Church to Home?

This past Sunday I attended the annual Heritage House Tour here in Vancouver. It was a lovely, fun-filled day packed with inspiring homes. One of my favorites was an old church re-purposed into a single-family residence. You can follow some before/after photos on the owner’s blog: So you think you’d like to live in a church. The most inspiring spaces were the bathroom and kitchen, which sadly, aren’t pictured. We weren’t allowed to photograph inside any of the homes, so the pictures on their blog will have to do.

Filed under: Inspirations, church, historic, history, inspiration, preservation, renovation

It’s been a while…

A few weeks since a blog post is simply too long. And so many wonderful architecture things have happened in the past week! I will get to those posts shortly, but I first wanted to update you with a few wonderful resources/inspiration/links/events/pictures.

old house web is a wonderful, wonderful resource I am so very glad I  found. The site is filled with advice for house renovations and various tips for historic houses. I plan on referring to the site often when making renovations to our 1920’s house.

If I wasn’t already swamped from a bunch of little projects, I would love to enter The Sketchbook Project. Who knows, maybe I will change my mind by October and enter anyway.

FUSE is a really fun event coming up this Friday here in Vancouver. If your in the area, maybe I will see you there!

Filed under: About, Inspirations, Projects

Friday Findings

Here are a few things I found inspiring this week:

A collaborative project in Detroit with five students from the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Love, love, love this!

Beth and Bill’s Soulful Straw Bale Retreat, a wonderful example of natural building by an architect and landscape designer in Maryland. They took an existing house and added on a straw-bale component reusing found objects.

Also this week, I came across a design competition, Betacup, that is really lovely. Notice the banner advertising the cause on my blog>>>

Filed under: Inspirations, Lists, architecture, links

Then vs. Now

Today I learned about the wonderful world of Pools on Flickr. There is one that really intrigued me, titled “Looking Into the Past”. I had to post some here. Just click on the image to see the original, as well as the photographer behind the image!

Filed under: Inspirations, competition, concept, flickr, history, inspiration, past, photography, preservation, representation

Function, Form, Thought, and Representation

Off-line I am reading some of Louis Sullivan’s writing on his architectural theory. Specifically Kindergarten Chats.

Here are a few quotes that spoke to me:

XIII. Function and Form (2) “What characterizes a real architect? First of all a poetic imagination; second a broad sympathy, humane character, common sense, and a thoroughly disciplined mind; third, a perfected technique; and, finally, an abundant and gracious gift of expression.”

XIV. Growth and Decay “As a man whose feet are on the earth, whose brain is keyed to the ceaseless song of his kind: how sees the past with kindly eye, who sees the future in a kindling vision: as a man who wills to create: So shall our art be. For to live, wholly to live, is the manifest consummation of existence.”

XV. Thought “Creative thinking must be done without words. When the mind is actively and vitally at work, for its own creative uses, it has no time for word building: words are too clumsy: you have no time to select and group them. Hence you must think in terms of images, of pictures, of states of feeling, of rhythm.”

Speaking of images, here’s a video that I am loving now found via Zeitgeist Studios.

Filed under: Inspirations, quotes, readings, representation, video