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Now available at www.blurb.com, this 120 page, full color book documents the process and finished Ruskin House.

2013—Geared Motion Pool Table

In collaboration with HurricaneBilliards finished up and installed in the client’s home in Toronto, CA.

2011—Lynwood Rework

A collaboration with Bill Brinkey, Architect.

Create a floating roof with 5 carefully placed skylights, and clean up volumetrics at street elevations with glazing & masonry blocks & planes.

2011—Davis Island, Structural Re-arrangement.

Remove load bearing walls from interior and clear out space creating vaulted, open living/dining/kitchen space approx. 24’x36’.

Mike Calvino, Mike Rahal, and "Cappy"  1996.

Featured Projects     |       Architecture Projects

 

                |     Stairs / Interior Elements

 

Outdoor / Landscape Projects     |    Automation / CNC

 

Furniture     |     Products

 

Collaborations     |     Photography

 

Artwork / Sculpture     |     Teaching

    

Books / Writings / Publications     |      Projects by Year(well, up to 2007 . . .)    

6330 Project—in progress

Existing roof removed from beneath new.

A little machining practice:  A second build of the Split Personality Pool Table in Collaboration with Lee Benson of Hurricane Billiards.  The Mods by Lee for this build include changing all of the steel parts to alumninum plate in a slightly thicker plate, and the tops will be Lee’s design this time around.  Check out HurricaneBilliards.com for more.

Featured Projects

Mobile Office:  a collaboration with Daniel Currea of DC Studio

A Gallery Space Addition  (unbuilt.  Section, ink on mylar)

A bad day as a hands-on design/builder practicing to be a real architect is better than a lifetime as a desk-architect . . .

 

 

 

Architecture   From the Greek:  architekton master builder, from archi- + tekton  builder carpenter.

 

Arch:  Prime, Primary, first

Tekton:  builder, assemble

 

The design-build process here is based on a set of principles drawn from classical and modernist ideals.  The pursuit of truth and beauty I think is the driver and the main pillar of our process.  The key to the process comes from the ever persistent quest to define what truth and beauty are, based on simple principles of certain God-given and traditionally defined truths and guidelines in terms of spatial, massing, and tectonic composition, materiality, structure, and assembly.

 

These ideas are a general outline of the issues involved and important to the design-build process along the quest to have each project become better and better composed  within these guidelines and integrated with its site and users.  The synthesis of these issues into a work of art which can be inhabited is the ultimate goal of one practicing to become an Architect which I believe is a sort of pinnacle to strive for, one which, through a lifetime of practice, may never really be reached.  But it is in the quest for truth and honesty in systems that we come ever closer to the goal.

Architecture in details:  The Ruskin House  (View through glass floor section at entry from below)

Grasshopper/Rhino modeling of magnetic fluid:  Collaboration with artist Ursula Berlot, Slovenia.

The Robinson Files:  Grasshopper/Rhino modeling and cnc router carving of x-ray images. 

A Collaboration with artist and professor Paul O. Robinson.

The Game Table  A compliment to a furniture collection.

The materials and the processes teach you things about the way things need to go together.

Mechanical systems like transmissions, engines, and designing and maintaining your own equipment teaches you about systems, about the power of simplicity, about necessity vs. superfluous components and systems.

The studio truck:  a collection of multiple design/fab projects:  engine/transmission swap, Chevy gen1 350 & Gen2 5spc into a 1956 international, 5T truck, flat bed, rack, & toolbox design/fab, design /fab a 7kw generator serpentine drive system, mounting bracket & housing . . . The list is long . . .

Sometimes the process and the systems don’t exist . . . So if you’ve paid attention after maintaining systems, working with different materials and processes, you just make up the system that needs to exist, develop it, and make it happen..

Steel Stressed skin waffle roof structure for a living space addition:  The roof plane spans 20ft while cantilevering 8ft on one end and 3ft at the other end.  The depth at the ling cantilever is less than 12”.

A study of a small-house as an addition to an existing property.  Along with a number of other projects on the site.  The intent is to develop a cohesive concept that can bring the eclectic nature of the spaces together while allowing the differences to exist at an applied level.  View from East across proposed pool with guest house to the right, existing house to the left, new deck at near left, breezeway straight ahead.

Process images of the south main door at the 6330 Project