The neon sign is glowy and the fencing is down! The ArtHouse, which will provide housing for those lucky PNCA students, is the first project that I acted as the LEED administrator. I can't wait for the ground floor tenants to move in and the students to arrive, those white walls are just crying out for some art!
This weekend I enjoyed a quick trip out of town to the Allison Inn, in the heart of wine country. The Allison Inn is a destination resort in the Willamette Valley, built to LEED Gold standards by the firm GGLO out of Seattle. What I enjoy best about this place, aside from the luxurious amenities, is the attention to detail in the way it was constructed. A nautilus inspired spiral staircase overlooks the lobby and allows views to the rolling hills beyond. The palate is very Pacific NW with wood, steel, concrete and a lot of stone. Entrances are marked with water flowing over boulders, creating a buffer of calmness and coolness between the outside world and the oasis within. The basic skin of the building are wood panels held off the structure as a rain screen with fairly large gaps in between. This allows for plenty of reveals on the building's surface, something that is played up inside as well with many linear details repeated throughout the interior space. The linearity is broken up only by the large walls of stone blocks which gently taper down to landscape walls then to organically placed boulders.
This area of the Willamette Valley is rich with silty, rocky soil creating the perfect ingredient to successfully grow a lush variety of grapes. The Inn is bordered by it's own grape orchard, as well as an amazing chef's garden complimenting the farm to table inspirations at the Jory Restaurant. The landscaping surrounding the Allison is full of drought resistant varieties happily thriving in this clay rich soil. Gravel paths circle the building with an abundance of sculptures and art installations at every turn. The attention to detail is perhaps most evident in the arrival sequence. GGLO describes this as a "carefully choreographed act of concealing and revealing". On their website they illustrate the project's journey through a series of sketches and photos, the arrival sequence in particular being informed by elegant materials, framed views, nuanced lighting, seasonal planting displays, etc.. This sequence created to highten one's anticipation can be seen in a more organic way throughout the wineries we visited while in the area. Long gravel roads, past ribbons of vines and many times hazelnut orchards, offering peeks at the upcoming tasting room, but rarely a full reveal of the manor at the very highest point of that acreage.
So, when we moved to our current house 3 or so years ago, we had a lot more walls to ourselves - more space to decorate. One thing we learned from selling our last house was not to wait to do some easy and economical fixes right away instead of when you're staging your house for sale. So right away we painted the upstairs common areas: living room, dining room, foyer, bathroom and kitchen. One thing that my husband and I agree with is that aesthetic of someone who's been collecting art for their whole life and has an eclectic, story-laden house imbued with this creative energy - we agree but we haven't successfully been able to sustain this, we don't know a lot of artists, we don't have money when the opportunity arises, sometimes we don't always agree (I'm a fan of prints (think Hatch) and he's a fan of paintings). I know it's a journey, but we're moving along this road in fits and bursts.
I see stuff I like all the time, so I would like to curate this art on this blog as well. I had found an artist I loved at a local show 6 years ago - Matt Condron. His empty waiting rooms and colorful plastic chairs really resonated with me. I took a postcard and filed it in my brain for a time when I had a lot of white walls to fill. The first month in our new house I got in touch with Matt and let him know how much I loved his stuff, then he let me know how much his stuff went for and I'm still a fan.... from a distance. Ha. The gallery that shows Matt's work is George Billis Gallery in LA, a place I haven't ever been but one that apparently showcases amazing artists.
This month's show features Terry Thompson. For some reason I'm a sucker for oil paintings of inanimate objects, forlorn things that have a lot of history but that are rendered so fantastically that they almost look like photographs. Many of Terry's paintings depict old neon signs that are aged and decayed, he describes finding them on back roads and old towns. Both Matt and Terry's paintings mesh my love of font, color, history and pure artistic talent.
More and more press is being devoted to women in the profession of architecture since the signature campaign started over Denise Scott Brown's lack of inclusion in the 1991 Pritzker Prize awarded to her husband Robert Venturi (see my May 11th post). Architectural Record is advertising special coverage in June of a feature page titled Women In Architecture Now, which currently includes an essay about women architects crashing (or not crashing) the boys club, a slideshow titled Women's Voices/Women's Work which solicits comments from the most notable women designers of today and a speech by RECORD editor in chief Cathleen McGuigan who speaks about women in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In reading the comments and watching this video, what I notice the most is a consistency in wanting to be relevant for being an architect, not a woman architect. I appreciate that this issue has come to the forefront lately, but now I am anxious to discuss the possible solutions and what we need to do to create a better culture for future women architects.
Last night I attended a lecture by Judith Sheine, the head of the University of Oregon Architecture Department, about Rudolph Schindler and the Kings Road House. Schindler was born in Vienna, but came to America with the hope of working for Frank Lloyd Wright in his Chicago studio, which he did beginning in 1918. In 1920 Wright sent Schindler to Los Angeles to oversee the building of the Hollyhock House and Schindler decided to stay and started his own practice in 1922 with the creation of his own home, the Kings Road House.
The Kings Road House is now over 100 years old and is being preserved by the Friends of the Schindler House which holds Judith as an active member of its board. Summarizing the main talking points of her new book “Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California Modernism”, Judith counters that not only is the Schindler's home the precedent for California Modernist Architecture but also that he influenced many of the most noteworthy architects of his day and ours from Richard Neutra to Morphosis. What resonated with me the most about Schindler, was that although there was continual reinvention and a willingness to incorporate new materials there was always a consistency in his principles of design and spatial characteristics.
