[slumping on the chaise with a glass of wine]

Y'all, Shorty is worn out. I just got done with the submission deadline for a presentation I'm doing later this year, and now I'm about to embark on the journey of four deadlines in nine days. This means that while there are plenty of interesting architectural activities going on (and even a little gossip to share), I just don't have the energy to blog it all for now. Instead, I'll share a few photos that my friend LFP took recently. LEP came out for a weekend to Denver (from Bawston, I sweah to Gawd), and we took him to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the latest cool architectural and cultural addition to the Denver landscape. Designed by David Adjaye, a starchitect I can actually tolerate, the building is made with a double exterior wall--1" black glass on the outside and white translucent panels on the inside--that eliminate the need for A/C (just an evaporative cooler is needed), which helped the building earn a LEED Gold rating.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Requiem for a good kitteh

Been a busy couple of weeks, y'all--it's been work and other professional obligations, and not much else. Hence, here are some pictures of my kitteh Maddy.

In regards to a previous question...

Someone asked in an earlier post about how to get rid of efflorescence, the white salts that leach out of a masonry wall when water gets and sits behind the brick face. I asked a brick rep recently about how to fix the problem.

First, make sure that the weep holes in the wall (if there are any) are open and clear at the bottom. It's helpful to make sure that there's a little bit of mesh (almost like plastic Brillo) in the weep holes so that insects don't crawl up in the wall and live there. Having cleared weep holes will allow some water to drain out of the bottom of the wall. Then, check the top of the wall to seal and/or fix any cracks where water could be getting in. After that, the brick rep suggested just letting the wall be for a few months and let the remaining trapped water leach out. After that, a brick supplier or masonry company can help you remove the remaining efflorescence. The solution is not to blast it off with a water power washer, as that will just push water back into the wall and start the problem over. However, it does involve using a power washer that uses a mix of water, a cleaning solution, and a fine-grade particle (like sand) to quasi-sandblast and simultaneously wash the white film off.

By the way, if you have questions about some weird building thing you've seen lately, take a few pictures and send them my way. Maybe I can answer the question, and if nothing else, it gives me something to blog about rather than my pedestrian life.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Hidden Places, Quiet Edition

Last week was a busy one for me, and this week is shaping up to be no different. Hence, I'm having to use some unpublished images from one of my wanderings through Cherry Creek North. Between a two- to three-story bank and a five-story office building, there's this little courtyard/paved garden/altar.

Upon closer inspection, I found that there's a polished granite planter on the left side of the courtyard, and there appear to be a security gate over a door just on the left as well...

Wow. Just...wow. This little fountain with cast stone trim around a mosaic tile back makes this look so out of place, but the out of placeness isn't its fault. It's as if something much more spectacular and grand was here before, and when it was torn down to make way for the stucco/EIFS commercial building behemoths, this was allowed to stay, demurely and gracefully protected from the street.

And then, if you look just to the right of the fountain/altar...

A corporate commercial cavern, desolate and quiet on a Saturday morning, as if everyone was out and about and completely forgot about filling this space with the sound of business, as the business of life were rediscovered and suddenly more important.

Running the gauntlet

Y'all, I got nothing to post right now; I've been busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor. I'm in the middle of whipping out some drawings for Gestalt--the client keeps changing the phasing of the remodeling work, and someone way above all the team's pay grades demanded that we change around the temporary locations of the departments (where they'll work while we're remodeling their spaces). I gotta get drawings out to the consultants with all these changes in them like yesterday. Meanwhile, I'm writing some stuff for an RFP for Howie and Bosley. The Bosley part isn't bad, but you know when Howie's involved, especially lately, a five-minute job takes an hour and I really don't have that kind of time and patience. That's especially true since we got the call midweek that we were shortlisted for the interview for a possible job that's pretty big, and the interview is Monday morning. So I've been involved in that presentation prep for the past week. Oh, and I've been hither and yon trying to stay on top of the AIA continuing ed seminar coordination, which is a constant interruption. And another oh--the deadline for my industry conference presentation submission's final draft is in less than two weeks, so I've been working like hell on that.

Other than that, things are quiet. Vicodin, anyone?

In Soviet Russia, survey takes you!

So here's the deal: a couple of architects have contacted me to ask a favor, and I'm happy to oblige. They're working on a presentation to an architectural convention that deals with the experiences of architectural interns and how best to work with them. So that their presentation will be fact-based (and not just based on their own experiences with interns), they've devised a survey for architectural interns. (Interns are defined as those working in the field who are not yet licensed architects.)

If you're an intern, and you're interested in sharing your experience regarding your architectural internship, then click here and take the survey now. NOW!

And send the link to your intern friends, people. The folks who are doing this survey also told me that no specific or individual information will be shared or even be identifiable--they're going to process a summary of the survey results to use in their presentation, although at the end, you can enter your e-mail address for a drawing to win an $80.00 gift certificate to a national bookstore. Squee! The whole thing should take about 12 minutes to complete, and hey, gift card, people!

Monday Visual Inspiration: Materials and Methods Fail

Every architect takes at least one class in college on Materials and Methods, which is essentially about how the contractor goes about building stuff in the field and therefore how we architects should go about drawing the stuff we want him/her to build. M&M, as we sometimes call this class and its teachings, can be prosaic, but it's the most important thing you can learn. Your awesome design ideas are crap if you can't turn them into reality in a safe, weather-resistant, and affordable manner. When I'm out on my weekend walks, I see some amazing homes and commercial work in the Capitol Hill/Cherry Creek area--slate roofs, copper gutters, vine-covered trellises, perfectly-laid stone patios...just marvelous. However, I also see some not-so-awesome stuff get built.

See that white stuff on the front of this brick wall? It's called efflorescence. When water gets into a unit masonry (brick or concrete block/CMU) wall and it can't drain out the bottom, it has to evaporate out through the block, and it pushes the salts in the block out to the front. To get rid of it, people will use a high-pressure power washer to blast it off...which forces a bunch of water back into the wall, causing the efflorescence to happen all over again. Water gets into these wall one of two ways: one, the wall wasn't capped fast enough before a good rain or snow happened; or two, water has gotten into the wall through the grout lines between the stone cap panels on top of the wall. (I know, I know, they look pretty, but every joint in a wall cap is a place for water to get in. Just say no.) The water stays in there because there's no weep holes at the bottom to get the water out of the wall. Sometimes, people think they don't need weep holes if it's not an actual exterior wall of a house, but they've been taking hits off the Fail Bong.

What? You didn't plan your window trim placement so that it would miss the fake roof brackets on your Victorian Revival house? I shutter to think.

Oh, you're not even trying! Just as the shutters in the above picture, these shutters don't even have hinges on the back side, and they're not even wide enough to cover the window if they actually could fold over it, so you can tell they're not even usable. Shutters were invented before everyone had glass in their windows--they could keep out weather, prying eyes, and large critters, and they're still used occasionally in hurricane-prone areas. So when you put shutters you can't use on your windows, you're wasting money and materials. Stop that! [whacks lame-ass designer on nose with rolled-up newspaper] Bad architect! No merlot!

As if the no-hinges wasn't enough of a giveaway, there's a little security camera poking through the left shutter to look at the basement apartment door below this window. Puh. Leeze.

Now this particular flavor of Fail is a little more subtle. It rolls gently off the palate and into the throat, as if you were sampling some saffron and truffle oil infusion on a morsel of artisan-baked ciabatta bread, and you suddenly tasted Cheez Whiz aioli--there's something funky, but it's so well disguised that you can't immediately place it. Here's a bit of architectural history to explain this Fail: A hallmark of Renaissance architecture--and indeed, much of the architecture of the 1500s-early 1900s--is that the ground floor of a building is made of larger, sturdier materials and has smaller windows, and then the materials get lighter and windows get larger as each floor gets further from the ground. Makes sense, given physics and all that. This brand new condo building in Cherry Creek is using brick below a balcony railing made out of...large blocks. I can buy the "stone" trim below the blocks, but come on. Them "stones" belong below the brick. Someone buy this guy a book of palazzo architecture.

Here's another take on that same flavor. This is a stone-looking planter on a stucco wall near a condo's pool deck. Again, I ask: really? We can all tell that the stone is decorative. And if the stone is decorative, then it's probably not even stone. And if it's not even stone, why don't you just leave the stucco and get some punk to tag it with, "I'm cheap"? Because all architects are taught in history as well as the M&M class that honesty in materials is paramount.