Way back in the late nineties I needed convincing by an old college roommate about the value of having my own website for my architecture business. He worked in Silicon Valley and was hipper than I to this notion. “People will be able to check you out on their own. They’ll be much more willing to do that, compared to having to call you on the phone to ask questions.” Hmmm. That sounded like it made sense. No wonder this Internet thing just might catch on. A week or two later I happened to be laid up in Kaiser for [...]

Every architect should have to personally build several houses from drawings that they’ve prepared. Really be the builder. Make every real decision about what to do next. Be there every day wearing tool bags and being involved “hands on” with everything. For me, it made for an education that I couldn’t obtain any other way. From bending and cutting rebar for the foundation, to placing beams just right in order to correctly meet sloping rafters, to aligning the deck framing in such a way so that the future handrail would line up just right with the window trim. Never a [...]

One day of every month a massive group of bicycle riders assembles in downtown San Francisco in order to ride around the city as a group of cyclists so huge that it gets to take command of the streets and intersections. “Critical Mass” began seventeen years ago in San Francisco as a monthly ride to assert bicycle rights and the idea has since spread to hundreds of other cities. It is prominently known for being a leaderless group. No agenda is set, other than the time and place for the start of the ride. The politics of cycling aside, I [...]

Well, it’s pretty obvious the party’s over. And by party I mean the fourteen year long wave of economic good times. (As Woody Allen might have said it: If only we had known we were supposed to be happy during those years.) And by economic good times I mean the robust professional life that those of us who make our living with houses got to enjoy by either selling, building or designing houses. So everybody now seems suddenly content to sit on their hands, forget their dreams. In this world of multiple networks and twenty-four hour news coverage this sort [...]

You’d think that someone who wrote about building and design topics for the local paper (kind of like me) and was also having a house built for himself (like me) would have something to say about the design and building of said house. It’s a pretty big deal, giving birth to a house. Stuff happens. Anecdotes accumulate. All of it fodder for the ol’ column. But blathering on about myself has never appealed to me, though I seem to be doing it just fine at this very moment. Yet insights, a few of them anyway, did result from this house-building [...]

You hang around enough jobsites you hear things. The following incidents came to me from various builders or homeowners and are recalled here as best I can. The dog and the pier hole One of the best foundation systems a house can have is a concrete “pier and grade beam” system in which eighteen-inch-wide holes are drilled about eight or more feet deep into the ground at various intervals along where the foundation is going. These holes are temporarily covered with octagonal plywood hole covers but are still hazardous enough that an effort is made to fill them with concrete [...]