Month: May 2017

A historic house on Park Street—one of the first ever built in this genteel Charlottesville neighborhood—is certainly a prize. But it comes with some baggage. When Ariana and Greyson Williams bought their home, built in the 1850s by a Virginia Supreme Court judge and listed on the National Historic Register, they knew they wanted to do some renovations. The house’s age meant they’d not only have to contend with an antiquated structure, but any changes would have to gain approval from the City’s Board of Architectural Review.

Their projects were also fairly large in scope. “Our goal was to make this our family house,” says Ariana Williams, who was just about to have her first of two children when they moved in 2009. One upstairs bedroom functions as an office, and the Williams needed a guest suite. So the latter would have to be carved out of the basement—partially finished by a previous owner but essentially unlivable.

“It was dank,” remembers architect Dan Zimmerman of Alloy Workshop. The basement floor was brick laid on soil, making for poor air quality that bothered Ariana’s asthma. “I couldn’t even be down there,” she says.

Alloy’s task, in a physical sense, was to gut the basement, lay down a concrete slab and finish the space with a bedroom, bathroom, exercise room and living room. Outside, a small rear sitting porch would become a larger screened porch, with a patio underneath looking onto the backyard. The Williams also commissioned Alloy to design a new two-car garage. The challenge was to blend all these new spaces and structures with the vocabulary of the existing house.

“I’m multilingual,” says Zimmerman, comparing building styles with languages. While his “native language” is the modern/contemporary look for which Alloy is best known, he welcomed the chance to test his fluency in a more traditional architectural language. “It stretched us a little,” he says. “You’re adding onto an architecturally strong structure; I wanted to do it correctly.”

Especially on the exterior, the details of the original home informed the new designs. The screened porch, for example, borrows its scale from an existing sunroom around the corner of the house. “We mimicked its windows with the openings in the screened porch,” says Zimmerman. The same goes for trim details, including the fairly ornate railing.

The results are convincing. “People are surprised the porch is new,” says Williams. At the same time, the structure does offer clues that it does not date to the 19th century. The floor is made of teak, and the ceiling planks form a subtly contemporary diamond/chevron pattern—painted, however, in traditional sky blue.

Modern on the inside

Inside, the basement design aims for a balance between refinement and an earthy tactility, inspired by the highly textured original brick fireplaces in the bedroom and living area. Zimmerman felt that these rooms didn’t need to match the formality of the old upstairs spaces, but could find a different appeal with modern touches and natural materials.

Concrete basement floors became a canvas for various patterns of shape and color, like the diagonal checkerboard in the entry hall, stained with light tan and rusty red.

Pine planks, lightly whitewashed, warm up some walls and ceilings, including those that form a nook over the bed. Tiny LED lights overhead are like stars, and the nook’s lowered ceiling, says Zimmerman, provides intimacy even as it serves a practical function: hiding ductwork.

Meanwhile, the landscape was also up for a redo. Alloy worked with Water Street Studio on a plan that used a new stone wall to separate the lawn into two different levels, added new plantings and steps, and improved drainage. “We didn’t want too many steps,” says Zimmerman. Careful tinkering with the heights of walkways and walls, and the elevation of the garage itself, ultimately yielded easy flow through the landscape and a sense of connection between the upper children’s play lawn behind the garage, and the garden below.

The new garage is able to function as a pavilion thanks to sliding barn doors on the rear. “I thought, ‘We have a party yard, we need a party structure,’” says Williams.

Zimmerman worked hard to integrate the garage with the property overall. Its stucco exterior mimics that of the house, and Williams remarks, “It looks like it could have been a carriage house.” Yet Alloy did allow some details, like exposed roof rafters, to skew more casual than their counterparts on the house.

Not long ago, the great-grandson of the house’s original owner stopped by to chat with the Williams, and expressed admiration for the changes they’d made. “He loved the additions,” says Williams.

Zimmerman says the task of sensitively augmenting a historic house is one he relished. “This is one of the projects I’m most proud of.”

Immigrants and minorities struggling to buy their own homes after the turn of the century had an unlikely ally—the powerful Sears, Roebuck & Company.

Sears sold mail-order kit homes and provided easy-qualification mortgages from 1908 to 1940, putting about 70,000 houses into the hands of enterprising folks looking to build their dream dwelling with their own two hands.

And all across the country, including in Charlottesville, the legacy of those homes is still felt today.

“The intent was to create a house mom and dad built that could be passed through the generations. They were latched onto a piece of the American dream,” said Rosemary Thornton, author of The Houses That Sears Built. Thornton is an unabashed Sears home fangirl—to her, they should be registered as historic locations, preserved and honored for their role in real estate’s past. “It’s not just about the house,” she says. “Sears was so progressive and helped so many marginalized people get a house. You didn’t have to come from the right part of town to own your own home.”

Thornton has identified nearly two dozen Sears model homes in Charlottesville and surrounding towns. Whether it’s the 2,900-square-foot Glen Falls luxury model in C’ville, the bevy of Carlins in Waynesboro or the Sears Dover-cum-restaurant in Crozet, many of the homes are still in working order and picture-perfect representations of Sears catalog images.

And the legacy of the Sears kit home—along with those by Aladdin Homes, Montgomery Ward and other manufacturers—is still felt in modern modular and prebuilt housing. While folks aren’t necessarily buying 12,000 pieces of lumber through the mail and throwing up their own siding, some are still drawn to housing designs that feature standard components manufactured off-site and assembled in place.

Casati Copeland, co-owner of local housing provider Green Modern Kits and a kit home owner herself, says that, in fact, she won’t sell to anyone who doesn’t have a reputable contractor at the ready to assemble the home.

“The client’s prefab project success is tied to my success, so no you may not buy my kits, get a keg of beer and invite your friends up for the weekend to build a house,” she says.

When the houses are complete, they should have a reasonably small footprint, but “these are not tiny homes,” Copeland says. “These are homes with two to three bedrooms that families can use for their different life stages.”

Copeland says she and her husband were attracted to kit homes because they allowed them to bring together their love of technology and cutting-edge design. Using prefab components allowed them to contract with a high-end architect while ending up with a modular, insulated home capable of being taken off the grid with solar power.

Copeland and her husband aren’t unlike those hands-on folks who built kit houses 100 years ago. But times have changed, according to Thornton, and we’re probably not going back to department store dwellings anytime soon.

“Building codes vary from locale to locale, so if you’re building a house in Florida, it’s different from California and Virginia,” she says. “And housing became increasingly complex. Electrical, plumbing and heating were sold separately from Sears homes…so they were primitive by today’s standards.”

Now that they’ve made it through the program, we asked a few of UVA’s architecture graduate students to tell us where they’re headed come May 21.

Jennifer Hsiaw

Undergraduate school/degree: U.C. Berkeley, BA Architecture; MIT, MEng Structural Engineering

Graduate degree/concentration: Master of Architecture

Summary of your thesis: My thesis is looking at high-tech corporate campuses in Silicon Valley and their relationship with the suburbs of the Bay Area. I am proposing a new corporate architecture that considers the unique character, culture and settlement conditions of the area, negotiating both private and public interests in the determination of space, program and form.

Why architecture? The social impact of architecture was a revelation to me in my first survey course as an undergrad. I was amazed by the breadth of the field and the research my professors were pursuing.

Best advice you’ve been given thus far: Take risks while you’re in school.

Most memorable experience during your time at UVA? Snacking on whale and vodka while sailing through a fjord on the way to an abandoned Russian mining town in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. This was on a studio site visit.

What’s next? I’m planning on staying an extra semester to complete my thesis. Then it’s time to start practicing!

Chad Miller

Undergraduate school/degree: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota; B.A. in Urban Studies and Psychology (double major)

Graduate degree/concentration: Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture

Summary of your thesis: I have completed two funded independent research projects while at the School of Architecture. Our studio sequence ends with Comprehensive Studio, so although these projects were not for a thesis studio, they constitute my design research interests.

First, L’Espace Peripherique, which explores emerging social spaces in the territory of Le Peripherique in Paris, a zone of transition which divides inner and outer Paris both physically and socially. Working in the context of Le Grande Paris regional planning initiative, this project develops a narrative of the zone as experienced on the ground, and employs a typological approach for spatial and programmatic strategies which subvert the monstrous scale and divisive nature of the territory.

The second project, Agile: Tactics of Colonization for the Flexible City, studies how the structural, material and spatial logic of abandoned structures in Detroit can allow these buildings to become stages for an imagination of new urban scenarios through gradual and temporary colonization rather than wholesale redevelopment.

Why architecture? I have always had a strong interest in the critical role that architecture can play in the civic realm, beginning with critiques of urban sprawl through drawing proposals I submitted along with letters to the mayor of my hometown Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at age 11. Although I considered studying architecture in college as a high school senior, my broad range of interests compelled me to seek my own path in undergraduate, gaining a liberal arts education and settling on Urban Studies and Psychology.

What’s next? I have applied for funding for post-grad thesis research for Fall 2017. I am planning to move to Minneapolis, Philadelphia or New York to seek work with an architecture firm. I hope to get licensed in architecture within a few years, and work between architecture/landscape/urban design throughout my career. I am particularly interested in critical and research-driven design practices as well as public interest design.

Shannon Ruhl

Undergraduate school/degree: B.A.Arch 2009, University of Kentucky College of Design

Graduate degree/concentration: Master of Architecture

Thesis summary: My design thesis puts forward a new paradigm for community development and vernacular architecture in central Appalachia based on the reimagination of a former mountaintop removal site and the recent emergence of industrial hemp production. Situated in a region caricatured by resource extraction and poverty, the project uses design to see beyond the scars left behind by the coal industry and reintroduce this novel landscape into the community as a potential site for agronomic research. My thesis asserts that architecture is a critical dimension for the success of such a project, while positioning itself within a regional framework for development in which the university and other intermediate-scale initiatives actively engage in local decision-making.

Why architecture: Pursuing architecture and design was a very natural decision for me – I come from a household of engineers and architects. Knowing that drawing was more of a personal strength than math left me with architecture.

From the scale of a territory to an individual’s day-to-day life, architecture presents a unique opportunity to imagine a new future and shape the space around us which I find is both a very exciting and humbling process.

What’s next: After graduation in December, I’ll be moving to Austin, Texas, where I’ll continue to pursue my architectural career and eat a lot of barbecue. From there, who knows!

Laurence Holland

Undergraduate school/degree: Harvard College (Philosophy)

Graduate degree/concentration: Master of architecture

Why architecture? After several years studying philosophy, I wanted a field that was both highly intellectual and also fundamentally engaged in the world. Architecture has allowed me to transition into professional life without losing touch with my philosophical interests in ethics, aesthetics and language.

Best advice you’ve been given thus far: Keep things simple! Architecture is complicated. If you start with a simple, clear proposal, richness and complexity will develop naturally. If you start with an overwrought idea, it will just keep getting more complicated and you’ll end up in over your head. (I still struggle with this!)

Most memorable experience during your time at UVA? Traveling to India as part of the Yamuna River Project, a University-wide research initiative that aims to help Delhi transform its urban waterways from massively polluted dumping grounds to a new network of thriving green public spaces. It’s rare that a design-school project jumps from the drawing board to real life, but thanks to a partnership with the government of Delhi, our work is helping build momentum towards actually accomplishing something. It’s been incredibly inspiring.

What’s next? I’ll be joining my wife in Toronto, and starting work at KPMB Architects.