Posts by elza hisel-mccoy

I like the concept of Jolie-Laide: Beauty and the Beast.  While Montgomery County undoubtedly has a burdensome share of beastly buildings, some so crystallize the product of their time that they rise above.  Taken head-on it is not much to look at, but obliquely the minimally monikered (sorry)  Silver Spring’s “Garage 2″, at the intersection of Fenton Street and Cameron Street, is a civic building with moments of majesty that reminds me of Peter Behrens 1909 Tubinenfabrik in Berlin.

For your delectation:

Facade-ism.  Facade-omy.  Building facades are harder to design than they look.  Especially with bigger buildings.  Look around you.

There are always of course excellent examples.  The National Gallery of Art, West Wing, designed by the fabulous John Russel Pope, is a beautiful building.

DC architect Phil Esocoff also does a nice job with attractive facade design.

There are far more stinkers, however.  For design, I prefer smaller buildings.  Like small gardens or landscapes, there is usually room for only one organizing principle and its elegant elaboration.  The rowhouse is a good urban example of this and the DC area has a wealth of fetching specimens in Alexandria, Georgetown, Dupont Circle, and of course Capitol Hill.  Another local architect, Amy Weinstein, has done beautiful work in southeast DC on the Ellen Wilson Homes (and on a HOPE VI affordable housing budget!).

This is all to deliver to you a link I received this morning for a street of contemporary rowhouse facade design on Lonnekerspoorlaan in Roombeek, Enschede, in the Netherlands.  The detail below is from a larger streetscape.  This looks a bit like a facade project we did one semester in school, where we each made cereal-box scale models and placed then next to each other.  Lots of ideas here.  Dig away.

Saturday’s DC Garden Open Day, hosted by the Garden Conservancy, took us down the exclusive streets and well-screened back yards of six well-heeled — and pooled — Washingtonians (did my sons crawl under author Christopher Buckley‘s trampoline?).  We were about do head into another beautiful garden when my wife got my attention by asking “Is that a zinc house?”

Indeed it was.  This house, at 3530 Newark Street, NW, was designed by Travis Price Architects and has a sleek LucasArts starship feel.  Assumedly pre-weathered zinc cladding form an outer shield, with minimal openings and a blunt-faced bay on one side and a curved slicing edge on the other.  Atop a stone base, the soft underbelly of this creature is mostly glazed, with red clapboard/fiberboard siding.

The stair on the right would suggest a piano nobile scheme with a side entrance, while a peek down the driveway on the left promises a spacious terrace level with a terraced garden.

The scale of the house is compatible with its neighbors.  The house has a narrower face on the street — the others don’t typically have driveways — and the large side setback of the house to the east provides the side elevation with a generous eye-catching aspect.  The contrast is a bit jarring, but refreshing at the same time.

Fitting “contemporary” design into existing neighborhoods and development can be a tricky business, especially where the existing character is strongly defined and fairly uniform.  As new projects fill in holes in our more-developed areas of Montgomery County, designers will mount these challenges with greater and lesser success.

A good case study is the Split-Level House in Philadelphia.  Designed by local architect Qb, it has been featured in several design magazines and websites (including the fantastic archidose.org).  But seeing the buildings close-up and in context (which is often conspicuously absent in much architecture coverage) is the real test for how the design works.

So here’s the shot down 4th Street.  The height is in the right place, but I think the excavated corner and the material change at the garage is visually disruptive.  Perhaps if that area at the entry could be used as a patio it might connect better to the street, but I seem to remember it being a (vacant) planting bed.  (More on the cupola down the street in a moment.)

Looking down Poplar, however, I think the house is more successful.  The height is good, the change in materials recalls the base-middle-top of the rowhouses, and the windows continue the established rhythm.  Much better.

You also don’t often get to see the back of the buildings very often either.  The patio will probably be a little enclosed, assuming a party wall neighbor, but for now it is quite airy.  Maybe when the neighbors put something up they will move the tables out front!

Also a bit of a detail of the corner, for your delectation.

And finally, for contrast, a bit more of the neighborhood: most positively 4th Street.  Awesome.  Enjoy.