But enough about you

(Photo by PT Ford)

I saw a little piece in Wired this month about the Bartenbach Lichtlabor Artificial Sky. A big part of architectural design is figuring out how the inside of the building is going to look under different natural lighting conditions. Will the atrium have a pleasant golden glow or will it be uncomfortably bright? And if you get it right for midday in July, how well does it work on a November morning?

The Artificial Sky project takes some of the mystery out by simulating any lighting conditions for any day of the year at any point on the globe. You build a model of your structure, set it up inside the spherical Artificial Sky room, and set the room to cycle through various days of the year at your proposed building's location.

The only problem I can see is, how do you shrink yourself small enough to walk around inside your model and see how it looks? I hope the people-shrinking technology has improved since that terrible Rick Moranis movie.

Ikea has had a line of prefab housing available in Scandinavia for a while now. How long until you can buy a flatpack house in Renton?

Wired had a feature on this a few months ago that showed some much more attractive options now available, including the environmentally friendly Glidehouse. And there's a whole, um, smörgåsbord of offerings on FabPrefab's listing.

I think these are neat in concept but I'm still reluctant. Who wants to go first and try it out and report back?

Frank Gehry just finished a new building in New York. Just as you'd expect, it's curvy and shiny and weird. This video of it really should be edited down; if you just want to see the outside, the last 45 seconds of the video are all you need.



Gehry was the first big-name architect I knew anything about, because he completed the Weisman Museum on the University of Minnesota campus when I was 16 years old and taking classes there. People made a big stink about how strange the new building was, but I loved the way the dim winter sun got magnified into a blinding blaze of light as you crossed the Washington Avenue bridge and headed onto the main part of campus.

Then, of course, I moved to Seattle in 1998 and Gehry built the controversial EMP in 2000. Sometimes I feel like he's following me around, but now that I look at all the big buildings he's done in the last 15 years all over the world, I realize that's just me being egocentric again.

We're still in the process of planning how we want our new house to be. But, I think maybe our work is done. Check out what NBA star LeBron James is planning for his new house outside of Cleveland.

A house like that would really blend in, say, Wallingford, don't you think?

Would you want to live in this building?

This class was more on zoning and land use regulations, with lots of questions from students who already have projects underway. Most of the information presented had either been presented before, or was too specific to individual projects to have a lot of bearing on my situation, so I'm not going to write up detailed notes from this class. However, I did get to thinking about some more general philosophical issues.

As I learn more about the process of developing land, it's finally dawning on me that building is not considered a right in our system of government. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - yes. Building a house - no. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a building permit, and the burden of proof that the project is legal is on the applicant.

For example, we learned this week in class that the location of bird nests can interfere with your ability to get a building permit. That makes total sense; we all love our spotted owls and want them to have safe nesting environments, right? However, here's the part that surprised me. If the government thinks there might be, say, a bald eagle nest within 400 feet of your proposed build site, they can hold up your permit until you prove that there is not a nest.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not against this system. The more I think about this setup, the more reasonable I find it, especially as I compare it to other possible systems. It just surprised me at first because I hadn't really internalized that building is considered a privilege, not a right.

This class was all about land use codes, zoning codes, and urban planning. Bruce felt it would be useful to us to understand the reasoning behind the set of laws and codes currently in effect in Seattle and the surrounding areas so that we'd be less likely to run afoul of the law when building, and so that if we try to get variances we can word our appeals in a way that is consistent with the underlying principles of the law as much as possible, thus increasing our chances of success.

The backbone of most zoning regulation in Washington state is the Washington Growth Management Act of 1990. The GMA had several goals, many relating to the protection of the environment by reducing sprawl, concentrating development in designated areas and improving transportation infrastructure. It also mandated that all sufficiently populous counties develop 20-year growth plans.

The GMA was passed statewide, but it is implemented locally. Each county and municipality is responsible for legislating and planning on its own. If you surf around to different county and city websites, you can look up their GMA 20-year plans and read about local goals and mandates.

One of the stickiest results of the GMA is that because they want to encourage growth in urban areas, that means they want to discourage growth in rural areas. So people who want to build in the boonies may run into government roadblocks and disincentives. Luckily for us, we want to build closer into the city than we already are, so this aspect of the legislation shouldn't affect us.

At this point, Bruce went off on a bit of a tangent (ah, how I love a good tangent) about cul-de-sac neighborhoods vs. grid neighborhoods. There was a period in residential development when cul-de-sacs (or should that be culs-de-sac?) were thought to reduce traffic speeds and make neighborhoods safer. But after lots of suburban neighborhoods were built with these windy roads and side streets, researchers found that just the opposite was true. Sure, traffic is slow on the spurs, but all the traffic very quickly gets concentrated on the connector roads, which become correspondingly congested during rush hour and dangerously fast at all other times. Grid layouts are much safer because traffic can easily, dynamically shift around congestion points.

Apparently the classic book in this space is A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. I haven't read it, but judging by the dozens of glowing reviews on Amazon, I probably ought to. My books-to-read shelf is getting heavy again. I'll just put it on my wishlist for now. But hey! Valentine's day is coming up! What says "I love you" better than a 30-year-old book on design patterns for the human environment?

Back on topic...

If you own a house in or near Seattle, here is a list of fun things to check out online about your property:

• Check out the King County urban growth boundary map.
  
  
• Look up your house on Seattle's DPD GIS map to see the real estate parcels around you and find out if you live in an ECA (environmentally critical area) like, say, the side of a hill the government thinks might slide into the lake during a big rainstorm.
  
  
• See permitting activity near a point of interest. This might be a good way to find out if that vacant lot across the street from your house is about to get developed.
  
  
• See the zoning maps for Seattle. I love this stuff. I am awash in a warm sea of data.
  
  
• Look up your house's sewer card. They used to keep all the information about sewer line locations on index cards downtown. How did they digitize? By scanning all the index cards and putting them online! Look yours up, it's fun.
  
  
• This one wasn't mentioned in class, but surely by now you've looked yourself up on Zillow? This one isn't Seattle-specific. You can zoom around on the satellite images of your neighborhood and see the dollar signs floating above your neighbors' houses.
  

We have a new instructor, Bruce Donnally of Donnally Architects, and a new topic, working with your site and environment, for Winter Quarter.

Bruce isn't quite as tangential and anecdotal a speaker as Bill was last quarter but I'm quite favorably impressed so far, and I expect good things for the rest of the quarter. Bill tended to riff from fairly terse notes, whereas Bruce spoke from a slideshow on his computer, so that's different. Also, this quarter I'm bringing my new laptop to class and taking notes in electronic form right from the start instead of taking handwritten notes and trying to decipher them later. Theoretically this will result in timelier and more accurate blogging, but since I'm already nearly a week behind and the quarter just started, I guess we'll have to pin our hopes on increased accuracy.

One surprise: I had the mistaken impression that we would continue to have guest architects most weeks. According to the syllabus, we won't have any guest architects this quarter, and we'll only have guest speakers at all about half the weeks. We're having a geotechnical engineer ("the dirt guy"), a couple of landscape designers, an arborist, and maybe one more guest. I hope we have more architects again spring quarter. And there will be another on-site home visit. I'm looking forward to that.

But enough administrivia and on with the content!

The overarching structure of Bruce's talk was that humans' relationship to nature has changed dramatically a couple of times in recent history. Until about 500 years ago, humans viewed nature as an omnipotent threat. With the age of Enlightenment we started to view ourselves as the center of the universe, the controllers of nature by divine right. And much more recently, we have come to view ourselves as stewards of natural resources.

Within that huge, general framework, Bruce showed us many dozens of slides illustrating various styles of residential architecture throughout history, divided into those three categories, and showed how each example embodied those attitudes toward the site and the environment. Although those shifts in attitude happened along the timeline I just outlined, you can of course continue to find examples of the older outlooks in contemporary dwellings.

As an aside, one of the bonuses of bringing a laptop to class is that now I can look up the structures Bruce is discussing in class, if they are famous enough, and find other pictures of them and more information about them right then. I also have the opportunity to be a wiseass and chime in with obscure facts that Bruce doesn't happen to recall on the spot. (For the most part, Bruce had a lot of data in his head, all accurate. It can't be comfortable to stand in front of students with access to Wikipedia and talk extemporaneously. So far so good!)

On a somewhat separate axis from the humans'-attitude-to-nature categorization, we talked about how the structure itself fits in with its environment. Some houses seem to grow up organically out of the ground; others seem to sit lightly. Some houses have abrupt transitions from indoors to outdoors; others have intermediate spaces that are outside but protected. Some houses have thick, solid walls and window casements; others feel more like they have thin skins. Some houses seem to reach up and embrace the sky, others are squat or boxy or just appear unconcerned with what's above them. Some are built of materials that blend well or even mimic the natural surroundings; others contrast and stand out.

Here are some of the more photogenic houses we saw in class that I could find pictures of on the web:


Potala Palace, Tibet, mostly 17th century

This structure is a little grand compared to the Seattle-area single family dwellings we looked at last quarter, but it provides an excellent example of a building mimicking its environment and appearing to rise up out of the ground. Look at the way the roofline and the stairways echo the mountains behind.


Jim Cutler's Bridge House, Bainbridge Island, 1987

In contrast, the Bridge House, though it also blends beautifully with its environment, sits lightly -- so lightly that a stream flows under it. Jim Cutler is probably most famous for designing the Bill Gates house in Medina.


Villa Rotunda, Vicenza, Italy, 16th century

The Villa Rotunda was the perfect structure for that second human-centered-universe phase that Bruce described. Perfect four-way symmetry, columns, stairs, everything in perfect order. This is another example of a building that seems to grow up out of the ground, though the grounds around it are too manicured for the building to blend in.

Bruce spent a summer in Vicenza once, and at one point he got the extra-detailed behind-the-scenes tour of the Villa Rotunda. There are no bathrooms anywhere in the building, since bathrooms were optional in the 16th century and since it would mess up the symmetry to add them later. However, there was a tiny niche off one of the stairwells that used to house a chamberpot and a fan. If you needed to use the pot, you could sit on it and hold the fan in front of your face to preserve your modesty as people walked by.


Villa Savoye, outside Paris, Le Corbusier, 1928-1931

Finally, we flip back to another house that sits lightly. Le Corbusier (or, apparently, "Corb" to those in the know) designed it to be a "machine for living." It has a feeling of separation and enclosure, and has a very thin skin separating outside from in. It stands up on stilt-like columns called "pilotis." When Bruce was talking about how le Corbusier pioneered the separation of structure and enclosure, I had an absurd flash back to operating systems lectures about the separation of policy and mechanism. But I fear that the intersection of my CS audience (tiny) and my architecture audience (also tiny) will be the null set, so I won't ramble at length about that. This ramble is probably lengthy enough as it is!

This was our last class for autumn quarter. I think there is still room to register for winter quarter -- anybody want to join me? The class has been excellent so far and it would be fun to have some company next term. Let me know if you want to register and I'll send you the info you need.

We didn't have a guest architect this session. Bill talked about job costs and handed out all of the actual money paperwork (with the clients' names removed) from a current job in West Seattle.

Once again, I'm feeling a little too lazy to weave this into any kind of narrative, so let's fall back on the tried-and-true bullet point approach.

• It costs about $30,000 to tear down and haul away a house, ballpark.
  
  
• My favorite quote of the night, in a charming and yet mildly snarky tone: "I don't do rectangles."
  
  
• Usually, about 50% of the money in a house goes into basic structures like foundation and framing, and 50% goes into finishes.
  
  
• The overall price tag for square footage in Seattle is around $185 to $250 a square foot, for an average, not-too-complicated house, with not-too-fancy finishes. The dollars per square foot figure will be higher for a small house, since you still have to have expensive rooms like kitchens and bathrooms even in a small house. Big houses have a lot of cheap square feet.
  
  
• The price tag for remodels is much too variable to toss off a one-size-fits-all estimate. Are you doing an internal remodel, or an addition? If it's an addition, are you building out or up or both? Is the house old? Has it been remodeled before? Was it worked on by pros or by the homeowners? All of these things can dramatically revise the cost estimates.
  
  
• It can be quite financially and emotionally rewarding to remodel your kitchen, use it for less than ten years, and then sell the house. In that time period, you won't wear out the finishes and fixtures and appliances, but you will get the fun of using them for a while before you have to sell and do it all again. Beware of this strategy if you have small kids or dogs, who are very hard on kitchens.
  
  
• General rule of thumb for selecting finishes and fixtures: if you touch it several times a day, get a really good one. For example, your kitchen sink should be just the way you want it. Get a nice kitchen faucet. It's worth it because you are going to use it so much.
  
  
• Bill gets about six flat tires a year driving to construction sites.
  

That's it for the quarter! There's so much that didn't make it into my online notes. I've really enjoyed the class and would recommend it to anyone interested in residential architecture, especially if you are contemplating a big project of your own, but even if you just like houses and building.

At some point (maybe not until the end of the year) I'm going to do an architect roundup and list all the guest architects, their specialties, and my impressions of them. I'll probably lock that entry so I don't feel like I have to be too tactful. :) Let me know (post a comment or send an email) if you're not my LJ friend but you'd like to see the entry.

In the second half of class, Bill talked about how to work with a builder. Some of the material had already been covered in previous classes, but this is a good time to pull it all together in one place, so here's a list of things to look for in a builder.

• Get the right kind of builder. Commercial contractors and residential contractors are completely different animals. Within the class of residential contractors, there are specialists. For example, some do mostly remodels while others do mostly new houses; and even amongst the new house builders, some usually do spec houses while others do custom houses. Don't let your house be your contractor's learning experience.
  
  
• How much expertise do you need? For a small addition with no complicated wiring or plumbing, you don't need as fancy a contractor as you need for a kitchen remodel. The kitchen is by far the most complicated room in the house.
  
  
• If you're married, get a builder who can talk to both people in the couple.
  
  
• Investigate your potential builder: talk to previous clients, and have your architect ask other architects who have worked with the builder. Look up the builder with Washington State Labor and Industries. Check to make sure the builder is up to date on his sales tax; when a builder's business begins to go south, often the first sign is that he gets into arrears on his sales tax.
  
  
• Ask about license and insurance, and how much insurance the builder has. The builder's insurance will cover it if someone gets hurt on the site, if someone sets fire to your big pile of lumber, or if materials are stolen. Your insurance doesn't cover the materials until they're actually on the house, so you want to make sure the builder's insurance covers the gap.
  
  
• Ask about billing methods and timing, and to see an example of a bill.
  
  
• Set up your contract to hold back about 5% on every bill for retainage. This is money that belongs to the contractor, but that you hold on his behalf until the job is complete. This is the money you can hold over his head to make sure he really finishes that punchlist at the very end of the job and doesn't just move on to greener pastures.
  

Our guest architect on 11/29 was Tom Lenchek of Balance Associates, Architects, a six-person firm in Seattle. They do about a third of their work in Western Washington (mostly Seattle and the islands), a third in Eastern Washington, and a third throughout the west (Montana, Oregon, Idaho, BC). About a quarter of their clients are from far away (Los Angeles, for example), so they end up having many jobs in which the client, the architect, and the work site are in three far-apart locations.

Tom, in particular, seems to enjoy focusing on vacation homes in and around Winthrop, Washington. The project he focused on in detail was his Wintergreen Cabin project in the Methow Valley in north central Washington, between Winthrop and Mazama.



It's a 1500 square foot cabin built to withstand the harsh conditions in the valley: 100 degree summers, but -30 degree winters, lots of snow, nearby forest fires.

Tom walked us through his firm's site analysis procedure. It's very different from Bill's, which I described in a previous entry. Tom takes a huge number of photographs from many vantage points and heights, so that he can generate sun angle diagrams with view-obstructing hills and trees built into them. Because Tom so frequently works in remote locations, he wants to gather as much information as he possibly can in the initial site analysis. It is prohibitively expensive to run out to the site to check details later so he's learned to be very thorough.

His schematic design and cost analysis procedures seemed pretty standard compared to all of the other ones we've seen this quarter; I seem to be getting a feel for how these things usually work. Every architecture firm seems to have its own very complex Excel spreadsheet full of choices. Some of the choices are up to the homeowners: do you want to have plastic laminate countertops or granite? Others are imposed by the character of the site: if you're building into a steep hill that's going to be more expensive than a flat site. All of these carefully-crafted, hand-tuned spreadsheets attempt to capture the major factors that end up affecting the bottom line.

Tom's construction procedures differed a little from those of the more urban architects we've met, again because of the remoteness of his build sites. In-city architects try to visit their work sites on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, but Tom may visit as infrequently as every 4-6 weeks for very remote sites. It is getting easier to use electronic means of monitoring work progress.

A few more tidbits from Tom's presentation:

• Did you know there's something called the National Fenestration Rating Council? In reality, they measure window quality. I'd prefer to imagine that they are official judges for fenestration and defenestration competitions.
  
  
• There was a theme, as Tom showed us slides of older projects. He kept saying that he'd do it better now. I'm also seeing a pattern over all the architects we've seen in class: the older ones really do seem better. Experience does seem to count.
  
  
• In a vacation home, it can make sense to build cabinets and use them as closets rather than building big walk-in closets. You just don't have to store as much clothing and other stuff in a vacation home as you do in your first home.
  

In a later post: in the second half of class, Bill talked about working with builders.

For dense housing, this is awfully pretty:



Cactus building

Our guest architect was Peter Conard, of Sullivan Conard Architects, a 13-person firm specializing in single family residences. Unfortunately, I can't show any of the images from their site here, since it's all done in flash, so you'll just have to click through to their site if you want to see.

If I had to choose one word to summarize the entire presentation, it would be "expensive." Everything about these projects was high-ticket: location, square footage, layout, and materials. Even the business cards that Peter handed out were thick and impressive. All of the properties we saw were exquisite, but I tried not to develop too much interest in them since this firm is completely out of my league financially. For example, one of the houses we saw was 12,000 square feet on the north end of Mercer Island. For another house (or maybe the same one, I'm not sure), we saw some spreadsheets showing the cost of the project for good, better, and best materials, and the total project costs came to $4.1 million, $5.0 million, or $5.8 million.

The presentation was fascinating, but likely had little bearing on my life, so I'll move on. If any of my readers happen to want to build a five million dollar house on Mercer Island and want my input about architect choice, let me know and I'll give you more details from my notes.


When Bill started his portion of class, he warned us it was going to be a real snoozer. The topic was land use codes. We learned all about the laws for building houses in R-1 residential zones in the city of Seattle: setbacks, curb cuts, maximum build height, tree requirements, lot coverage limits, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and fences. This is all really good stuff to have in my head before we go searching for the lot we want to build on, but it doesn't make for very interesting reading, so I'm not going to go into details unless I get requests.

I will just relate one nugget of wisdom from architecture school: in the battle of building vs. tree, the tree always wins. That is, if you have a tree and a building in very close proximity to each other, you better move that tree before it takes out the building. The tree is slow and patient and it has many methods of attack: roots, mold, moss, critters. Hire a professional arborist to help you resolve tree issues before they get too serious.

On November 4th, my architecture class toured the Buck/Pelton house, which I described in a previous entry.

Some description and some photos that I took follow. ( Read more. )

Our guest architect for this class was Ben Trogdon, of Ben Trogdon Architects. Ben's my favorite guest architect so far.

Rather than focusing on one particular home in detail, Ben showed us a slide show of his work going all the way back to 1986, when he remodeled his brother's house. The retrospective approach was fascinating because even with my untrained eye, I could see Ben's skill and style improving over the years. The stuff he's building these days is amazing.

Here's an interior of a house in West Seattle that I like a lot:



All the pictures of that house (the one labeled "West Seattle" in his web portfolio) appealed to me. It's one of the five houses he lists on his recognitions page as having won Home of the Month.

For Bill's part of the class, he introduced us to a home that he is working on that is currently under construction. He'll give us updates on this particular job throughout the year.

The house in construction is on the beach on the west side of Whidbey Island. It's a steep property with a view of the water, very quiet. He met the clients one year ago. They go to their property 2-3 times a month, for several weeks in the summer, and for Thanksgiving. They live in Seattle and drive to the Mukilteo ferry.

Bill told us about a ritual he goes through when he is seeing a work site for the first time. He visits alone and writes his feelings and impressions of the site in hopes of capturing some of the poetry or vision he will use to define the concept for the house. He writes what he's seeing and hearing and thinking in a notebook as he looks around the site. He read us his notes for this job. It was almost like blank verse, all about the ferry ride, the rhythms of the wind, the seagulls, the gray skies, the nettles, the shipping traffic. Apparently this is not a standard architectural practice, it's just a weird Bill thing. Anyway, it does set the mood. I felt like I had a good feeling for the vibe of the site after hearing Bill's notes.

He also showed us a two-minute flash slideshow video the clients had sent him when they were first starting the job. It was full of pictures of friends and family camping on the site where the house will be built, with schmaltzy music and busy transitions from slide to slide. It was wonderful because it gave a great idea of what the clients are like in a very short amount of time. Some clients come armed with drawings, some send silly family videos. Whatever gets the point across, I guess!

I loved the story of how they named the street they cleared to lead up to their property. The family has several pets, including a completely imperturbable cat named Scooter. Apparently Scooter is one of these cats that you can pick up any which way and he just remains completely relaxed as you roll him all around in your arms. So they cleared the road up to their property, and they officially named the road Scooter Way, because you go out to this property to relax in the Scooter way.

Bill showed us a whole series of drawings for the house, guest cottages, spa building, and viewing platform. This is going to be more of a resort complex than just a house. The first drawings were literally on coffee shop napkins. Apparently coffee shop napkins work well with fountain pens. I never realized. The drawings started out very rough, just getting a sense for proportion and location of each of the buildings. The firm keeps all of the drawings for the whole project, even as concepts get discarded. By the end of a project, there will be several large 4" three ring binders of materials, but there will also be a big manila envelope full of all of the coffee shop napkins from the early planning days.

One of the coolest features of the new house will be an observatory above the main entrance, lined entirely with books and windows. This will also be the designated room for drinking cocktails. I like this client's priorities.

The guest speaker was Ann Beeman, of Ann Beeman Architects. Bill first met her when she worked on a project across the alley from his house. Cynically, he thought it would be awful, but as construction proceeded and he realized he really liked the project, he introduced himself.

The house Ann presented is on a corner lot in West Seattle. Her client was a single woman who was about to retire from her career as a developer and general contractor. The client enjoys cooking, entertaining, and building things in her workshop, and she has several very large paintings. The program was focused on supporting those activities. Since the site also had a view, it was tricky to find enough big wall space for the paintings that wasn't also saturated with natural light from all the windows opening up to the view.

Another reason this job was unusual: since the client was a general contractor, she actually built the house herself from the plans that Ann drew up. Usually it's not a great idea for the client to play general contractor but this was a special case since she had had so many years of experience doing it.

I wish I could post some pictures of the house, because it was an intriguing presentation, but unfortunately it looks like the house is not in Ann's online portfolio. Since there's no picture of the house Ann presented, I'll include this other picture from her portfolio instead:



I can just see Elliott playing in that room. I wish our family room was not carpeted. More stuff gets spilled in the family room than anywhere else in the house, including the kitchen and the bathroom. Carpeting is such a stupid choice for the room where a toddler spends all his time.

Moving on to Bill's part of the presentation...

Bill talked quite a bit about the new "50 Top Architects" feature in the November/December issue of Northwest Home and Garden. Supposedly it's on newsstands now but I've been looking for the last week and a half and I keep finding the previous issue. I suppose it will filter out eventually.

He also talked about finding an architect in your price range. The "50 Top Architects" feature is interesting, because it gives numbers for each architect's typical job cost, so that can help you narrow it down. We also learned that an architect's fees will usually end up being between 8% and up to 25% or even 30% of the total cost on a new house, but that most will fall into the 12%-15% range. Only the really big names charge up in the high end of that range.

Architects tend to have comfort zones for the number of dollars per square foot their projects end up costing. Architects use the same builders over and over, and the same materials over and over, so the numbers often end up pretty close from job to job even if the program is very different. Some architects work almost exclusively in the $185-$250/square foot range, for example, while others find it difficult to go lower than $450/square foot.

There was a question from a student about UBuildIt, and Bill said he'd never used them, but he thought they'd probably be all right for very modest, straightforward projects.

Our guest architect for this session was Lisa J. McNelis, of McNelis Architects, a one-woman firm in West Seattle.

I had to laugh when she started by showing a picture of the kind of house she doesn't do: it could almost have been a picture of my current house. Since I don't love my current house at all, it was a good sign that Lisa doesn't either.

Then she showed pictures of what she does do, with this as one example:



Some of the high points from Lisa's presentation:

• In contrast to a previous presenter, Lisa recommends getting a separate interior designer, to ensure that someone is focusing on those details.
  
  
• Lisa showed us her worksheet for choosing finishes and fixtures, for homeowners who want to do all the selection themselves. It's pretty daunting. There are a tremendous number of decisions to make. You can, of course, pay someone to make all the decisions for you.
  
  
• Lisa strongly suggests googling your contractor, looking him up with the Better Business Bureau, and checking his references. For example, you don't want to end up hiring this guy: Ken Schlecht, Contractor from Hell
  
  
• Lisa uses a structural engineer on every project. In the past, architects did their own structural analysis, but structural codes have gotten more complicated so it makes sense to hire a specialist, who can also be more objective
  
  
• The City of Seattle does no design review on single family dwellings. They care about safety issues, such as not having rusted hulks of dead cars on your front lawn, but aesthetically, the homeowner has complete control.
  

Once Lisa was done, Bill talked about how to find an architect. Well, actually, first he went off on a long and amusing tangent about being a Yankee architect on a job in Williamsburg, Virginia (home of the "phony Colonie" architectural style) and getting guff from the good old boys on the design review committee. But then he talked about finding an architect. Here are some suggestions:

• AIA Seattle has an online eSource center. Not everyone is listed in that. It costs quite a bit to be listed, and firms that get plenty of work by other means don't always bother to get themselves listed.
  
  
• Magazines like Northwest Home and Garden, Seattle Homes and Lifestyles, Seattle Magazine, and Seattle Metropolitan often have listings and resources.
  
  
• AIA Seattle and the Seattle Times Northwest Home and Garden partner to have an Open House (formerly known as Home of the Month) every two months. You can go on tours of these homes.
  
  
• You can look at job signs on projects under construction.
  
  
• You can avoid the Street of Dreams (aka the Street of Screams).
  
  
• Ask your friends who they used.
  
  
• Once you find some candidates, interview about three of them. Enjoying your architect's personality is very important. You are going to be working very closely with this person for months and months, and you are going to have to share some very personal information if you want the job done right.
  
  
• Questions to ask: How can we reach you? How many people will work on my job? How many jobs do you and your office work on at the same time? How long will my job take? Can I email you? Can I call you on your cell phne? Do you also do interior design or do I need to hire a separate designer?
  
  
• Overall strategy: start with architects whose work you find interesting, even if it's too expensive. Then find people whose work you like who work in your price range. Among those, choose based on personality, services provided, how much they charge, how much experience they have, and what builders they typically work with.
  

There was no guest architect on the 18th. Bill's two big topics were a review of a beach house he designed (but has not built yet), and some discussion of the differences between new construction and remodeling projects.

The Burke-Watson Residence

The Burke-Watson residence will be a beach house in Pacific Beach, Washington. Currently, the lot is occupied by a rotting mobile home.

When Bill first arrived at the site, he spent a couple of hours hiking around, making sketches of the site, looking for features that would inspire the design and also problem areas that would restrict the design. How do the sun and the wind hit the site? Where is the view? Where are the trees? The neighbors? Where is the well and the septic system? Where are the setbacks from the ocean, the well, the septic system, and the neighboring lots?

The main points that inspired or restricted the design of this house were:

• If you get up high enough, you can see the whales go by. The house has a tower where you can go up and watch.
  
  
• The beach has a lot of rolling dunes. The roofline of the house slants the same as the dunes.
  
  
• This will be a second home, used mainly for weekends and vacations, so it should be built with beachy activities in mind -- a large, accessible, and well-designed mud room on the beach side is key. Also, the closets can be small and hotel-like. They mostly bring ready-made food in, or go out to eat, so the kitchen doesn't have to be too special.
  
  
• The family has dogs, and the two other families they would most frequently invite to spend time with them at the beach house also have dogs, so there could be up to seven dogs running around the house at any given time. The flooring was chosen accordingly.
  
  
• The family will spend time together around the fire, talking, playing games, or reading, so there's an inglenook. (When I told this to Chris, he said that after the kids go to bed, the homeowners could have a little inglenookie in front of the fire. Groan.)
  
  
• On the sea side, there is an unroofed, unheated, glassed-in area. The idea is that you can sit or stand in there and look at the ocean, protected from the wind, and it will be quite pleasant.
  
  
• When you have a large wall of glass, as houses with good views generally do, it's important to make sure there is a second source of natural light coming from the other direction. Otherwise it will be unpleasant to sit and talk in the room with the light flooding in -- someone will be heavily backlit and hard to look at. In this house, there is a tower room where the husband can get away from the family and do some work, and some natural light will filter down from the tower into the main part of the house and soften the otherwise harsh lighting in the living room.
  

New Construction vs. Remodel

Bill says: "A new house is always more fun than a remodel. A remodel is so reactionary -- you're solving problems. In a new house, you get to create new ones."

Besides the new problems/old problems distinction, probably the biggest difference between remodels and new construction is how the land use code governs the project. In new construction, you must be fully up to code, no exceptions, and probably no variances. In a remodel, you might be able to get grandfathered in, depending on what type of violations you have. For example, if you are building a second story, everything in the structural system (the foundation and supports) below the addition does have to be brought up to code. However, if you are adding on to the side, the crumbling foundation in the existing part of the house can be left alone.

A third option between new construction and remodeling is tearing down an existing structure and building a new one. In some cases, it is worth keeping a small part of the existing structure, if it is sufficiently sound, in order to get grandfathered in to older land use codes.

On the topic of construction site: it is always good to be on an alley. You get more light and more access to your property without having to pay the price of having a lot of traffic go by. Also, the codes for lot coverage allow you to include part of the area of the alley in your computations, so you can build bigger on an alley lot. Corner lots, on the other hand, are a mixed bag, because you have large setbacks from both streets.

I already wrote about the second half of class on 10/11. Now I'm coming back to write about the first half, our guest architect for that night.

Our visitor was Elizabeth Maher, of Abrahams Architects. The owner of the firm is Robin Abrahams, who also happens to be our instructor Bill's friend and neighbor.

Although the Abrahams Architects website says that the firm does new home design and commercial design work, my strong impression from Elizabeth's presentation is that they focus mostly on remodels. My hunch is borne out by reading the company history on the website, which says that when Robin started the firm that's all she did, and that over the years as the firm has grown they have expanded into other areas. For this reason alone, I probably won't end up hiring Abrahams Architects to work on our future house, though their work seemed very high-quality. I loved one thing that Elizabeth said: their clients love them as much for their process as for their product. It's going to take a long time and a lot of communication to get a house designed and built. It's great if that process can be as smooth and pleasant as possible.

Elizabeth spent some time giving an overview of the Abrahams firm, the architectural design process in general, and some quick views of various Abrahams projects over the years. Then she spent about 20-25 minutes focusing on one remodel: the Chapin residence on Mercer Island.

The house and land were amazing before Abrahams even touched it. The property was a triple lot with a lovely garden and a stream. The house, which dated from the 1920's, was already around 6000 square feet, so the owners didn't need to build an addition, but they did want to renovate and reconfigure the existing space to make it safer and more appropriate for the way their family lived.

The second link above already does a good job of describing the basic problems the family wanted to solve, and how the architects tackled those problems, so I won't get into that. I'll just hit some of the high points that I picked up on during Elizabeth's presentation.

• It's a good idea to hire an architect who designs the space and simultaneously works in interior design. Some architects do this and others do not. You can also get separate people to do the two jobs, or you can do the interior design yourself, but the finished product may not be as integrated as you hope.
  
  
• You can go to the Secretary of State's archive in Bellevue and order historical pictures of your house. This doesn't apply to us, so much, since we bought our house when it was only a few months old and no one had lived it in yet, but those of you with older houses might be interested in doing this. In the case of the Chapin house, they learned from the historical pictures that the windows had originally had a gorgeous diamond-pane design on the windows, which they were able to reconstruct in the remodeled house.
  
  
• Sometimes clients have to take a leap of faith with the architect; if the architect is experienced and talented, he or she may have something in mind for the space that the client just can't see. In the Chapin house, the homeowner was pleasantly surprised by the master bedroom. On the drawings, it just looked like a rectangle. In the finished product, it was amazing: it had windows on three sides, a stunning domed ceiling, and it felt like it was suspended in the garden. As the client, if you are concerned about a room being boring, ask your architect what he or she has in mind; maybe it's going to be great and you just can't read the drawings as well as your architect thinks.
  
  
• The neighborhood matters when you embark on a remodel. It's important that the client can afford the remodel, but the house and neighborhood must be able to afford it, too. For example, let's say the prevailing home price in your neighborhood is $750K, and your run-down house is currently worth about $500K. If you put $500K into a stunning remodel, you now have a $1M house in a $750K neighborhood, and you may not be able to sell the house. Don't remodel too ambitiously unless you plan to live in the house for a very long time afterwards.
  
  
• When financing a new house or a remodel, you go to the bank at the end of the schematic design phase. This is when the bank has enough information to estimate the value of the finished house. Banks sometimes get squeamish about strange layouts because they can't predict the resale value. For example, Abrahams once designed a remodel that had a large, flowing, open floorplan on the second floor, where all the bedrooms were supposed to be. The bank got nervous because the bedroom and bathroom count was (seemingly) not high enough, and the bank's model for home values is very simple. Abrahams and the clients had to start over and redesign with more walls before they could get their project funded.
  

This entry is about Bill's portion of architecture class on 10/4 and 10/11. I'll come back in another entry and talk about the guest architect on 10/11.

Bill's topic for the second and third classes was the services of the architect and the architectural process. That is, once you have selected an architect, what happens next?

Contract

When you first hire an architect, he (I am going to say "he" throughout because I am thinking specifically of Bill, though much of this process would be the same with any architect) writes a proposal discussing the scope of the work, the fee structure, and outlining what's included and what's not included. Then he sets up either a Letter of Agreement (usually for smaller jobs) or a contract. There are boilerplate contracts available from the AIA (American Institute of Architects). Getting a contract is a really good idea because if something goes wrong with the project, it provides a roadmap for getting out of trouble.

Feasibility

The next step is to find out about the feasibility of the project. This has mostly to do with various government agencies and zoning regulations and land use codes. No one wants to invest a lot of time and money in a project that is going to turn out to be illegal to build.

This is also a good time to make sure that the budget of the project is realistic and that the client will have sufficient funds to realize their vision.

Next, the client and the architect work together on the program. The program is a written version of the client's hopes and dreams for the project. It includes such factual information as "we want a two car garage" and "there should be a bathroom on every floor," but also includes more touchy-feely qualities about the flow of the space, the detailing, and even the emotions the space is supposed to evoke.

Finally, the client and the architect produce a rough schedule for the entire project.

Schematic Design

The schematic design is the first iteration of design work the architect will produce. Often this is just sketch-on-a-napkin quality, though other times the proposals will be a lot more formal. Usually, the architect will propose more than one design, and the options may be very different from each other, depending on how specific the client's vision was before coming into the process. The client and the architect bounce the schematics back and forth a few times, spiraling in on the design that will ultimately be constructed. By the end of the schematic design phase the architect will often construct a scale model and produce a preliminary cost estimate.

Design Development

Now that the basics of the design have been hammered out, the architect and the client work on the details. During this phase, the architect produces sections, elevations, and site plans. The owners choose details and interior finishes. The architect also works with a soil engineer and a structural design engineer.

Working Drawings

Up to this point, the architect and the client have been the major players. Once the architect is to the point of doing working drawings, the client has a smaller role. Now the architect is working with the city and possibly the builder. He is producing a set of drawings that are so specific that the house can be constructed without any further input.

Permit

Now it is time to get the building permit. By this time, all of the life safety and land use issues have to be completely resolved.

Bid and Contract

The client should be working to find a contractor at the same time the architect is finishing the permit process. The idea is to have the contractor ready to go the day the permit comes through.

There are two basic ways to choose a contractor: through competitive bid or negotiated bid. In a competitive bid process, you start with three or more contractors and have each of them submit a bid for the work. In a negotiated bid, you choose the contractor first and work together to determine what the bid will be.

Bill feels very strongly that the negotiated bid process is superior. In his experience, the total amount of money spent is the same in either case, but you get fewer surprises and fewer ulcers when you use the negotiation process. In the competitive bid process, the contractor has no motivation to anticipate surprises and share all of his information with you up front. When you do a negotiated bid, you are working on a team with your builder in a spirit of cooperation. The initial price tag on a negotiated bid will look higher but it all washes out in the end.

Construction

Finally, you build the house. Once a week, the architect, the client, and the builder meet on-site to discuss progress. Final selection of materials, colors, carpets, and lights happens. The architect is responsible for coordinating the builder, the landscapers, the security people, audio people, computer people, and so on. Sometimes the general contractor will manage some of these subcontractors, but others will report directly to the architect, and in case of any dispute the general contractor can't resolve or is a part of, the architect fixes the problem.

The architect should also be tracking liens and making sure none get applied to the property. If the billing is managed properly, the architect can ensure that all of the subcontractors get paid and provide releases from liens on schedule, so that when building is complete, the client is free and clear.

Then the client throws a party in the new house and the architect comes and everyone lives happily ever after.