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The Ruskin House: Upper Roof & Loft |
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I've always said here in Florida, there should be two lines of enclosure: one is the what I call the glass line, that is the line between conditioned and unconditioned space; the other one is what I call the screen line. And that is the line between your living space and all of the insects. So what it does is it gives you outdoor livable space that is part of the house. If you think of the old houses say, on an old street in an old neighborhood, you have the old front porch. Everybody had a front porch. Well, that used to be the hangout spot. But many people today won't go out there because there are too many bugs. So this solves that issue, especially if you have, say, a pool on the water by mangroves and at around sunrise and sunset, you get what you call no see-ums . . . they are terrible! They will attack every inch of your body all at once and it's very uncomfortable. So this screen is a 20 by 20 mesh, which is fine enough that these tiny, little biting gnats called no see-ums can't get through, which makes it a perfect outdoor space for a house on the water, and you can actually leave the space open 24/7 if you wanted, which I believe the owner, Stan did for quite a bit of the time while he lived here. |
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. . . forge ahead . . . |
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While the cypress is certainly way more economical than aluminum, the long-term durability is certainly less. For budget reasons, this entire space was created using local, rough-sawn cypress. However, I did explain that the life span would be limited between 7 and 10 years. |
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I had figured that 7-10 yr time frame is where we would probably start to see some dry-rot at some of the connections between the 2x 4,6,8,10 framing and the Gulam beams, and at that point we would likely have to replace all this cypress framing either with new cypress Framing, which would have to be replaced again in another 7 - 10 years; or we could reframe it all in aluminum which is actually what we ended up doing in 2015. |
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So if we put this up in 2007, then that’s a good 8 years that we got out of the cypress before we had to reframe with aluminum. See how the change was made here.
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Here you can see how you have the screen line on the left and the glass line on the right with a view out to the water and all those mangroves that are just teeming with no see-ums at sun up and sundown especially, let alone all the mosquitoes and other insects that fly around. So this grabs all this deck space and makes it part of your living space. |
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You can see the light quality in this space sitting here by the pool up on the deck. With the screen, it filters the light a little bit, and it brings in all of the colors, the breezes and everything from the water’s edge . . . |
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This screen line is conceived as an integral part of the overall concept and composition of the project. Its materiality, its connections and its construction have to be consistent with the entire project. The main space defining concept here, and the main structural elements are these glu-lam beams which appear in the very first sketches to define a space enveloped by the space of the water in the Bay. It cannot be separated, either formally or conceptually from the rest of the project. |
