Harrison Modern -- Funky Mid-Century Modern that Speaks to Today

I have been riding my bicycle past the Harrison Modern for almost a decade now, always appreciative of its  design and one that I have been yearning to share for some time. Unfortunately, its predominant exposure faces north, making its photography less than ideal for a majority of the year and thus potentially depriving the building the adoration it so deserves. Imagine my great joy when, a couple of weeks back, I was walking past in the late afternoon -- camera in hand -- with the lighting just perfect for portraying the Harrison's many charms.

Located at the intersection of 12th and Harrison, the Harrison Modern is clearly a building whose designers were firmly rooted in mid-century modernism. Built in 1951 and designed by Victor Martin, the Harrison is not only exemplary of that era, but it also foreshadows current trends in architectural design in its use of layered cubic forms as exemplified by the work of such contemporary Dutch architects as MVRDV in the Edificio Celosía, pictured below. This stacking design approach, though all the rage now, was most certainly pretty avant-garde over 60 years ago, and continues to mark the Harrison unique among Capitol Hill's vintage buildings.

What I am calling a stacked or layered design is one where each floor (or grouped floors) is expressed individually and in a very like manner, without the more traditional base, middle, and top.  In both the Harrison and MVRDV example, this stacking is expressed not only by revealing the floor lines, but also by carving out voids for balconies that emphasize the volume of the floors above or below.  The Harrison's design captures this layered design approach to create cleverly framed outdoor spaces that exhibit the modernist desire forblending  indoor and outdoor space, including a generous upper floor balcony that must provide  a great view of the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains. On a more intimate scale, the north facing veranda of the Harrison is  crisply framed, forming a powerfully simple, elegant, and dignified facade along Harrison Street.

Along 12th Avenue, the busier of the two streets upon which the Harrison is sited, a more formal facade was in order and is fittingly more massive in temperament. The contrast, and utility between, these three elevations is achieved by the simple rotating of the lower and upper floors to best suite their orientation, an ease of effort to effect that has long captivated me. A powerful difference is accorded between the two floors; on the longer, northern elevation is the lower form which represents the void, and on shorter, eastern elevation, it is the upper form. A lower floor ying to the upper floor yang, as it were.

Contrasting the bold cubic forms above are the cascading stones and plantings that mark the entry ramp into the building. While on one level apparently quite different form the building's aesthetic, this little bit of landscape is actually within the spirit of its mid-century heritage, and provides a finishing touch to one of Capitol Hill's finest small buildings. If I squint a bit, I can imagine the Harrison at home in say, Palm Springs or Malibu, but am quite content knowing it is our neighborhood.

The Common House - The Heart of a Cohousing Community

Design matters. In the design of cohousing, intention also matters. What sets cohousing apart from other types of conventional housing models - whether it is single family neighborhood, condominiums, or apartments - is that in cohousing, there is a physical space that is the heart of the community, and that space is the Common House. It is the stage in which community life (and intention) plays itself out.

While most common houses have the same programmatic elements - a dining room, kitchen, kids play room, and laundry, I would argue that they are not all created equal. The success of a Common House results from the careful juxtaposition of the above programmatic spaces and how they relate to each other. And the intentionality behind the design of each room also lends to the success. After having visited over 80 cohousing communities in the past 8 years my measure of a successful common house is how often its rooms are used by the community. During my visits to cohousing communities I have seen some rooms that were seemingly well designed, but were reported by residents to have received little usage due to poor acoustics, lack of visual connection, uncomfortable furniture, poor lighting, etc.

I have also seen rooms that were clearly designed as a "multi-purpose" space - and therefore, it serves no single purpose well. I acknowledge that space is often a premium in cohousing (either due to physical constraints or budget) and that the Common House needs to support a diversity of programmatic uses – large events, community dinners, canning of summer harvest, a musical combo. I would argue that a well-designed Common House will contain rooms that are well suited for the uses programmed for a given space while still allowing future flexibility for how that space might be adapted for another use.

How is this achieved? Through careful application of patterns - as enumerated by Christopher Alexander in his seminal book A Pattern Language. In 2006, I used Alexander's book as the basis of codifying the essential elements of Common House Design and created some additional patterns that I felt were important to better accommodate the intentionality of cohousing communities as I had observed in Denmark. It was apparent that the Danes had been more concerned about the specific uses of each space and not so much on each space needing to satisfy a litany of multi-purposes. And thus, their Common Houses had an air of hygge that is less frequently found in the Common Houses I have experienced in North America.

Designing the Cohousing Common House is the title of the book I wrote to document my findings of Danish Common Houses. The book includes, in addition to my own, Alexander’s patterns. My book has been requested by architects designing their first cohousing community, students researching cohousing, and residents who are planning for the design of their common house - these requests have come from across the US, as well as from Poland, Australia, Belgium, and England.  It is available for purchase by contacting Schemata Workshop.

In addition to the book, and if you are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to attend my workshop on Common House Design at the National Cohousing Conference in Oakland, CA. 1-5pm on June 15, 2012.

Seattle Asian Art Musuem -- Art Deco Splendor in Volunteer Park (Part 1 of 2)

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park is a splendid building housing a magnificent collection of ancient and contemporary art. Designed by the Seattle firm Bebb and Gould (designers of many noteworthy structures in Seattle, including many prominent homes on Capitol Hill) and built in 1933, it originally housed the entire collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Set within Volunteer Park, SAAM shares its museum-in-the-park setting with other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose home is in New York City’s Central Park. As private collections predated by centuries those offered for public view, the museum-in-the-park typology finds precedent in that of the manor house in the landscape of either a noble’s estate in Europe or that of the landed elite of the East coast of the United States. Both the museum and the public garden are places of leisure, and their pairing is sensible, for sure, and allows for a full day’s outing both in and out-or-doors. In this tradition, SAAM and Volunteer Park present no less compelling a pairing than their historic or big city predecessors.

Art-deco (approximately the style in which SAAM was designed), to my mind, has always had a somewhat precarious and undervalued place within the history of modernist design. It never garnered the serious attention paid to many other 20th century movements, because it was seen, perhaps, as only a pleasant if not too serious ‘scenic’ detour along the thoroughfare of the more rigorous, international style modernism that eclipsed it. Architects, especially, like to see modernism as the built manifestation of industrialization and of the Enlightenment’s goal of human progress. Modernism’s emphasis on functionality, abstraction, and a machine aesthetic are well known. While modernist, art deco was perhaps too populist an expression of modernism’s machine aesthetic ideology, leading to deco’s being ultimately and sadly dismissed by ‘serious’ practitioners and their academies in favor of more somber fare. Ironically, deco’s embellishment with organic motifs and stylized figures doomed it to a short life even if those embellishments were crafted in the same materials, precision, means of that modernism propounded. Given its rather short life and relatively meager legacy, we are fortunate indeed to have such a building as SAAM, and that it is open to all to relish in.

Among modern materials aluminum figures prominently, including in many art deco designs such as at SAAM.  While not a new material, aluminum’s manufacturing costs had been significantly reduced by the late 19th and early 20th century making it more readily available (until then, it was priced as was silver).  As important to its new, ready availability, was aluminum’s light-weight, corrosion resistance, and excellent casting characteristics -- the perfect combination of qualities for the ornamental metal work sought by art deco architects. Add to that the fact these qualities allowed it to be utilized in its pure and visually uncompromised form (by being either polished or clear anodized – not painted) and you have the almost perfect ‘new’ material for the ‘new’ architecture, with no Seattle example better (art deco or otherwise) than in the spectacular aluminum screens and doors that comprise the entry at SAAM. With its organic motifs, shininess, and casting precision, the entry screen ranks among the best architectural features of any building in our city. And, dare I say, many an architect’s current fetish with screening and de-materializing could learn much from the effectiveness of SAAM’s entry screens in achieving those same qualities, the full effectiveness of which are realized best upon entry into SAAM (so go ahead, go in!).

Upon entering SAAM, one is impressed by a lobby that is of a grandeur befitting not only the institution itself, but also of the powerful design vocabulary offered by art deco. Still in a relatively early stage of modernism, art deco had to resolve many new and modern functional requirements, oftentimes without the off-the-shelf products available to today’s practitioners. Things that are now easily ordered from a vendor’s product line were either unavailable or were sufficiently rare enough that the architect had to design those elements themselves. In the skillful hands of SAAM’s architects, such commonalities as air grills, light fixtures, clocks, or doors became objects d’art in-and-of themselves, and are a testament to a comprehensiveness of design mostly absent from today’s buildings. While it is true that standardization has made such objects much more attainable (and therefore useful), there is something lamentable in this loss of design-in-depth. There is no escaping the observation that despite their adding of flourishes to such functional objects, there is an underlying and guiding reliance on streamlined aesthetic resulting from industrial manufacture – an aesthetic that (is essentially the same and) holds its own against a more ideologically correct modernism.

This being art deco, there is more to see than stylized architectural furnishings in SAAM. Gold foil, polished and richly veined marbles, and of course, curved surfaces abound. Despite this potentially chaotic assemblage of luxurious materials and forms, there is a skill in their assembly at SAAM that creates not only sumptuous spaces, but adds a dignity and refinement befitting of the art contained within -- which is the focus of the next post -- the architecture of the galleries themselves.

Project Profile: MCM Lakehouse

Schemata Workshop recently visited the MCM Lakehouse on Lake Sammamish for a construction tour.  This 1960s vintage home renovation project is nearly complete and the owners will be moving in next month. [caption id="attachment_3502" align="alignnone" width="687" caption="We started the tour at the driveway surrounded by the wooded site."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3501" align="alignnone" width="386" caption="From the driveway, the stairs lead to a courtyard surrounded by three glazed walls."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3503" align="alignnone" width="386" caption="The first space we entered was the two-story living room. The louvered wall and shoji screens above are original to the house."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3504" align="alignnone" width="687" caption="Around the corner from the living room is the kitchen. The steel moment frame provides support for the white quartz eating bar."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3505" align="alignnone" width="386" caption="Next, we ascended the original stairway with new treads that match the new second floor hardwood floors. The wood handrail is being replaced and will match the stair treads."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3506" align="alignnone" width="386" caption="The second floor bathroom is full of natural light. The red light fixtures are an unexpected color accent."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3507" align="alignnone" width="386" caption="The original closet drawers and shelves were able to be reused in the bedroom closets."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3508" align="alignnone" width="687" caption="Finally, we met outside near the lake. This vintage house now looks very modern!"][/caption]

Capitol Hill's Alley Experiments

As related in the previous post on Capitol Hill's alleys, their inherently less public nature creates a social environment distinct from that of their associated streetscapes. Furthermore, this distinct environment has fostered experimentation in the design of alley landscapes and buildings. While not in the avant-garde, these experiments can nonetheless be seen as a foil to the more ordered and regular streetscapes they are paired with. Some alley experiments are simply whimsical and relatively ephemeral in nature, others relatively daring in their re-conceiving of typical alley elements into bolder more modern constructs, exploiting the alley as a vehicle for design exploration.

One impetus for alley experiments is found in the blending & compacting of roadway, sidewalk, and landscape into an area of less girth than our streets, and, therefore, to lesser expectations for openness and transparency. An indicator of this variance with the normative can be seen in the retaining walls that frequently demise the alley, but at a scale and opacity rarely seen on streets. Such robustness results from the fact that alleys and their walls are frequently used to terrace grades along our hilly landscape. Charged with retaining massive amounts of earth, alley walls cannot be bothered with the niceties of pedestrian scale and detail that are incumbent street side, and are therefore able to more efficiently discharge their duty. Pictured below is a landscape wall that directly and unapologetically dispenses with its retaining chores, and is a good representative of the normative condition.

On Capitol Hill's alleys such large retaining walls often contain other service elements, including garages. Combining programmatic elements is perhaps only mildly experimental, and is much like the wall-garage combinations in Capitol Hill's Harvard historic district. The wall-garage combo pictured below deftly combines it various services, and to the extent possible, is traditionally detailed and landscaped. And though thoughtfully executed and within the stylist expectations of the neighborhood, such a length of predominantly blank wall would cause an outcry if it were on the street and would be seen as an affront to neighborliness. On the alley, however, such a carefully designed wall/garage/landscape can actually be seen to be in the best of taste.

Just up the alley  from the above example (next door to it, in fact) is a decidedly modernist interpretation of the same typology. And most likely for the same traditional type of home that the above serves. Bold in its geometry and Spartan in detail, its design is most certainly not derivative of the home is serves, and provides a contemporary counterpoint to what is typically seen on the street in this section of Capitol Hill. The only relief to the mass of the wall is the setting back of the three garage doors and one pedestrian door, both similar to the previous example, but again, lacking the architectural embellishments.

Not all alley experiments are so willful. While it is hard to miss the above two examples, alley experiments appear in smaller, subtler ways, with the glass block wall below a fine example. Glass block and good design are not typically uttered in one sentence, glass block  perhaps the most abused of modernist tropes; yet, pictured below is an attractive use of this beleaguered material as one is to find on the Hill. Here, the adjacent bamboo blends in perfectly with the wall; its distinctive, modernist lines adeptly blending with the lines of the glass block.

Fortunately, such modernist expressions are not restricted to the landscape. Entire modernist buildings are realized in our alleys, allowing for the fulfillment of the latent modernist design leanings of homeowners -- leaning that they are otherwise too timid to express street side where they would be in full view of watchful neighbors whose design prerogatives most likely lean toward maintaining the decorum  of the otherwise traditional homes and landscapes. Alleys, on the other hand, are the perfect crucible for those having the vision -- but not necessarily the brashness -- to pepper a bit of contemporary in our neighborhood.

And it not simply modernist deviants that are to be found in our alleys. There are hyper-craftsman buildings  as well, where the vocabulary of the quintessential Seattle home is taken almost to extremes, and certainly closer to its proximate oriental influences. Not that such a finely crafted garage as picture below would be out of place on the street, but the fact that it is an alley dweller makes its discovery ever more delightful. That such care and craft would be expended on a 'mere' utilitarian object, bespeaks the importance of utility in our lives.

The most singular design example of alley experimentation I came across in this admittedly small section of Capitol Hill was perhaps one that expressed none of the previous mentioned dualities; in fact, it was an example of a home whose landscape and architectural expression on the alley make it indistinguishable from that on the street. Admittedly, it does take some means to maintain decorum on both street and alley frontages, but it also takes a bit of s contrarian stand, in that this homeowner does not feel the need to distinguished between servant and served . Those of similar means have chosen a different route, as witnessed by the to imposing garages at the beginning of this post, which are across from the one below.

Despite of, or perhaps because of, Capitol Hill's heterogeneous alley landscape the above building and landscape I found to be the most compelling. The simplicity of its form and the honest expression of its  utility are captivating, its patinaed brick cladding matching that of the alley and the low landscape wall. While not experimental itself, it forms the quintessential alley building/landscape prototype against which to measure those homeowners who are more experimentally inclined, making the above artist forays resonant, and grounding them within a larger cultural context.

Up next -- (one of) Capitol Hill's Secret Alley.