The post 10/20/2016 – Synthesis of Physical Considerations appeared first on Larry Speck.

One of the first projects I did in my career was an addition to a 19^th century stone house in Austin that had 20-inch thick limestone walls.  I really admired that old house with its single-material walls and high thermal mass that actually performed beautifully without insulation or a vapor barrier.

As I have traveled I have admired a very long lineage of single-material walls. Ancient stone or brick walls acted as the structure, thermal barrier, and enclosure as well as interior and exterior finish.  I love the ruins of the ancient Hittite city of Hattusa in central Turkey where massive stone walls constituted virtually all construction—from dwellings and markets to gigantic ramparts.  Another great example is Machu Picchu in Peru, which is made almost entirely of carefully crafted stonework.

Centuries later, at the beginning of the 20^th century, Cass Gilbert designed Battle Hall at UT Austin with very similar construction.  Its walls are just one thickness of stone all the way through, but they have performed very well both aesthetically and thermally for more than a century.  Even when air conditioning was added, Battle Hall’s high thermal mass has helped keep it temperate even during our hot Texas summers.

There is a second history of walls that conceives of them as layers of various materials, each of which accomplishes a particular function.  Early versions of this can be seen in Roman buildings, like the Pantheon, that have a structural core faced with very different materials for the inside finish and the outside skin.

Over the last 20-30 years we have become very adept at making walls out of layers with many materials where each material is performing a separate role: one for structure, one for insulation, one for water-proofing, one for vapor barrier, another for interior finish, and another for exterior finish.  We are interested in getting the best performance out of each material with its own specific characteristics.  The coordination of so many materials may not be so great, with different  people doing each installation, often months apart in the building process.   A lot of glitches can happen at the intersection of those various materials, and the result is often not perfect.

Might we get equal or better performance out of fewer materials?  We have experimented with this idea in several projects we have done at Page, learning lessons from older single-material walls.  At the Torcasso residence, located in New Mexico, we used only rammed earth for some of the walls.  They are thick and solid and that single material provides everything needed: structure, vapor barrier, insulation, interior finish and exterior finish.

In Austin, we designed a small office building for Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates.  It features thick, unreinforced concrete walls, which serve as both the structure and the environmental barrier, and we used the walls’ thickness to significant thermal advantage.

I am not a building science nerd, and I certainly continue to be interested in walls made up of layers of materials capped by a rainscreen.  However, it also seems appropriate to explore another longstanding genre of wall construction that optimizes simplicity of construction and high thermal mass.

The post Building Envelopes: Greater Performance from Fewer Materials appeared first on Larry Speck.

I am a big fan of parks.  My local park in Austin is Zilker Park with its famous Barton Springs Pool. There is a beautiful 1940s bathhouse at the pool, designed by Dan Driscoll, an early Texas modernist architect.  I often stage my visits to the pool at times that will require a change of clothes just so I can enjoy the huge open air changing room and the very cool outdoor showers.  This blog topic is inspired by my experiences in parks and in designing buildings specifically for parks.

Decades ago, when I had my own firm, we did the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, also in Zilker Park and located just a short distance from Barton Springs Pool.  I recently participated in a series of tours for elementary school kids who came to visit the garden.  It was amazing to watch the eye-opening reaction of the kids exploring the four-acre park and its exhibits–taking a break from their regular school routine. We had our little talk on the huge porch that comprises half the space of the building at the Umlauf.  It has been a real treat to do many tours and lectures there through the years.  It’s an incredibly lively setting, and continues to thrive.

More recently, at Page, we participated in the design of Discovery Green in Houston, and, for the last few years, we have been working on Buffalo Bayou Park, also in Houston.  This newest project, which opened in October, includes many buildings spread throughout the park.

For a park building to do its job, it’s essential to feel connected to the landscape.  The intersection between structure and nature is critically important.  At Umlauf, there is that huge aforementioned porch and lots of glass in the primary pavilion.  At Buffalo Bayou Park, we did much the same with all of the buildings, including the restaurant, the bike rental and the kayak rental, each featuring a porch all the way around providing both full shade and dappled light.   The restaurant’s dining room has a large glass wall with a focus on a big, particular tree, as well as an adjacent lake, the bayou and the surrounding tree canopies.

A second big issue is scale.  One plausible approach might be to try to make a building disappear, but I think that’s problematic.  Park buildings need to be in scale with their big, open setting, and they often need to be visible at a distance to serve their purpose.  At Buffalo Bayou Park, the buildings’ scale is large and in keeping with the grandeur of the setting.

A third challenge is designing buildings to accommodate a lot of use and abuse.  Because of the flood plain at Buffalo Bayou we needed to plan many of the structures to be under water at times and vulnerable to floating debris.  We built them from stout board-formed concrete so that when there is a water event, the building withstands it.  After a significant water-level change, the concrete can be hosed off, and the structure is good to go again.  Last spring, we had huge rains in May after the buildings were pretty much complete, and there was no harm done.

Places like Barton Springs Pool, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Discovery Green and Buffalo Bayou Park are wonderful, egalitarian urban draws.  More than most places in our cities, they attract people of very diverse income levels and cultural backgrounds.  At the opening of Buffalo Bayou Park in October it was wonderful to watch a real cross section of the Houston population mingling together and enjoying a beautiful day in a beautiful spot.  Being able to be a part of making these kinds of places is as good as it gets as an architect.

The post Houston’s Buffalo Bayou: Buildings in Parks appeared first on Larry Speck.

I was in Quebec City for a few days of business meetings and was impressed by its street life in the old part of the city.  I had been there decades ago and had fond memories of this compact little bit of urban life that had, if anything, improved through the years.

I have a long history on the subject of street life.  When I was right out of school, I was hired by Stanford Anderson at MIT to assist in his extensive research project on the subject. We did meticulous observation, mapping and analysis in Paris and Brooklyn Heights (which were very positive examples) and in downtown Washington DC (where things were pretty much falling apart).  The research led to Stan’s remarkable book, “On Streets”.

I was 24 at the time, and was mesmerized by how societies have – for centuries – made these complex crucibles of cultural interaction we call streets.  Being in Quebec made me think about what’s happened in the 40 years since those days at MIT. In 1973 – apart from San Francisco and New York City – we had pretty much given up on street life in the U.S. and nobody wanted to hang out in the city.  Car-dominated culture, the suburbs, and TV were being regaled as creating a death knell for urban pedestrian life.

Now there is a remarkable resurgence of urbanity even in many places that are surprising—like Austin.  But I think we still have many lessons to relearn from cities that never lost their urbanity, some in North America, like Quebec City.

One afternoon in Quebec City, I witnessed a remarkable bit of urban theater – the quick transformation of a single street in the old quarter.  In a period of 15 minutes it went from a car street with a sidewalk to a 100% pedestrian corridor with generous outdoor social settings/restaurants and no cars.   The photos here show the quick installation of planters and rails and the relocations of the pedestrian path they provoked.  With these modest interventions, what was needed as a car route during business hours became a festive pedestrian party space in the evening. It is these kinds of subtle design moves that contribute to making urban spaces that are truly successful and engaging.

St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and many others places are now trying to rejuvenate the kind of urban life that has been continuously present in Quebec City all along.  How did we lose it in so many North American cities?  Was it really the TV of the Marshall McLuhan era?  Curiously, we now have far more technology than McLuhan anticipated and yet more people are hanging out enjoying urban life.  Maybe it’s because we all really need to be in-person social creatures.  Even with the ease and mobility of today’s social media, people are still drawn to public places.

In the 1970’s, Charles Moore wrote an article called “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” in which he hailed Disneyland as one of the best experiences of public life in the United States.  Moore’s piece was both humorous and biting.  Now urban life is reappearing everywhere. We need to be encouraging, celebrating and provoking more of this direction as best we can.

The post Urban Life and Walking: Pleasures in a Big City appeared first on Larry Speck.

The post 21_12/3/15_A_Few_Good_Buildings appeared first on Larry Speck.

The post 20_12/1/15_Perfection_and_Compromise appeared first on Larry Speck.

The post 19_112415_Architecture_That_Makes_Lives_Better appeared first on Larry Speck.

The post 18_11/17/15_Meaning_in_Public_Buildings appeared first on Larry Speck.

The post 17_11/12/15_Humanism_at_the_Scale_of_Organizations/Communities/Bureaucracies appeared first on Larry Speck.