Tree Houses

In real estate dream #4a, I'm staging a tree house, with bakelite radio and army issue binoculars, mosquito netting, maps of the Ubangi River, and a dog eared copy of Lord Jim, or The Swiss Family Robinson.

Some arboreal structures are cobbled together from partial sheets of ply and builders waste (see top). Others employ fine finish materials, inspired by fantastical architectural, or the tree dwelling tribes of New Guinea.

Pitchford Estate in Shropshire County England claims the oldest extant tree house, believed to date from at least 1692.



But while constructing a woodsy roost used to be a rite of passage, chief staging for hideouts, secret clubs, and sleep overs, the pre-fab play structure seems to have commandeered the kiddie commorancy niche.

But who needs all that outdoor imagination stuff when you have video games?

The Super Duper Ellipse

The Super Ellipse, or Lame Curve (see Super E 1/07/2009 ) is neither costumed crime fighter, nor diamond shape.

Still, the Degenerate Super Ellipsoid is amongst our favorite forms, and not just because it's degenerate or a convex function.

Popularity can be fleeting, next week I'll probably get cozy the Reuleaux triangle.

But let's savor the moment: look within the diamond, deep within the diamond, past the radiating vent slats.

Monday Montage

Battered Dormers

The battered, or tapered, column is a staple of Craftsman architecture. Battered columns appear atop room dividing built-ins, and across front porches.

The battered dormer on the other hand, which features an inclined face, is a far less common proposition. (Note the string of "doghouses" across the image top.)


In some examples, the window is hung upright, or parallel to the front elevation, inset at the base of the pylon massing (rather than adhering to the cant of the dormer).

Rare example above with clipped hip roof.

In the Anderson & Bach tract, near the Foshay Learning Center, there's a handful of properties with skinny shed roof dormers wherein the end of the fascia board exhibits the same tilt, or angle, as the dormer face.

Los Detalles

Even More Eyebrow Dormers

An eyebrow dormer with relief panel inset!

Enlivening an otherwise undifferentiated section of hipped roof (and providing a bit of balance opposite a turret). There's a lot of mass-centric residential building today, but the roof/roof line is mostly relegated to a flat cap.

Maybe we need a roof revival!

Eyebrow dormer with dreamy stained glass window.

Odd ridge cap fascia illustrates yet again the hazards these features face in re-roofings.

Tom-School-ery

Buyers often harbor an aversion to schools, especially high schools, and properties adjacent. While learning institutions beget traffic, some daytime noise, and litter, they are not without perks. Many schools roll up the sidewalks after 4 pm, students and faculty dismissed at three-ish, lie silent in the evening, on weekends and for long holiday periods.

I was once involved with the purchase and sale of a property on 40th Place, in West Park, directly behind Manual Arts High School. "Manual Arts is a large institution," I cautioned my client, "be prepared for a teenage chorus line, maybe even loitering, in the morning and afternoon." But it wasn't to be. Manual Arts received and relieved entirely on Vermont Avenue. Moreover, because the school interrupted the East-West grid, those streets that abutted the back side of the campus (see image top), nearly operated as cul-de-sacs, with reduced traffic, and security patrols.

Over the years I've sold many a house in the Kinney Heights neighborhood, home of Joseph Pomeroy Widney High School. Outsiders, prospective home buyers, have often cast a wary glance at the single story Brutalist strip along Gramercy. Yet, Widney harmlessly serves a mere 370 special ed kids, including sightless youngsters who often, and heartwarmingly, navigate the neighborhood whilst learning to use their canes.

In the Heights (Arlington Heights that is), Johnny L. Cochran Jr. Middle School features an expansive green along the school's Southern border. At an open house, opposite the field, I once heard a home-seeker complain, "but it's across the street from a school."
"Tell her it's a park," I kidded with her agent.

Flip-Flop-Flip

"It's the perfect market for you," I told a longtime client and ardent home restorer recently, "lots of beat-up fixers at heavily adjusted prices."

Simultaneously, for those of us operating outside the golden triangles, there's less "finished" product, much less. Financial jitters, a seller's strike, the spiraling costs of some materials and labor, all play a part. But perhaps principally, the absence of investors, or "flippers," has eradicated a significant percentage of move-in condition offerings.

"Flipping" frequently gets a bad name--deserves a bad name, as vulgarian investors white-wash surfaces, concealing compromising conditions beneath carpet, stucco, or new drywall. Such efforts are often derided as "Home Depot specials." Still, some honest handyman types did turn product around with new roofs and plumbing, decent fencing and the beginnings of a nice landscape. Enough to move the acrid to the tolerable, to make properties more immediately palatable for intimidated first-timers, or engrossed families.

The foreclosure storm will only bring so many well maintained properties to market, a change in the weather will be necessary to evince others. The golden lining: "It's the perfect market for you," I told a longtime client and ardent home restorer recently, "lots of beat-up fixers at heavily adjusted prices."

Tread

Bicycles, tricked out scrapers and retro cruisers, carbon fiber fantasies and e-bikes, have become the latest fashion accessory, runway set pieces, celebrated by the Sartorialist, with fenders fashioned of bamboo and luggage racks fit for Louis Vuitton.

But the homemade bicycle, the arty ride, has always been a mix-or-match proposition in the bar-etto, where a "masser" might be confused for an aggressive lothario and a cyclo-commute sounds like something to do with particles.

These are just the sardines, traveling between work and home, neither to subvert or disrupt, nor in support of Tibet. They haven't a Maybach in the garage, or a bouncy pad in the Oaks; and, they ain't freshmen. They've merely personalized their ride, injected a little art into the "get there" machines.

Sunday Montage

More Blind Windows

(See Blind Windows 1/20/2009)

Frequently a device used to balance other facade enriching elements, Blind Windows assume many forms.

After the second World War, efforts at facade animation, became more abstract, the details less intrinsic.




Comical trompe l' oeil. Reminiscent of the 'Occupied Look' programs of those cities hardest hit by foreclosure and abandonment. Plywood seals over the means of egress are 'dressed' to resemble functioning doors and windows, sometimes even with flower boxes and cheery looking occupants.

New construction on Wilton.

Architect Sumner P. Hunt

Sumner P. Hunt was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1865, and arrived in Los Angeles in 1889. Hunt had apprenticed since his teen years for architect Clarence Cutler of Troy, N.Y., remembered today for the Park Street Railroad Station in Medford, Massachusetts.

In Los Angeles, Hunt initially toiled for the firm of Eugene Caulkin and Sidney I. Haas, potentially contributing to Haas' Mission Revival designs for the California Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

But with Hunt's first independent commission, the famed Bradbury Building (1893), he embarked on a career of stunning innovation and achievement, contributing (sometimes in partnership with other distinguished architects including Theodore A. Eisen, A. Wesley Eager, and Silas Burns) to the design of iconic structures such as the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, the Automobile Club of Southern California, Casa de Rosas, the Southwest Museum, and El Alisal.

Along with Silas Burns, Hunt designed many early Los Angeles park buildings, including the city's oldest branch library in Vermont Square. The library, opened in 1913, was built in the Italian Renaissance style, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie.

Hunt lived for nearly twenty years in West Adams, for a time on Severance Street, in a house he designed. His residential designs are scattered throughout the area, from Alvarado Terrace to the Menlo Avenue Twenty-Ninth Street Historic District. An especially strong concentration can be found in the Kinney Heights tract, from whence the accompanying images come.

Obituary, Martin Eli Weil

Architect Martin Weil, champion of Los Angeles preservation, founding member of the LA Conservancy and the West Adams Heritage Association.

Weil, 68 years old and originally from Montana, lived in Los Angeles for over 30 years, and contributed to the restoration of many LA buildings, seminal and vernacular. Especially renowned for his analysis of finishes, Martin would carefully crater through sometimes multitudinous layers of paint to reveal the color history of a surface, often pro bono, in service of a preservation cause, or as a gesture of friendship to a neighbor or interested home owner.

Martin's house is the only known extant Greene & Greene building in the city of L.A., preserved--thanks to Martin's stewardship--after years of insensitive use.

A personal memory:

In recent years, residents of Martin's Harvard Heights neighborhood have hosted informal gatherings to welcome new house buyers. At one such event, Martin complimented the living room fireplace. "It's so Chicago," he exclaimed delightedly. The comment, accessible and charitable, uninfected by snobbery or self-importance, settled over the room with a charming warmth.

Firstly, the First Bay Tradition

(Continued from Roots)

The body of influence lay decumbent, an autopsy proceeded, resembling the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, attended by a human pyramid of blood-lusting surgeons, vampires transfixed by fresh dissection. The influences, pestiferous; the foolish notions, the valour, courage, rage, and misplaced affections, the pathology tortuously revealed as monkey tricks and nothing more.

The flight impulse took hold again, like a plane refusing to land, I charged through snowy hinterlands in the battered pickup, through places of great silence, quarries, and sandpits, uncongenial surroundings, past courts of public assistance housing, and the substantial Tudor Revivals of Hancock Park given an eerie nighttime immensity by patches of parti-color light from lawn height parabolics.

The third and most important revelation came not with the low-rumbling of drums or the hiss of steam, but as if overheard, a snippet of speech intercepted, the trailing words of an exchange between confidantes: the First Bay Tradition.

The First Bay Tradition was the handiwork of a radical group of architects, seeking to give San Francisco and environs a regional identity, fusing formality with rusticity, bold experiments in spatial arrangement intensified by unexpected detail and juxtaposition. The era of significance began in the 1880's and lasted till the great quake (if not the Great War). Site specific work, with spectacularly complex massing, shingle clad, and infused with local materials.

It was time to confront my maker.