thadjock:
Regardless of the thought of drinking gray water, thanks for the heads up on the contents of mortar.
And regarding Frank L., I feel your pain. He's not my favorite architect, but he was definitely a diva and an unavoidable one. It's still true that if you ask someone to name an architect you usually get Wright as an answer. When I was a kid (like 5 years old) I remember standing in front of and going in to Lever House on Park Avenue and that was it. I poured over books on architecture once I figured out what architecture was. I certainly knew it when I saw it when I was 5.
When I first clawed my way into university I took the Core Fundamentals of Basic Design (which also included photography) that was a two-year program one needed to complete before beginning pre-architecture. Architecture was exclusively a graduate school deal. It took four years and a lot of talent to qualify for the program. And during the same first two years I took all the biology courses about plants that were available: 1. Because I didn't have a car and it got me out of the city on regular weekend field trips; and 2. I just liked plants. But after finishing the two-year core curriculum I was detoured when I bought my first house (a four floor apartment building) just below Coit Tower in San Francisco that had real bay windows. I started a new career, taking buildings apart and putting them back together to at least their original foot prints. So much for making it into architecture school.
Until I was 24 or 25 I was still smitten with Mies van der Roh, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, et al. That glass curtain International Style seemed so cool and restrained. Now I'd like to throw rocks through most of the windows. But van der Roh's Crown Hall on the Illinois Tech campus still makes a lot of sense to me -- hanging the main structure from steel girders held up by steel columns. Can't say what it is. It just speaks to me.
Then in 1972 William Pereira's Transamerica Building was finished and the Bauhaus boyze suddenly lost their luster. But I'm still a sucker for the minimalist look. When I read Tom Wolf's from Bauhuas to Our House I was pissed. By then I'd pretty much been living with what people recognize today as "business lobby" furniture. But I've stood by my Barcleona lounge chairs, Wassily lounge chairs, and my Ray Eames lounger with matching ottoman. I won't give them up until I'm dead. Or the Mies chaise. They all seem perfectly at home in my piso in Barçelona. And as for Barçelona, OY! Antonio Gaudi sure has left his mark all over that city. My building is a pseudo Gaudi structure rendered rather faithfully in the modernísme style. Not to be confused with Art Deco. Different aesthetic altogether.
You name the style of home, and I've probably renovated it (except for the new pseudo "craftsman" style crap). And now, in Nevada, I've got this multi-level log cabin where the foundation is no longer a rectangle since being changed into a parallelogram by an earthquake a year ago, February 2008. It's true that the wooden logs are incredibly strong, structurally. If they weren't strong the county would have condemned the place. But I need to take it apart and rebuild it somewhere else.
I thoroughly respect your green aesthetic. However, despite the very real non-green reality of dense thermopane glass walls, zinc plated corrugated steel paneling, and radiant concrete floors, I'm gonna build a home that's small scale yet takes advantage of the 360 degree view of nothing but sagebrush desert. But the guts and skeletal structure will be stick built (prefab stick built, but still stick built). And except for a cluster of strategically clumped silvery turquoise Koster hybrid blue spruce, I'll try not to disturb the native landscape --- much. There are a few things that deer, elk, antelope, jack rabbits, voles, moles, field mice and cattle will not eat: any member of the daffodil family, hyacinths, lupines, pyracantha and Jimson Weed (daturis metaloides). So, I'll have to do a little naturalizing pottering about in the desert and planting clumps of these cultivated plants. Especially one stand of Datura that really gives off a great sinful sort of fragrance when the blossoms open at night. Despite what the Cattlemen's Association claims, cows are a lot smarter than we are and won't go near the stuff.
Still, if you ever have the opportunity (as in find yourself in Phoenix) by all means check out Wright's Taliesin West School of Architecture. And the Sausalito Civic Center is one Hell of a building (another Wright project that was made a main character in the film Gatica).
soon to be from the Midlifebear's retirement home (Im getting too old for these 12-hour non-stop flights).
