Archive by Author
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)
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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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)
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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New Orleans Post-Katrina: Making It Right?
“When I visited New Orleans last fall, there was no way to prepare myself for the despair I felt when walking through the Lower 9th Ward, even 6 years after the storm. What was most dismaying was seeing ‘celebrity architecture’ masquerading as sustainable housing. A vacuum of leadership at every level has left the task of ‘salvation’ to celebrities … with projects that are an exercise of vanity over practicality.
What place does LEED certification have in a disaster recovery if it makes construction so costly that only a handful of homes get built? Whose intentions are really more important?”
– Mark English, AIA
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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Ask an Architect at Miele’s San Francisco Showroom
You’ve been dreaming about expanding your home for years now, but haven’t committed yourself to working with an architect to explore what could happen. Or maybe you’re just curious about what architects actually do. Now’s your chance to ask all the questions you want, with no obligation – and take a cooking class on Miele’s state-of-the-art equipment at the same time.
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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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
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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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
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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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.”
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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Design Alert: Potential China Scam
It sounded too good to be true – an invitation to build a large office tower and sustainable housing project in China. But when several architects discovered that they’d signed on for the same identical piece of work, everyone smelled a rat. No one has lost much money, yet. So the mystery is, why?
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
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LA Modern House Tour in Los Altos Celebrates Richard Neutra
Coming up on Saturday, October 16 from 10-3pm is a special event for fans of Modernism – the 2010 “LA Modern” homes tour sponsored by the Los Altos Community Foundation. The upcoming tour includes several California Modern homes besides the Neutra house designed in the same spirit: light, airy, rigorous and clean, with an acceptance of natural materials as well as modern industrial techniques.
by Rebecca Firestone with Mark English AIA
