Valmont Mill

The City of Boulder owns a significant portion of Valmont Butte, east of town, including the abandonded gold and fluorspar mill.  The entire property is in the County and as part of a intergovernmental agreement, the City has been asked to grant landmark status to portions of the mill and associated buildings.

The City conducted a tour of the facility for Landmark Board members and we got a brief glance into the history of the place.  Walking through the building was fascinating and frightening as only dark, abandoned buildings can be.  Even in the middle of the day in the company of others, this place, with its obscure machinery, broken glass and menacingly dark corners is daunting and a bit thrilling.

Once a Landmark, what will happen with the mill?  To clean it up and secure it for public tours will rob it of its mystery and power.  It is decidedly too dangerous in its current condition to allow access.  Every passage holds dangling wires, shards of glass and rusty metal flanges ready to pounce on the unwary visitor.  The roof is coming off in sections and the entire place is probably a heavy metal contamination nightmare.  To leave it as is, mothballed but beautiful in its decay and abandonment, would shut it off from the citizens who now own it.  Any thoughts on what to do with these monuments to both an industrial past and the notion of the past in itself?

New technology and the richness of history

I have been thinking a lot about how to better harness new technology and new media resources to bolster interest in historic preservation and the changing architectural faces of our cities.  I have written before about the potential of posting QR codes that allow visitors to easily access a rich and deep array of information that a typical sign can not accommodate.  This has now been taken into the real world application of a building in Tokyo that displays QR codes on its facade that can be read by a smartphone and that accesses the building users Twitter feeds in  real-time.

I have been very impressed with some recent augmented reality apps, like Sara,  that allow you to use your smartphone and its camera and gps technologies to envision a proposed building on a site.  By downloading the app you can simply point your smartphone like a camera at a specific location and along with the actual building or site that you are seeing, an image of a future project from the same vantage point will appear on your phone's screen.

I have yet to find someone that has applied this technology to envisioning the history of a city.  You may have seen the history slider in Google Earth's satellite imagery that lets you scroll through historical aerial images of a city and gives a great understanding of the incremental development of a given place.  If the 3D buildings in Google Earth were tagged with their date of construction, you could do the same with the 3d imagery, scrolling through the decades, watching buildings rise and fall and new construction rise again.  I think this would be an amazing resource and break the veil of history that often impedes our understanding of time and place.  It is so very difficult for folks to believe that the buildings and spaces around them have not always been that way.  We all know this intellectually, but without visible evidence of previous eras it is impossible to really inhabit the city through time.

Beyond this capability in Google Earth, I would like a developed app that would integrate all those freely sourced 3D buildings built online and place them within an augmented reality app.  Anywhere you walk through the city you could enable the app and hold up the phone and from the same vantage point, be able to scroll through hundreds of years of urban growth and transformation.  The perspective on current projects that that kind of a technology would engender would radically change both architects and the public view of what our places have been and will be.

Locally there are two programs that begin to approach this kind of real time/place historical understanding using current tools.  Historic Denver's Denver Story Trek allows people to choose from a range of designed tours or the ability to create your own.  As you walk, bike or drive around the city, a text message prompts you to information about a given site, both its architecture and social history.  Free audio files can accompany your tour and help bring to life each site.

Another program, run by the Denver Public Library's Western History & Genealogy folks, called Creating Communities, harnesses a vast digitized archive of images and information to map neighborhood histories.  Their work consists of a Google map containing building histories and an iPhone app, Creating Communities, that allow you to search your neighborhood and access information about its city while also on the move.

Can we expect to see my proposed app some time soon?  Well, there's not much money to be made in preservation, so unless there's so nice grant out there for a pilot project, probably not.  If you know of such a thing, let me know.  If you have further thoughts on how to apply this technology to architecture and preservation issues, I would love to hear that as well.

churches, rural south central Virginia

Frank Lloyd Wright's Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan

This last summer I had the opportunity to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of Steelcase furniture, and the magnificently restored Meyer May house.  Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909, the house was designed and built just as Wright's marriage was falling apart and he was soon to depart to Europe to escape the scandal and notoriety.

Like the Robie House, designed in Chicago just a year or two earlier, this house sits on a residential corner lot and shares with as well Wright's signature hidden entryway and layered horizontal composition.  Even though the Robie House is more dramatic, being more decidedly long and narrow, the Meyer May house actually does a better job of addressing the spatial situation of the corner lot.  However, this does lead to a fairly complex interior with spaces driving in two directions, maybe anticipating the more pinwheeling designs of later houses.

You can see many of the typical Wright details here - the flush vertical joints and deeply scored horizontal joints of the masonry, the wide cantilevered, hovering roof planes, the delicate leaded windows.

And, like in some many of Wright's houses built during this phase of his career, a complex and devoted attention to some rather fussy details like these Living Room windows.  One can't help but speculate that this heavy grille work on street-facing windows was as much defensive as decorative, a spill-over from Wright's domestic troubles, keeping the world at bay as much as providing light and views.  I have often thought that his growing predilection for the increasingly hidden and obscured entries of houses of his from this period are also an echo of the growing demand for privacy and avoidance of the public gaze that eventually surfaces in Wright's full retreat from Oak Park and Chicago to rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.

In any case, the Meyer May house is not only an excellent and under-appreciated work of Wright's from this period, it is also one of the very best examples of a period restoration that feels complete and careful without feeling like a museum (even though it is of sorts).  Steelcase purchased the home in 1985 and painstakingly restored the entire structure including sourcing many Wright-designed furniture and textile pieces to fill it.  And best of all and a great testament to the new owners, the house is fully available for tours for FREE, no reservations needed.  Thank you Steelcase for the great renovation and most importantly for allowing it to be viewed by anyone.

author-illustrator studio construction progress

We are making good progress on the construction of a new studio in Boulder, Colorado for a couple who are artists, illustrators and authors of children's books.

The project greatly increases the size of their existing studio and adds a second-level loft space.  The original studio was a dark, poorly-constructed structure and it was awkwardly attached to their 1880's Second Empire house.  Our new work involves creating a new studio that looks primarily to the west to take advantage of the deep space of their richly landscaped property.  The link to the old house is created by a small hall whose eastern face is pulled back from the older house's front porch to allow the old house to have a more complete expression.  This little reveal between the old and new is a small example of the project's attempt to create a positive dialogue between the old and new.  The studio's size and position required us to make a building that might "compete" with the older house.  Rather than fight with that formal issue, we used this potential problem as the central narrative for the project.

More updates to come as the construction progresses.

Builder:  Cottonwood Custom Builders