Another one from the sketchbook.
The client pulled the plug on this one.
The design features a simple, energy efficient main house, with a set back garage and an apartment on the upper level.
Its a bit of a shame…I really wanted to see this one through, I think it could have been a spectacular home.

Here is a drawing that been lingering in my sketch book.

A proposal for one of two houses to be built on a split lot in Alta Vista. The owner is a car guy, and wanted to dedicate the main floor to garage and workshop space. The sentiment among the local community was that large garages on the front on infill houses were a sensitive issue. Given that we needed some relief from the zoning (min. lot width) to pull off this project, we worked up a tandem garage design (two cars front to back) with some generous workshop space as well. I think we were able to minimize the impact of the garage and still provided an oasis for the car loving owner. Otherwise, we were able to meet all the other requirements for development, including the max. building height.

I do a lot of work that I never talk about.
This is one of them.
A very good contractor I work with was planning to build a house. He hired a local (to him) part-time “draftsman” to draw up some plans. This “draftsman” was also a fulltime firefighter. Lets just hope that he’s better at putting out fires. The drawings that my friend showed me were horrifying. I believe that “friends don’t let friends design bad houses”…so I offered to “tweak” the design a bit. He left it with me and I came up with the above result. Needless to say, its nothing “avant garde”, and it doesn’t meet any of the criteria for the work I want to do as part of this firm. But sometimes you have to take a bullet and help out a friend.

More from the literal vault. This sketch is obviously for a fire escape. I would date it as something from the late 90′s.
The building is the Victoria Woolen Mill in Almonte. I had worked on this building for better than a year while I was an intern. The building has a prominent position on the main street and by the river in this town. The building came into the hands of a couple of local developers, one of whom was Stephen Brathwaite. Stephen is an artist of some repute and proved to be a very fun and thoughtful client.

The firm I was interning with was Julian Smith & Associates, a nationally renown heritage conservation architect. As you may expect, the clientele for a heritage focused firm could be classified as conservative. Working on the Mill, with a progressive and free spirit client like Stephen was both liberating and challenging. At some point, my normally reserved sketches were not resonating with him. I took this as an opportunity to really let loose and design in a more modern manner. At first I didn’t share my sketchbook with him, choosing to try and translate the ideas into more conventional plan/section/elevation. But I was soon turning to the book to try and salvage the design meeting. It was both cathartic and transformational. I soon realized why I was working in this field and made an immediate resolution to pursue a more progressive and forward looking agenda.

The client received these sketches with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t allow for most of the ideas, but I have since noticed that the client has used some of the ideas as time and money allowed.

While I was closing up the cottage this year, I took a long walk around the lake. I visited a property that has been abandoned for many years now. The property is a wonderfully rugged bit of land that has pretty good access from the main road. The landscape epitomizes all the qualities of the Canadian Shield. My favorite aspect of the site is the jagged rock that tumbles down to the shoreline. Mature cedars and pines provide a dense canopy right at the waters edge. The water at this point of the lake is jet back, hinting to the extreme depth. The exposure on this side of the lake is less than optimal, but it is graced with spectacular sunsets.

As I was trudging around the site in the unusually cold autumn, I couldn’t help but imagine the type of building that I would build there. I had visions of a simple rectangular box that would jut out from the rock and cantilever precariously out to the waters edge. Its scale would be modest with simple modern gestures to relate it to the natural access and slope of the lot. I was surprised by the clarity and vividness of the image in my minds eye. Obviously, the asthetic borrows heavily from the classic modernists, but I was finding hard to consider any other possible concept for the site.

It wasn’t until I was cleaning out one of my hard drives that I came across a sketch that was pretty much the picture of what I was daydreaming at the lake. This sketch, on a napkin (I know…how cliche), was time stamped 2001, and was likely done a few years earlier. I have vague recollections that it was done while siting in the Denver airport. It was a time in my life when I was doing way more digital design and had set aside my architecture work for awhile.

Although not exactly what I would consider building now (that foundation looks a little brutal), it embodies a lot of the ideas I had for the site. Its funny how some ideas just linger in your subconscious and pop back up at random times. I’ve known about this specific lot for ages (having explored it as a kid), but it was revisiting the site with a designers eye that brought together the sketch and the vision for the property.