Mork-Ulnes Architects has completed a barn-inspired artist studio in northern California, which includes a white volume that looks it like is growing out of a reclaimed timber-clad building. (more…)
From the architect. From the Architect: The existing 1970s brick and weatherboard dwelling on a large triangular site was well loved but had been outgrown by its family. The client had a diverse brief, including both definite and abstract goals such as maintaining and enhancing connections to the established garden, adding a master bedroom suite, providing a secure and defined entrance and reconfiguration and refurbishment of the existing layout and spaces. The combination of these elements led to the non-conventional addition of a new pavilion to the front of the site. The form of the addition closely references the typical gable form of the existing house but juxtaposes it with fiercely contemporary detailing and materiality.
Once through the sheltered entry and front door, the garden aspect is immediately appreciated with a large-scale, fully glazed sliding door that opens onto the landscaped rear yard. This glazed bridge forms the connection between the old and the new and is set down from the main living zone, helping the extension sit snugly on the site.
The internal rearrangement of living areas, kitchen and bathroom now complement the existing 3 bedrooms and take full advantage of the northerly aspect and elevated position of the house on this steeply sloping site. A secondary entry, rumpus room and home office, along with amenities and ample storage, are tucked into the undercroft at the rear. The outcome is a fully updated home, suitable for the changing demands of a contemporary family lifestyle. It maintains a comfortable and lived-in ambiance and pays homage to the best aspects of the original cottage.
In the past few weeks, the fates of two classic Brutalist buildings by architect Marcel Breuer were determined – with differing results. For the Atlanta Central Library, it was good news, as the Fulton County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to support the renovation of the building, saving it from the wrecking ball. Meanwhile, the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia, was not so lucky, as Fairfax County’s board of supervisors voted to tear down the building to make room for a new a townhouse development project.
First opened in 1980, the Central Library in Atlanta contains a 300-seat theater, a restaurant and space for 1 million books, and a facade representative of Breuer’s sensibilities, with its bush-hammered concrete panels and Bauhaus-inspired forms. Over the years, the building fell into disrepair, with its theater closing in the mid-1990s, and the restaurant closing a few years later. Even after a $5 million restoration in 2002, in 2008 taxpayers voted to approve a $275 million bond referendum, which would replace the Breuer-designed building with a new library.
Since then, the library’s fate had been up in the air until the board of commissioners’ vote two weeks ago. The current proposal now calls for a $40 to $55 million renovation of five of the floors, as well as a “nominal investment” on the four remaining floors to potentially lease out the space. Exact plans for the project are still being determined, with ideas including calls for a new arts center or partnership with Georgia State University’s art department, Woodruff Arts Center or Fulton County’s Arts & Culture department.
A few states north in Fairfax County, Virginia, preservationists received bad news as Breuer’s American Press Institute (API) headquarters was slated for demolition. Built in 1974, the 48,000 square foot building, featuring precast concrete panels, was built in Reston’s non-profit district to serve as a conference center for API events. After merging with the Newspaper Association of America in 2012, the API headquarters closed its doors, leaving the building vacant.
Historians had argued that the building constituted a significant work in Breuer’s catalogue, and suggested repurposing the building as a library or the home of another non-profit. A vote by the Planning Commission to not demolish the building gave preservationists hope, while an online petition received over 1,600 signatures from people all over the world. But with no county funds available to preserve the site and no buyers expressing interest in restoring the building, it was not enough to stop the redevelopment plan from going through. The site will now be used to build 34 townhouses and an apartment building as part of a masterplan designed to construct higher-density housing near Metrorail’s Silver Line train route.
News via the Washington Post, Architect’s Newspaper, WABE Atlanta and Curbed Atlanta.
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Are you a newlywed living in your first apartment? Or maybe you’re moving to a brand-new condominium along with the rest of your family? Perhaps you’re even a long-time renter who calls the landlord for any old problem.
Here’s the thing: whether you’re renting your first property or are on your third, you should know that safe condo and apartment living isn’t just the landlord’s responsibility. It is your duty to protect your family and possessions.
Here are some practical measures you can start doing for rental home security:
First of all, check your home for possible entry points, the most obvious ones being the doors to the outside (or to the corridor, depending on your exact living situation). See if they’re sturdy and in good condition.
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If they tend to get stuck or don’t close easily, it can be a problem. Inform the landlord of any broken locks so they could be fixed or replaced.
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Even if the locks aren’t broken, ask the landlord to replace them especially if the previous tenant was evicted and might still have a key. Do the same for locks on your windows and balcony doors.
Locks aren’t the only security mechanisms you have to consider. For each door, examine the strike plate (the metal plate that goes in the doorjamb) to make sure it’s sturdy and secure.
A good strike plate can reinforce the doorjamb in case someone tries to force their way in. Deadbolts, security chains, and peepholes are also good and simple features to consider but you may have to talk to your landlord before getting those installed.
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Many homeowners can get a safe to store their valuables in. A good safe is ideally one that is heavy; burglars and robbers usually want to take as much as they can and leave as quickly as they can.
An empty 1.2 cubic-foot safe can weigh 100 pounds, so it could be a good place to put valuables like jewelry, important documents, and electronics in. Owners can also bolt down safes for added protection.
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However, getting a safe for your rental property may not be the best idea. If you’re on a short-term lease, moving a safe into your temporary home can be too troublesome.
Bedrooms in condos and apartments also have very limited space, and bolt-down safes may require installation that your landlord will not allow. If you’re renting a spacious property on a long-term lease and your landlord is easy to talk to, and you have very valuable items, consider getting one. Otherwise, you can maybe just get a small fire chest and keep it well hidden.
One advantage of condo-living is that many developers invest in CCTV cameras. These usually go in common areas like the lobby, elevators, and hallways. The cameras usually go to a live feed monitored by guards on duty, so even if they aren’t being recorded, unsavory individuals have to think twice before they do anything rash or dangerous.
But if you want better security, especially within your own living space, you’ll have to get CCTV cameras installed yourself. Even simple dome-type cameras can be installed with minimal disruption to the space’s original configuration.
Assuming you have a webcam set up in your home office, there’s software you can use to turn that into a security camera as well. And if you want even more discreet protection, you can get a nanny cam or other hidden cameras in case someone robs your home while you’re away.
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See Also: 15 Budget Worthy Smart Home Improvements
Long-term leasing is often cheaper in the long run, but it also means you’ve got to invest more in keeping your property safe in cases of emergency. Even the safest locations can, over time, become unsafe.
In that case, just relying on locks and safes may not be enough. You need a way to actually scare and deter potential invaders, which is where alarms would come in handy.
In the past, getting alarm systems installed in a rental home was tricky because it could require fairly major rewiring of the property which landlords would hesitate to agree to. Now, because of wireless technology, tenants can buy easy-to-install wireless alarms that just run on batteries.
The variety of motion sensors and security alarms in the market is staggering, and you can find something to satisfy practically any security need. You can also consider getting personal panic buttons and whistles for members of the family in case of emergencies.
Of course, cameras are no good if the areas they’re monitoring are too dark. You may see faulty light fixtures and switches as a minor inconvenience but in a crisis situation, dim lighting can be dangerous, so make sure all light bulbs are working. Talk to your landlord if you have to. In case the light switches are oddly placed (for example, the switch for the dining room light is located in the living room), getting that fixed will probably require a longer talk with your landlord.
It’s also a good idea to place flashlights and LED lights in strategic locations around the house (hidden behind a houseplant or in a vase, for example) so that you have backup light sources in case of a night invasion. You also want to make sure intruders don’t have many places to hide so the more furniture you can place right up against a wall instead of in the middle of a room, the better.
Robbers and thieves take a big risk in breaking the law, and they most likely won’t bother if they don’t see a big payoff. That means you shouldn’t do anything that would entice them to try stealing from you.
Keep windows closed at night and make sure that expensive but easy-to-steal items, such as jewelry and gadgets, are not left in plain sight. Some people also favor putting alarm systems and CCTVs where they can be easily seen so strangers with bad intentions wouldn’t even try to break in.
The same goes for your online social media habits. We all know that it’s ridiculous to post pictures of your credit card online, but when you announce on social media that you plan to go on a long vacation, that could have the same consequences.
In fact, in the UK, that could even be a basis for insurance companies to invalidate your home insurance plan. Of course, you’ll also have to inform your landlord if you’re leaving the property unattended and for how long. Depending on the terms of your contract, you may not be allowed to go out of town for too long.
Of all the tips to secure your condo or rental property, this is probably the least obvious. Cultivating a good relationship with your neighbors is a great way to make friends and be sociable, but it’s also practical. Neighbors can be your best defense when it comes to protecting your property when you’re away.
Even if you’re not going away on vacation, it can be handy to routinely talk to your neighbors every evening. If for some reason, you break from that habit, they may become concerned and see if anything’s wrong. In case they see that your property’s been broken into, they can report it to security or the authorities, who can then come to the rescue.
See Also: Home Security: Try These 10 Ways to Make Your Home Safer – Without a Gun
Sometimes, despite all your efforts to keep unwanted visitors out, they can still get in. That’s why some of the tips to protect your apartment or condo would involve getting help during an invasion.
While panic alarms are a good choice, they’re not the best when you’re dealing with armed individuals. In that case, you need stealthier ways to get other people’s attention.
Store important emergency numbers on your cellphone so that you can call the authorities quickly. If you’re cellphone’s out of reach, try going for your landline phone instead.
Having a list of emergency numbers next to each of your phones would be a good idea. You also need to check if your unit has an intercom so you can call the guards in the lobby for assistance.
Some of the best plans are based on expecting the worst. That also applies when you’re living in an apartment or condo for rent. While nobody wants to live their life in fear or with a negative outlook, the reality is that trouble will come sooner or later.
To have peace of mind, you need a good set of security systems. All it takes is for you to be proactive and collaborate with your landlord about what you can and cannot do to protect your property.
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The post 8 Sharp-witted Ways To Protect Your Rental Homes appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Glacier National Park – Montana – USA (by Dave Hensley)
The final touches are being added to David Adjaye‘s museum of African American history, a project that “felt like a bloodbath at times” according to the British architect. (more…)
“I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else’s story,” Nadja Spiegelman writes in her memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This. Her famous father, the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, immortalized her in some of his own work. Her mother, Françoise Mouly, is the art director for The New Yorker and a publisher/editorial director at TOON Books. Nadja says that one of her mother’s strengths is “a certain shaping of reality and a certain force of narrative and of will that also felt like a rewriting of things that I had lived through.” Both of her parents, then, formed stories out of her own life.
Nadja started interviewing Françoise for her creative writing senior thesis at Yale, when she was twenty-one. She was scared about life after college and frustrated that her mother “couldn’t possibly understand.” In her daughter’s eyes, Françoise was a sophisticated, successful, worldly woman who always knew what she wanted. But that, of course, wasn’t true.
“It was really humbling to realize how little I knew of my mother,” Nadja says. “You think that your mother belongs to you, and on some level I think that most people tend to believe that your mother’s life starts with your life, and there’s not that much to know.”
Nadja started recording their conversations in French. As she talked to her mother about her childhood in France, she wanted to know about her maternal grandmother, too — a woman with a “strong force of will . . . an indomitable woman.” So she traveled to France to spend time with Josée, her grandmother, and learned that daughters searching for their mother’s love is “a pattern that keeps repeating itself through generations.”
I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This is a memoir, but what makes it stand out from so many other books in the genre is the process of uncovering family history, examined on the page. Nadja recorded hundreds of hours of informal conversations with her mother and grandmother. She had them recount the same anecdotes three separate times just to see how the versions differed. And it wasn’t until much later on that she realized she needed to add her own story to the narrative. In doing so, Nadja uncovers a strong, hidden strand linking multiple generations of women. Times may change, but the desire to control one’s own personal history does not. There’s a surreal moment as Nadja is on the plane to Paris to interview Josée. She thinks of her mother first arriving in New York City as an eighteen-year-old. “Perhaps a ghost of her plane crossed mine,” she writes. “Perhaps, for just an instant, we overlapped in the silence over the black water.”
I chatted with Nadja recently over Skype, as she smoked a cigarette in her Paris apartment. (She splits her time between Paris and New York.) The memoir emerged from her own questions about the conflicting versions of family stories. Who decides what the truth is? Who owns a story? It’s these questions that Nadja wanted to explore. “Within families there often isn’t any kind of historical record, but there often is a real battle for who has the truth.”
In writing her own account, Nadja stakes a claim on her own version. “There’s power in being the narrator, and there’s power in being the one who controls the story,” Nadja says. “And everything is constantly shifting. Our relationships to the people that we love are constantly writing over themselves in real time, so that when you look back on your journal entries or on your diary entries or even on old emails, I think most people are often surprised by how they used to feel — because in the intervening years, things have either gotten better or gotten worse in a relationship with a certain person, and you allow the present state to color the entirety of the past. And that’s powerful. Being able to change reality in those ways, being able to constantly change the past so that it fits the present and the present makes sense, that’s a real kind of magic.”
It’s no surprise that she thinks of the process as a kind of conjuring. When she was a child, her father would tell her stories about a magical anything shop. If she found a penny on the ground, she could redeem it at a shop that would appear or disappear in alleyways. She started to tell these same stories to her brother. Then she wrote about a magic pencil — anything you drew with it could come to life. “I really wanted there to be magic in the world, and telling stories seemed like a way to create that and have that,” Nadja says.
The enchantment, however, ran uncomfortably into the distinctly real details that emerged from her mother’s life. “I ended up feeling a lot of it in my own body, strangely,” she says. When her mother told her about attempting to slit her own wrists at one point, for instance, Nadja’s own wrists ached as she typed the words.
The difficulty in telling — and hearing — those sometimes painful stories gave Nadja her title, a phrase that captures the paradoxical demands at the heart of her memoir. “In all the conversations I had with my mother and my grandmother, after they had read the book, about what it would mean for me to be publishing such intimate stories about their lives, often they both said to me: ‘You were supposed to protect us from this.’ You were supposed to protect us from this being weird. You were supposed to protect us from this being uncomfortable . . . there’s a certain moment when things flip, and when you do need to be protecting your parents from certain things, or when they stop needing to protect you from certain things.”
The twenty-nine-year-old author spent seven years working on the memoir. “I really feel like I grew up through writing this book,” Nadja says, ” . . . and through sort of taking my place among [my mother and grandmother] by becoming the narrator of their stories.”
The role reversal, she says, allows those family stories to become building blocks rather than boundary markers. “We’re creating a real sense of narrative and of cause and effect throughout our lives that in a way life mirrors art. Stories exist with the kind of logic they have because it’s a logic that we need in our own lives in order to make sense of them,” Nadja says.
“Pure memories are like dinosaur bones . . . discrete fragments from which we compose the image of the dinosaur,” Nadja writes in I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This. “They are only flashes: the examining room table in the nurse’s office, the soft hand against the forehead. But memories we tell as stories come alive. Tendons join the bones, muscles and fat and skin fill them out. And when we look again, our memories are whole, breathing creatures that roam our past.”
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American studio Richard Meier and Partners has completed its first project in South America: a white and concrete office building with hidden vertical gardens in Rio de Janeiro (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 