Introduction to the John S. and James L. Knight Building, Akron Art Museum by Coop Himmelb(l)au

Coop Himmelb(l)au, a cooperative architectural firm (thus Coop, pronounced Co-op), originated in Vienna, Austria but now also has offices in Los Angeles and Guadalajara, Mexico. The punning name translates from German as 'sky blue' (Himmelblau) or as 'heaven construction' (Himmelbau). The design firm, founded by Wolf Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer, was one of several included in the 1988 MOMA exhibition entitled "Deconstructivist Architecture." Although some of the architects included in the exhibit have disavowed the designation (most notably Frank Gehry), many still design buildings in a generally deconstructivist style. These qualities may include fragmentation, non-rectilinear shapes, and a sense of unpredictability and a controlled chaos. Coop Himmelb(l)au designs asymmetrical structures with "open-planned, open-minded, open-ended" designs, made up of complex, undefined spaces. This addition to the Akron Art Museum was the product of an international competition. It is the first building in the United States by this firm and indeed one of the rules of the competition was that the architect chosen could not have built previously in Ohio (thus eliminating Gehry, Eisenman, Hadid, and other notable firms). Coop Himmelb(l)au was known for adaptive reuse of historic buildings, which may have also given them an edge in the competition. The new building is 63,000-square-feet with additional gallery space, an auditorium, museum shop and café. It is joined to the earlier building, dated at 1899, which in its even earlier incarnation had been a post office. (It is the red brick, red-roofed building seen in numerous photographs here.) The addition is defined by three parts: the Crystal (lobby and adjoining areas), the Gallery-Box (space made up of several gallery areas), and the Roof Cloud (the cantilevered roof). These areas will be described further in the respective pages.

 

Alpers - Jannetta Residence

Paul Lukez Architecture

“I had my second home built,” says anesthesiologist Jim Alpers, “and it just happens to be attached to my first house.” What Alpers is saying, in jest, is that the vacation home of his and his family’s dreams (wife Carol Jannetta, M.D., and two sons, ages five and two) is the house they currently live in, in Dover, Massachussetts, about 25 miles west of Boston. The 3,100-square-foot house, designed by architect Paul Lukez, started out as a 1,600-square-foot, timber framed, 1960s Contemporary Cape. Sited on a hilly one-acre lot overlooking the Charles River, the house “wasn’t executed as elegantly as it could have been,” says Lukez. Though structurally sound, the original house was situated awkwardly, with the living room embedded in the center of the house, making the primary living space dark and uninviting. “It was hard to find the main entrance as well,” Lukez says. For Alpers and Jannetta, who do a lot of entertaining, the idea of recycling the bones of the original structure while totally reconfiguring the spaces and creating new ones sounded appealing and cost effective.

A year passed between design and construction while financing was secured.  The resulting two-story, 1,400-square-foot addition was lifted and attached to the completely renovated original house (Lukez says he kept about 75 percent of the existing structure). Along with the new living, dining, and breakfast rooms, the addition includes a cantilevered entry porte-cochere with parking, an entrance vestibule, a master bedroom suite, an office, and a ground-floor playroom.
Throughout the house, Lukez established a rhythm of awning and casement windows that filter natural light and frame vistas. “It was important that every space in the home feel both contained, yet connected to each other, and to the amazing views,” says Lukez. The effect was achieved not only with the windows, which activate the interiors by bringing the outside in, but also by creating a variety of ceiling heights with soffits, that help to delineate areas within the open-plan living, dining, and kitchen spaces. “The soffits are practical too, as they hide ductwork and mechanicals, and in the dining room, a major beam,” says Lukez. “Between the living and dining room the soffit helps with a spatial transition, and in the master bedroom it stiffens the corner, adding some extra structure there.”
Also in the master bedroom suite, the patterns continue with the geometry of the translucent, shoji-like closet doors, which run along the length of the suite. Made of glass covered by a white film, the pattern on the doors mimics the window placement and adds one more rhythmic element to the house.
Materials are rich and warm, including red birch floors and stair treads, walnut cabinets in the kitchen, cherry for a built-in sideboard in the dining room, and limestone in the master bath. “All the surfaces were chosen to bring another dimension of light, shadow, and reflection into the home,” says Lukez. A custom steel and glass stairway, located off the entrance vestibule and anchored to the back of the fireplace adds another reflective surface to the mix.
Alpers, who just returned from Ethiopia with his family and their newly adopted two-year-old, says he loves coming home to the house whether it’s back from a trip overseas, or just home from his easy commute to work. “I love to be cooking in this kitchen and to look over and watch the kids playing in the living room,” he says, trying to describe his favorite space in the house. “But then, I also like the master bathroom. Oh, and the living room is pretty nice. The truth is, we use all the space in this house. There’s nothing we would change.”

House in Kohoku

House in Kohoku
Yokohama, Japan

Torafu Architects

Shaped like a cluster of barnacles, the House in Kohoku doesn’t exactly blend in with its neighbors. Located in a hilly suburb of Yokohama, it has neither the conventional pitched roof nor the standard-issue wood frame. But contained within its reinforced concrete shell is a barrier-free home for a nautical architect and his wife who were ready to chart a new course.
Their children grown and gone, the couple no longer needed the two-story home they built 35 years ago on their flag-shaped property hemmed in by buildings. (“My parents inherited this land from my grandfather and built the old house,” explains the clients’ adult son. “But they wanted a new house to accommodate their lifestyle change.”) Not to mention, their old house had a number of shortcomings – it was cold, dark, and lacked adequate display space for the hundreds of dolls the wife collected while traveling the globe with her husband. So the clients decided to “scrap and build” and asked Torafu Architects to take the helm.
Nodding politely to the old house, the architects kept and reinstalled the original front door, an ornately carved wood panel that contrasts with the smooth concrete. It leads into the entry foyer, an auxiliary vestibule attached to the one room dwelling. Divided into quadrants, the home’s simple, square plan consists of four, distinct areas: kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom topped by a loft that serves as a home office. Accessed by a ladder-like stair, the work area is as compact as a ship’s galley. “It expands the interior but it is an incredibly small space,” says the clients’ son, who ought to know since the loft is his graphic design office. An additional appendage at the rear holds storage and a walk-in closet.
The trick was how to distinguish the functional parts yet maintain the integrity of the whole. “Connected but separate, that’s the theme of this house,” explains Torafu principal Koichi Suzuno. Undifferentiated by full height partitions or the sliding screens commonly used in Japan, the floor plane unifies the house. But at the ceiling level, individual tubular roofs cap the quadrants and branch off in different directions. Topped with a skylight, each roof lets in a modicum of daylight, animating the interior with an ever-changing dance of shadow and sunshine while forging a direct link between interior and exterior.
Because of Kohoku’s densely-populated, terraced topography, this was no mean feat. Since the neighboring house to the north sits on higher ground, accessing the coveted southern exposure was a problem. Blocking sight lines from above necessitated the careful study of both skylight angles and roof shapes. At the same time, external considerations had to mesh with internal height requirements: while the kitchen’s roof had to be low enough to bounce reflected light onto the counters, the bathroom’s roof soars to 23-feet to accommodate the loft. “The volumes on top are definitely not residential in scale,” comments Suzuno.
Yet all four roofs converge at a single spot in the middle. Inside the house this center point is equally important. From here concrete wedges corresponding to the valleys between the roofs descend towards the perimeter walls. While their solid mass separates the quadrants, the slanted openings beneath preserve room-to-room continuity. Furniture placement and custom upholstery fabric underscore the divisions, but uniform interior finishes and the ubiquitous doll collection – thanks to built-in cabinetry they are visible throughout the house – pull it all together.

Seadrift Residence

Photo © Matthew Millman

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Those of us from Northern California can attest to the fact that one of the most beautiful beaches in the world is located about 20 miles north of San Francisco—Stinson Beach. It’s a little wilder than most—windy and often foggy. It’s the kind of place where you want to have bonfires, or surf, or sit by the fireplace in your beach house with the floor-to-ceiling glass doors flung open wide, taking in the sights and sounds.
That’s almost what San Francisco-based architect Cass Calder Smith, AIA’s, client does when she’s at her home in Seadrift, the small community located at Stinson’s northern tip. Her house isn’t on the ocean, but at the mouth of Bolinas Lagoon. Still, the water is there, and it shimmers and laps—just a bit calmer than it might on Stinson Beach proper. And the Fireorb fireplace in the living room of her 1,900-square-foot beach house can be turned to face the deck or the sitting area inside. Smith, whose firm CCS Architecture is known for designing a number of San Francisco’s hottest dining spots, created the net-zero energy consumption house as a getaway to accommodate his client’s three-generation family. The client, who lives in San Francisco, bought the plot of land with its original house (according to Smith, “a tired little one-story built in the 60s that didn’t take advantage of the site”) in 2004, as a weekend retreat for herself and her two sons, both of whom live in the Bay Area and have small children. “What was great about this client was that she knew exactly what kind of house should be there,” says Smith. “She knew the potential of the site.” The site, with the lagoon on one side and views of Mount Tamalpais on the other, hardly needed to be ocean-side to make it worthy of a refined yet casual retreat.
The result of the client’s vision and architect’s hand does the site justice. Local building codes require new construction to be at least three feet above grade in anticipation of rising sea levels. Smith and his team approached the design by thinking of the project as one large dock, with a house in the middle. “Like a pier, the decks on the water side step down to the water with bleacher-like stairs,” says Smith. “My client’s family can sit on the steps and watch the water or the kids swimming. On the street side there’s another deck, and there’s no formal entry. This is a casual beach house. But the connection to the outdoors was crucial. You can see right through from the front to the back.” The glass fence around the lagoon-side deck amplifies connections to the water.
The house itself is an inverted, almost L shape, with public areas—kitchen, living, dining, on one side, and the bedroom wing on the other. Cedar siding treated with a bleaching oil clads the exterior, and the flat roof is rimmed in 316 stainless steel, a product that resists rust and is often used in marine building. Decks are Ipe.
The architect used durable, simple materials throughout the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house’s interior. “We tried to make it all functionally smart,” says Smith. Floors are concrete, the ceiling is paneled with cedar, and custom furnishings designed by CCS, such as walnut bookshelves, a white oak dining table, a white oak island with ample storage in the kitchen, and bunk beds in the kids’ bedroom add to the coherence of the house. Articulated skylights on both sides of the kitchen bring in patterned sunlight throughout the day. Storage areas under the waterside decks provide places to put beach gear and small boats.
On top of it all, the house has zero energy bills. An absence of air conditioning, photovoltaics on the roof that support the split-system heat pump and all electricity, two 4-foot by 8-foot hot water panels for the solar water system, and a xeriscaped landscape with deciduous trees support the Platinum rating, given by Marin County’s point-rating system, which is similar to LEED. Smith admits that it’s easier for a home that’s not used seven days a week to have no energy bills. “For a grid-tied house, every day you’re not there you feed more energy into the grid.” Smith’s clients use the house each weekend, so there are many days during the year to feed that hungry grid, and a lot of free energy ends up flowing back.

And speaking of getting energy back, Smith says he’s lucky enough to have a fairly open invitation to the house whenever he can take the time to enjoy it. “And they cook for me!” he says, modestly.

Island 254 C

Georgian Bay, Canada

Peter Hamilton Architects

Canadians refer to Georgian Bay as the sixth Great Lake. This appendage of Lake Huron is located almost due north of Toronto, and for many residents of that metropolis, Georgian Bay and its myriad small granite islands provide a summertime retreat. Modesty rules here, as many houses originally served as fishing huts and were hand-built.

“Hot water and a shower is heresy for Georgian Bay,” says one of the owners of an acre-and-a-half thimble known as Island 254c. For 40 years a small cottage stood in the center of this outcropping, hidden from the shoreline and its dramatic waterfront views to the west. Today it sports a pair of buildings designed by Toronto-based Peter Hamilton Architects that elegantly accommodates the owners’ getaway needs—including hot showers—without trumping the attitude or aesthetic of the region.


In profile, the five cedar-clad volumes that comprise the 2,000-square-foot main house may evoke the diagonal, shingled cottages of the Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. The building also is reminiscent of low-slung houseboats or of 254c’s predecessor cottage, which was carefully dismantled and recycled. Another resemblance between old and new is more than skin deep: Never intended for wintertime occupancy, the new house, like the old one, foregoes insulation.
For Hamilton, however, the highly articulated main house represents not so much a reference to textbook or vernacular architecture history as a solution to a pressing riddle. The municipality in which Island 254c sits only allows construction of one building and one sleeping cabin on the property. (Boathouses are no longer permitted on the shoreline; 254c’s boathouse is grandfathered.)
Yet, without insulation, Hamilton explains, “you can hear through the walls. That’s why the sleeping cabins are connected at the corners. They appear separated without breaking the building code.” Like toy ducks connected on a string, the four sleeping cabins trail from the larger rectilinear volume that contains the kitchen and living and dining areas. Maple floors throughout were milled from century-old logs recovered from the bottom of Georgian Bay.
“You could have saved in the exterior envelope by making a single bar building,” Hamilton says, “but privacy and other livability issues would be compromised.” Constructing this illusion of a residential compound required no additional structural material, on the other hand. The sleeping cabins are built in a 16-inch balloon frame, while the public room features turned fir columns topped by steel moment connections bolted to timber beams and purlins. The entire structure is placed within a scoop of the glaciated rock that runs along a north-south axis, and is pinned to it for stability. Indeed, a recent tornado launched a nearby fishing cabin into the water, and there is a persistent wind that Hamilton hopes the homeowners will someday harvest with a windmill. 
Even without a full outfit of green accoutrements, the homeowners—a married couple with six children and three grandkids—say the year-old residence is “in sync with the environment,” as the wife puts it. “I want to feel like my house is a verandah. I want to be looking out on the water and hearing it and watching incredible storms,” she says. In a more tangible nod to sustainability, each corner of the main house has a rain chain feeding a cistern that irrigates the vegetable garden.
The parti accommodates the homeowners’ brood nicely, too. “Each family has its own unit, deck, and view this way,” the wife says of the seemingly mutually exclusive sleeping cabins. “You can get away from everybody if you need to. And when you want to be with people, there’s the main cabin. There’s lots of opportunity to interact.” Besides sacrificing frugality for the exterior envelope, Hamilton also notes that island construction comes at a premium—more than twice what it would cost to build on the mainland. And the homeowner acknowledges, “We had many slash-and-burn sessions” as a result. Even so, the highest compliment? She says, “There were tons of things we took out, but it would be hard for me to remember what they were.”

East Windsor Residence

Austin, Texas

Alterstudio Architects, LLP

 

homas Fletcher, father of five, radiologist, and homeowner of a recently completed 4,200-square-foot house near downtown Austin, is sad. “It’s remorse,” he says of the absence of activity now that construction of his house is complete. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed taking part in the realization of this place. I never knew how much I’d miss the process when it was over.” Kevin Alter and Ernesto Cragnolino, principals of Austin-based Alterstudio Architects, deserve the credit for the three-year intellectual exercise that Fletcher had so much fun participating in.

In a neighborhood of early twentieth-century brick chateau-style residences, this house, modern and eye-catching with a base of black Leuders limestone and a broad ipe rain screen at its middle, stands out as what Alter calls “a beautiful object on a hill.” “Despite its four bedrooms, the three-story house is essentially a one-bedroom loft,” says Alter.
The focus may very well be on the top floor, which boasts 270-degree views and which contains the master suite, kitchen, and main living area. But the other two levels have plenty of their own assets. Those moments begin at the street, as you climb a gently rising path of concrete steps before coming to the over-scaled, pivoting glass front door that provides a fluid transition from rough limestone exterior to polished interior. Entering the house you face a stair with large ebonized oak treads hanging in a vertical space that connects all three stories. Past the stair, an etched glass wall reveals moving shadows from a stand of giant bamboo just outside, while a band of clear glass directs attention to a private garden. Rough shards of granite pass through the glass from outside to an interior granite fountain. Up the stairs to the second floor is a formal dining room (complete with catering kitchen and wine cellar), a guest suite at one end, and two bedrooms at the other (at least two of Fletcher’s five children stay with him much of the time). The rooms are well proportioned and have several eye-catching details (a punched window in one, an inverted one in another, built-ins including cabinetry and a bed in the guest suite), but the most notable feature has to be the rain screen. From the dining room, two 10-and-a-half-foot sections of the screen dramatically unfold to reveal some of the amazing views of Austin’s extensive greenbelt and the city beyond “This house is all about looking out,” says Alter, who took pains with the design to downplay the view to the west, with its unsightly power lines and neighboring houses above, and keep the focus on the northern, southern, and eastern views.
Up the stairs again and the third floor delivers the views, enhanced by an uninterrupted ceiling plane in the living area. The edge of the rain screen is apparent, as it rises 18 inches above the floor level “to give you a feeling of safety,” says Alter, “so you don’t feel like you’re going to fall out of the wall-to-ceiling windows.” Those same windows are accentuated by monolithic corner glazing. The west side of the third floor has a strategic pattern of porthole windows to illuminate the interior and contribute to the house’s texture palette with patterns of light and shadow that change through the day.
For Fletcher, who had never before lived in a modern house, living in his new home is wonderful—but not as wonderful as the excitement he felt being involved in its creation. As it evolved, architect and client met every week to discuss all aspects of the project. And while there’s some disagreement over who suggested the cherry picker to demonstrate the importance of building a three-story home, neither Alter nor Fletcher will deny the adrenaline rush they both felt throughout the whole design and construction process. Fletcher experienced so much joy, in fact, that apparently he is ready to put the house on the market and have another one built, with Alter as architect again. “I’m hooked,” he says.

Vashon Island Residence

For Seattle-based artist/designer Roy McMakin, simple things can be very complicated. And vice versa. Take, for example, the house his firm, Domestic Architecture, designed for a longtime friend: a music manager who spends one third of his time in Los Angeles, one third traveling, and one third escaping to his McMakin-designed retreat on Vashon Island, just a 20-minute ferry ride from Seattle. Seen from a distance, the house appears as a quaint farmhouse—a metal gable roof, board and batten siding, double hung windows—set on 13 acres of forest and pastures with views of Puget Sound. But come closer, and you understand why the homeowner says he lives “inside a sculpture” and why, for him, it is a place where personal history and love of art collide. As a dedicated collector of McMakin’s work (furniture and objects that turn nostalgia and domesticity on its head), he turned to his friend to help shape his memories—of the wild meadows of Northern California’s Marin County, where he grew up, as well as his grandmother’s farm in Iowa, where, as a child, he spent his summers—into what he calls “functional art.”
McMakin, who lives on Vashon Island, may not be an architect, but, says Domestic Architecture project architect Ian Butcher, AIA, “he knows architecture. He’s learned it.” According to McMakin, he and Butcher have a kind of “mind meld” going on after six years of working together, with McMakin as lead designer, taking abstract ideas about the familiar, the vernacular, and human perception, and subverting them. Butcher, in turn, articulates those ideas as drawings and then, as real buildings.
The program for this house called for two floors with an open, irregularly shaped living, kitchen, and dining area, a study, and three bedrooms, each with its own bath. The client also wanted a basement that could be accessed from both inside and outside the house, much like his grandmother’s home. He had admired a drawing from McMakin’s 2003 book of sketches of residential work that showed a barn-like structure with a row of uniformly spaced windows. Bringing that sketch to life for the client, McMakin and Butcher created a home with natural light in mind. “First, we oriented the main living spaces of the house toward the water, which is where the winter solstice sun sets,” says McMakin. “Then, we oriented the other side of the house for the summer solstice sun. Reconciling those two geometries gave us the crazy roof structure.” That crazy roof results from two volumes that collide at an obtuse angle, with adjoining walls either removed or made transparent with floor-to-ceiling glass, as well as a master suite that cantilevers out over a patio below. The sequenced windows that the client so admired are there—double-hung and regularly spaced regardless of what they run into, such as corners, cabinetry, or walls they must bend around. “The sequencing sets up an order and a logic,” says McMakin, “but that logic gets bent.” The whimsy continues with a third form, a concrete lean-to that functions as both entry and laundry room.
It’s a complicated house, in many respects, but it’s also a comfortable place to live. “Mostly,” says the owner, “it’s just my home. When I get on that ferry to go there, I feel the stress just melting away.”