JULY 5TH, 2010
By BUILD LLC
Maybe it had something to do with the 4th of July fireworks last night or being over-served by the bar tender, but some night shots of our latest project, the Davidson Residence, sounded like a good blog post today. We love taking night shots and dusk shots of our projects because the conditions keep changing by the minute – it’s a balancing act between exercising patience and quick maneuvering. We’re also finding some key ingredients that greatly improve the quality of night shots:
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JUNE 26TH, 2010
By BUILD LLC
BUILD LLC just wrapped up a sharp, modern residence in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood and it’s a perfect time to share some materials, methods and design ideas. We decided years ago that the BUILDblog would be dedicated to transparency and getting useful information out there in the world about design and architecture. This project, in particular, is an excellent means to do so as the owner, Mike Davidson, has kept the most thorough journal/blog we’ve ever seen on a residential project. A HOUSE BY THE PARK documents everything from talking to realtors about buying the land, through the design and construction process, all the way down to the punch list. It’s an objective, accurate look at home construction and you should check it out. Give the owner some kudos for the achievement and supporting architecture!
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JANUARY 29TH, 2010
By BUILD LLC
One of our favorite things about running a design blog is the discussion and dialogue that takes place around any given post. Among all the talk, we’ve been introduced to some champion peoples, individuals we just wouldn’t know otherwise. After our post on Mid-Century Modern Communities, Pamela and Erik gave us a shout-out because they own a home in the super cool Hollin Hills hood.
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JANUARY 18TH, 2010
By BUILD LLC
We love it when design minded people choose to create community. So when we recently heard about several mid-century modern design communities around the country we were all over it. Today’s post highlights 5 neighborhoods in the United States that share a common aesthetic, create an intentional environment and establish a sense of place. These communities also serve as catalysts to evolve the way we think and behave. They are extraordinary situations – most of them have their own community websites and some even have their own books on the architecture. Being the design geeks that we are, we could hardly stay in our seats when we learned that a couple of these communities organize annual home tours – sign us up! These are communities where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and we’ve got a lot to learn from them.
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JANUARY 8TH, 2010
By BUILD LLC
Throughout our travels over the last several years a couple of places really impressed us with their adherence to community and preservation of character. These two places have a great deal in common. Both have managed to keep the chain restaurants and big box stores out, a task which must require a unified stance and constant effort. Both have a philosophy that supports the local crafts of each town, maintaining the presence of street-front shops filled with local cuisine and hand-made products. And near and dear to our design-minded hearts, neither community seems to give a crap about providing ample parking, gaining popularity, or creating more convenience (cheers to that). So to have a little fun, today’s post is a collection of photos from both places for your viewing pleasure. The first commenter to correctly identify the town and state of both will nab themselves a certificate to Peter Miller books.
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OCTOBER 12TH, 2009
By BUILD LLC
The preservation of traditional architecture is important to us and being a modern architecture firm does not exclude us from having respect for the architectures that came before us. Integrating new home updates to a traditional residence is always challenging and establishing a set of strategies is, in our opinion, key to a successful combination of historical charm with modern precision. It helps keep the aesthetics deliberate, the team focused, the budget on target, and the result elegant.
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AUGUST 14TH, 2009
By BUILD LLC
Recently during a drive along Interstate-90, just outside of Seattle, we passed by a large tract housing development on a hillside near Issaquah. The development immediately caught our attention for a reason that may seem a bit strange. At first glance it reminded us of some of the Italian hilltowns from our student days backpacking around Italy. We know, ridiculous right? Maybe our periphery vision failed us, maybe we had one too many martinis the night before, or maybe we’re just trying to hard. Whatever the case, we couldn’t get it out of our heads. There were inexplicable similarities in the overall composition, massing and patterns.
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JUNE 23RD, 2009
By BUILD LLC
When we heard the news that famed architect Daniel Libeskind is now in the prefab home game, we knew that something has gone terribly wrong with the idea of cost-effective prefabricated, mass-produced, delivered-to-the-site housing. This isn’t a criticism of Libeskind mind you; we have made numerous pilgrimages to admire his projects, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin and his recently completed Royal Ontario Museum Extension in Toronto. His entry into pre-fab home design, however, represents the last nail in the coffin as far as we’re concerned. Like it or not, BUILD is officially declaring the pre-fab home movement dead, at least this round anyway. Here’s 10 reasons why:
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MAY 29TH, 2009
By BUILD LLC
Today’s post is a tribute to the work of Arthur Erickson who passed away on May 20th, 2009 at the age of 84 in Vancouver. While Erickson created a substantial portfolio of civic, commercial and institutional work, today’s post will focus on his residential projects. Erickson’s wood framed homes pushed architecture into new territory in the Pacific Northwest and has influenced generations of architects since.
Erickson was quoted as saying “If you can design a house, you can design anything.” We’d like to think that this speaks to the complexity and serendipity involved in each residence. While each house is unique to the clients, budget, environment, and available technology, Erickson developed common strategies to navigate through the design process. These common strategies are fascinating to us for a number of reasons; it allows the process of design to be efficient amidst all the variables, it develops a visual language with each project, and it unites a population of projects with a collective vision (a thesis if you’ll allow us to get architecty for a moment). Here is a breakdown of some of the strategies we find most compelling:
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FEBRUARY 26TH, 2009
By BUILD LLC
It has taken us 17 months to finally finish our own office here at the Park Modern, but that gave us a little time to focus our industrious nature on the task. Through our good buddy Chris, we were able to obtain some unused perforated metal material that was going to be scrapped from a local project. Keeping this in mind, we employed the same tricks we use to keep our client’s budgets reasonable on our own space- finding reusable or discounted materials and finding a way to turn them into elegant compositions (in our humble opinion).
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