in studio, I still listen to a lot of music while I work – probably like a lot of architects/ creative types. Music can help set a mood, bring energy to the process, or act as white noise when focus is needed. There is a lot of research being developed that evaluates the development of your brain when exposed to music; both playing it and listening to it. A particularly interesting article that I came across mentioned that “studies had shown that the brains of adult musicians have structural and functional differences from those of non-musicians”. And “…ongoing study, led by Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College, and Gottfried Schlaug, professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School,…found no difference between the music and non-music groups on skills unrelated to music performance, such as language, perceptual reasoning or abstract reasoning. However, a separate study has found tight correlations between music training and mathematical reasoning, suggesting that continued longitudinal research and cooperation with educators may yet uncover definite links.” Hmmm….interesting…not really.
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As I have aged, my musical tastes haven’t changed as much as I like to think they have but they are still pretty broad. I also feel like I’m getting old person music taste because a lot of today’s music all sounds the same to me – that and I remember when the original version the hooks that everyone is using came out. I’m lucky I have a private office so I can stream music all day long and listen to whatever, whenever for however. For me, music is a big deal and whenever I need to get a lot of work done, I have to have music playing. Even when I sat down to write this post, it was almost impossible to select the album covers I was going to use. In the end, I just selected what was on my iPod nano that I use when mowing the lawn.
People always want to associate musicans, or at least people with musical tendencies, with architecture; that one was directly associated with the other. I never did associate one with the other and don’t really think that they are directly related – otherwise, why was I the only person in architecture school that played in the band? Shouldn’t the program have been lousy with musicans? It wasn’t – but everyone up there wanted music playing in studio, all the time. I just thank my lucky stars that I got to pick the music.
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