Building a Fire-Resistant Home: Strategies taken from DNM’s Deer Park House in California
While no home can be entirely fireproof, the risk of fire can be significantly reduced through strategic design and material choices. These choices are often referred to as “hardening” a home against fire.
Finding A Way Forward
So, for lack of a path forward from their various hilltop fiefdoms, the major players in the building industry wait for change from cross-pollination: radical, game changing ideas with game changing acronyms like BIM, IFC, IPD, LEAN, TQM, and others, that will propel their own company to new levels, and pull the rest of the industry along in their wake.
Holding Space: Fences & Obelisks
The strategy for defining a space depends on its purpose. An enclosure is appropriate when the space’s purpose is to keep people in (or out) and when no common belief system binds them to the space. It can be very expensive to construct an enclosure, however, and it limits future growth, as many walled cities have learned.
DNM Architecture Collaborates with Nonfiction to Bring Clean Energy to West Africa
Sausalito-based DNM Architecture is collaborating with with fellow Bay Area creative firm Nonfiction to design and produce Jaza Solar Hubs – field assembled power centers designed to bring clean, renewable energy to Nigeria localities – while empowering local women to run 100% of operations.
Japan: Connecting Old and New
On a recent trip to Japan, where everything I saw was new to me, I was struck by the way old and new forms are used to express similar ideas in very different ways.
Geometry & Generalist
unlike specialized professionals such as structural engineers, mechanical engineers, or geotechnical engineers, an architect is specifically trained to be a generalist, to see both the big picture and oversee the details. There is a saying that an architect knows a little bit about everything, but not much of anything! No other professional on the building project team can talk with about space, light, building codes, history and the strength of concrete with equal ease (and sometimes in the same sentence!).
Tree, Water, Earth and Sky
When starting a new project, facing a blank canvas or a blank computer screen is daunting. Even after analyzing all of the project constraints, where is the starting point to synthesize the information and for create something from nothing? This is where literary devices, such as personification, analogy and metaphor, are useful tools to think about architectural design in the context of another medium such as literature, sculpture or, quite often, music…
Navigating Technological Change in Architectural Practice
Starting somewhere in the 1980’s with 2D CADD software on mini and microcomputers, through the internet, worldwide web, 3D modeling and simulation, BIM, and, more recently, artificial intelligence, fast changing technology has often disoriented architectural practice and potentially threatened it both economically, but even existentially.
Power of Ten Design
Architectural design can be thought in terms of multiple levels or “altitudes.” Up close is the building itself, its walls, roof, doors. Further back is the building’s physical context, and further back still – with the building now out of direct site – might be its symbolic context or the role it plays in the larger society. All of these views are interdependent.
Palm Springs
What is the allure of a 110 degree suburbia? Is it post war exuberance? An act of defiance against climate and logic? Is it a statement of democracy and free will? Sunstroke? Isn’t it a little bit weird?