Archive for 'Interviews'
Craig Steely: Steel and Light
“My own work now, it’s all one house, just done over and over. I see a connection between one idea to the next – I’m always exploring contrasts along similar lines: opacity-transparency, heaviness-lightness, action-reaction. The ideas can morph to suit the circumstances, and they get refined from one project to the next.”
– Craig Steely, Architect
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Craig Steely Part 2 – Inside Track
“To me, a good client is someone who’s really interested in the process. Someone who really WANTS to be involved. I demand it, actually… I only work with people that I like and respect. The point of taking only good work is that you’re more invested in it. I love what I do and don’t want to get burned out.”
– Craig Steely, Architect
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Sculpting the Land: Arterra’s Landscape Architecture
“If we are successful in our design, the site is essentially preserved or restored to a naturally sustainable state. The building will be aligned for solar aspects, and will be so well-sited that it appears to emerge from the land.
We provide a sense of magic and well as a workable landscape in which water is conveyed, plants grow naturally, the soil is healthy, and wildlife can thrive. Through good design we link home to site and provide a sensory feast for our clients with all the sights, sounds, fragrances, and perceptions of being in a deeply meaningful landscape. The landscape is living, breathing, and ever-changing. From this, a unique sense of place emerges and begins to tell its own story.”
– Vera Gates and Kate Stickley, Arterra LLP
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Jeffrey Day (MIN|DAY) on Artistry and Utility
“Art has conventionally been distinguished from architecture based on utility – architecture must do something, while art is free from functional requirements. However, art can lead us to approach architecture as something more than just rote problem-solving. Injecting an element of “uselessness” into a building allows the artistic elements to form an intellectual background against which the building’s functional aspects can be fulfilled in innovative ways.
Ironically, contemporary artists are much more engaged with the actual world through activist agendas that directly address social and environmental problems. Art helps us innovate how we deal with the world, beyond purely normative solutions.”
Jeffrey L. Day
Min|Day Architecture
Monday, June 13, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Conversations with Gary Hutton, Part 2
Continuation of last week’s conversation with Gary Hutton, one of San Francisco’s premier interior designers
(Photo: David Wilson)
Wednesday, March 09, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Gary Hutton: San Francisco Master of Interior Design
Fashions come and go, but then they come back around again. Wayne Thiebaud once said, “There’s nothing uglier than a 20-year-old car, but there’s nothing groovier than a 50-year-old car.” It’s our own thought process that has changed, not the object itself…
When something is completely made by hand, like a custom home, there’s a Zen to that. Your body recognizes it almost on a cellular level. It’s really about knowing how to make things. That’s what you learn at a good art school. My furniture is made by people who do the finest work in this country. People in the know, people who work with metal, they see my tables and they say, “Oh… my… God…”
- Gary Hutton
(Photo: Steve Hodge)
Friday, February 25, 2011 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Chris Downey on Tactile Architecture
“The idea of simplicity for the sake of mental clarity can actually be created even within a complex space by having an orthogonal way of moving through that space. Even a Frank Gehry design can have an orthogonal footprint within it. I’d love to visit his museum in Bilbao. It could be a fascinating building to hear or to sense… virtual reality is all about being “somewhere else,” but architecture is about being where you are – that’s what I’m really interested in doing.”
– Chris Downey, Architect
Monday, December 20, 2010 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Chris Downey on Architecture for the Blind
“When I lost my vision, the first thing I had to learn was non-visual coping skills. Rehabilitation teaches you about things like how to travel on mass transit, but there was no training on how to be a blind architect. But why not? After all, Beethoven wrote some of his best music after going deaf. We’re not shut out of architecture.”
- Chris Downey, Architect
Monday, December 13, 2010 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment
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Anne Fougeron’s City of the Future Starts Now…
With 80% of the world’s arable land already in use, we are running out of land to feed ourselves. Land and water are fixed, finite resources; their scarcity could become a greater crisis than global warming, terrorism, or species extinction. One way to address that is by expanding the notion of what “land” is to include urban settings, to make regions like the Bay Area self-sustaining. Architect Anne Fougeron answers a few questions about her vision for a San Francisco 100 years in the future by saying, “People shouldn’t be allowed to come into this world only to starve.”
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 | Rebecca Firestone | Add a Comment