Ach,

So, as part of researching images for this project, I subscribed to Dwell magazine, an architectural digest for people who are not architects and need things explained to them in really short easily understood words. I like the pictures.

At any rate, this months issue had two houses which seemed to very closely parallel things that are going on in Plan B. The first is a house in LA which appears to have wood walls, a wood exterior, and marine plywood ceilings.

Note also the lifted ceilings with the windows underneath that open, presumably, outwards. The hardwood floors are like my projects, but there are, of course differences too.

Here, in the Dwell image, you can see that there are portions of white tile, or white stained concrete. Its hard to tell which. I kind of detest light floors like that. Oh course, now that I look closely, it might be carpeting, which, with the added texture, might work, but I am not using carpeting in CR< class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">is wider, by far, than mine, thus it employs beams supporting the roof, whereas in Project B, the walls are the weight bearing instruments, and there are no columns.

The one thing this house is doing that I would like to avoid is that sense on internal impermanence. Many of the walls are so thin, they look like temporary structures, without having the elegance of a Japanese screen, but just looking kind of cheap.

Interestingly, It appears that the roof in this house, above, has a skylight. I have never seen a skylight in CR, which could reflect the heat of the climate, or the limitations of previous construction companies.

This image, from another part of the magazine, shows a house that also has aspect paralleling Plan B. You see the tower, which, I believe, is made of Corten steel. This is in LA, again, if memory serves (I lost my copy of Dwell). There is a small porch off the front of the tower, and the full glass wall giving a view to the ocean. More subtley, but still in the spirit of Plan B, is the fact that the builder either planted or left the native flora, hiding and cooling the house from the street. This is an aim of Project B. We [attempted] to leave all the mature local flora, the cocobolos, the oaks, and the other trees. It is to be hoped that with the slope of the hill, the vertical element will, like this tower here, peak above the forest, and, in my case, under the canopy of the larger trees. It will be, this way, camouflaged, cooled, interactive, and complimentary to its environment. Still not sure about the Corten. I am on the fence. Sometimes I love its texture, sometimes I am concerned about the next owner, as I appear to be one of the few people I have met who likes it. I did talk to someone knowledgeable about urban planning in Pittsburgh who told me that it was necessary to rip down a lot of experimental Corten building since the rust stained the pavement around the building and covered the windows onto which it dripped. That would be a mess.

Anyway, I think these two images taken together anticipate my project to a degree.

Let me know what you all think.