Meadow House won the Grand Prix du Design’s top honor in Architecture in November 2025.

In November 2025, I was invited to Montreal as the recipient of two Gold-level awards at the Grands Prix du Design ceremony. I didn’t know what level beyond Gold we might have won.

We had submitted the Meadow House in two categories: “Prestige House” and “Large Private House” and had been selected as ‘Gold’ winners in each category in the first round.

Meadow House is a recently completed home and guesthouse within the exceptional Santa Lucia Preserve in the Carmel Valley. It is our most uncompromising design to date and is prominently featured in our new Monograph; ‘In Situ – Unique Homes Crafted for California Living’. Both the site and brief paved the way for a challenging and, ultimately, deeply rewarding process.

The brief from our clients – a multigenerational family with business ties to their native Korea – outlined a Californian home with a Korean heart. Exploring these singular influences revealed many similarities, all of which can be seen throughout Meadow House, from the fluidity of indoor-outdoor spaces and deep terraces surrounding parts of the home, to the abundance of natural light that is overt in some places and tempered in others.

The Ceremony took place in Montreal, a city I’d longed to visit.

I’ve always wanted to go to Montreal and had never had the chance. When I arrived, it had started snowing and was cold, bleak, and very European-feeling. I was thrilled to be there. I checked into my hotel late at night and took a walk around the old port area. The next day, I knew the ceremony wasn’t until evening, so I went to visit the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History by the late Dan S. Hanganu and Provencher Roy + Associés.

It is one of the most amazing buildings I’ve seen, and the most amazing part is underground. The founding of Montreal on the site of a native village on the St. Lawrence River is beautifully explained in an exhibit that covers acres beneath the current city. Terraces and buildings are held up structurally so that the archaeology below could be exposed and explained. It really is one of the best examples explaining the founding of a major city through its earliest stages until now, with excellent signage, wayfinding, and exhibits. It’s a great example also of how some countries are happy to invest money in a facility that will not necessarily have broad appeal, but will definitely appeal to people who want to learn.

The Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History reveals the city’s foundation through excavated ruins beneath the modern streetscape.

Structural supports hold up the current city above while allowing visitors to walk among centuries-old foundations.

Later in the evening, as I got dressed for the event, I went to the website again and realized how seriously the awards, jurors, and supporters were taking this. They were going to put on an amazing event with a thousand people from all over Canada and the world, and we were in the midst of it. I was excited to see how our work, especially Meadow House, would stack up in a jury pool of almost all Canadians and some Europeans, in a setting so different from what the host country exhibits. I knew there would be nine categories of design honored, including architecture, interiors, landscape architecture, product design, art & photography, communication, lighting, construction and student work.

The event filled a vast Hall with nearly a thousand design professionals from Canada and the world.

I was a little nervous walking into the event. It was a very formal feeling, very European. Immediately I saw across the room one of my California landscape architect friends, Ive from Shades of Green Landscape Architecture. That was exciting and comforting. She was talking to a French Canadian named Frederic Blanchet, and we became fast friends. Soon it was time to join the event. We were all assigned to tables in a vast room with well-dressed people looking very French. This being Quebec, the main language was French with translations to English.

Landscape Architect Ive of Shades of Green was a welcome familiar face among the French Canadian crowd.

At the end of a very long evening, we were honored to win not only two “Grand Winner” awards for “Large Private House” and “Prestige House”, but as the very last category of the night, we won “Award of the Year” in architecture! It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

Accepting the “Grand Winner” and “Award of the Year” for best overall project in Architecture.

As I accepted the award, I’d never felt so comfortable being up in front of that many people. I expressed the following hope: “I’m thrilled and honored to have won this award. I would never have expected it, but I do have another wish now. I wish that and hope that winning this award will help me with my future application for Canadian citizenship.”

The Award itself, presented at the end of the ceremony.

This was a lot of fun because the people who only spoke English started clapping and cheering right away, and after a five-second translation delay, the French speakers followed!

The drawings shown here document how we investigate and study details in architecture.

This jewel of a building, set in the coastal mountains of the Bay Area, is simple in form and complex in execution. Transparency and simple appearing connections require sophisticated structural design and integration with finishes.

We use digital modeling programs, hand sketches and CAD drawings to investigate and finalize all of the key connections, in support of the design idea.

The Poolhouse is designed as a stunning replacement for a non-descript older poolhouse and equipment shed. The new Poolhouse and pool are now a featured view from the Living room and it’s terraces to the east.

The structure is meant to feel as though it’s an open-air pavilion, with as little strucure evident as possible.

We reviewed the structural system in a digital 3d model to confirm the interactions of the various structural materials; steel (red), wood framing (orange), and concrete (grey).

After the main structural elements were defined, we were able to focus on the architectural details that need scrutiny.

Typically, we start at the top of the building with the important edge that marks the profile against the sky. In this case, a very secure but minimal metal edge cap was studied.

Often actual material models are essential to help confirm the visual and technical integrity of the detail. In this case we used sheetmetal patterns of the correct size to help evaluate the look and feel.

After verifying the basic dimensions of the sheetmetal mock up, we investigated further, in sketch section form, how the metal would be incorporated into the waterproofing system.

Designing a custom skylight that transforms into a window required a bit of investigation.

A rendered view of the desired outcome.

Using 3-d hand sketch sections and CAD sections to scale, we investigated all of the important conditions together.

The window portion of the assembly is designed as an “L” shaped metal angle frame receiving a fixed double-glazed panel set in sealant.

The skylight portion of the assembly follows the arrangement determined below for the window portion.

The varying heights of the roof elements of the building, tailored to just skirt under the warped height limit above natural grade, create some challenging finish transitions.

The underlying structural “bones” of the building.

The sheetmetal cap has to change direction 90 degrees in plan and also in height, while tying together seamlessly.

One of the cornerstones of the design is the thinness of the apparant roof line.  We chose to use the sheetmetal cap, made of CorTen steel, as the catchment of the top of the sliding door frame. This allowed the glass to rise to within just a few inches of the top of the building, accentuating the theme of transparency.

In working with the Builder and Structural Engineer, we came up with alternative ways to achieve the desired outcome.

We next investigated the interaction of the sliding door threshold and finished interior and exterior paved surfaces at the base of the building.

Two alternative ways to embed the sliding door draining threshold into the paving.

Finally, the interaction between the interior and exterior stairs was explored in relation to the rectilinear glazed door panel.

The ADU SWAP is Designed for Equitable Communities & Economy. The concept of the SWAP project is that a compliant ADU will be built and completed onsite while an extended family continues to live in the Primary home. A second permit to reduce the size of the Primary home to 1200 sf and enlarge the ADU to 1826 sf will allow the family to maintain seamless affordable housing onsite throughout the build process.

The ADU SWAP is Designed for Change. The simple “U” shaped plan layout of the ADU, with large roof overhangs and structural columns has been designed to meet all lateral and gravity loads. The structural engineer has been tasked with creating a structural system that will not depend on future walls for seismic resistance.  All waste plumbing and electrical conduit required for the future expansion will be in place.

The ADU SWAP is Designed for Energy & Resources.  The ADU SWAP is an all-electric home with PV panels, mass slab floor, LED lighting, high efficiency heat pump mini-split systems and heat pump electric water heating. The materials used for the finishes; exposed concrete slab floor, cement plaster exterior, white PVC roof membrane and sheet metal fascia will stand the test of time.

The ADU SWAP is Designed for Well-Being.  The ADU SWAP allows for an extended family to stay together, to evolve and grow. The ADU is simple in form and connected to natural light and exterior spaces through sliding door, expansive glazing, and clerestory windows.

This is a real project.  Permits are pending, and construction is planned to begin Spring 2022.

Information

The ADU SWAP is designed for change. Pre-emptive structural aspects allow the future addition of two bedrooms on contingency the original primary residence is reduced to 1200 sf to become the new ADU on that property. This design strategy can be applied to all new ADUs in California and provides a blueprint for an innovative future.

Diagrams

1: An existing residence that qualifies for an addition of an ADU  2: The ADU has been designed and built with the foundation to support an addition  3: An addition is made to the ADU in the designated addition area – meanwhile the main residence is reduced to 1200 sf  4: The ADU has become the main residence and the main residence has become the ADU

The original design of the ADU allows for a peaceful transition from ADU to main residence. However, the design still considers a stagnant option, in which the unbuilt space can be utilized by the occupants – in this case, a nice porch.

Renders

ADU

Main Residence

The building footprint and roofline remain the same throughout the transformation from ADU to Main Residence. The infrastructure is already in place to make the transition as smooth as possible.

ADU

Main Residence

The new 626 sf  of space is added to enlarge the simple “U” shaped plan and create a more intimate courtyard.

ADU

Main Residence

This allows for the addition of 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, making the new Main Residence a 4 bedroom, 4 bath residence.

ADU

Main Residence

The common areas remain fully intact throughout the addition process, aiding the seamless transition from ADU to Main Residence.

Bocci Cluster Pendant Light with Multi-color Hand-blown Globes

I was joined by my architect friend Masha. As it was our first time at Milan Design Week, we spent the entire time in absolute delight and rapture at what was happening all around us. And yet, almost a week of exploring for 12+ hours per day until we literally couldn’t walk was not nearly enough see it all. 

Before moving to California, I regularly visited Saloni World Wide, which has come to Moscow every year since 2005. But this did not prepare me for the epic scale of the Milan Design week!

When I returned to San Francisco – equal parts exhausted and inspired – I couldn’t wait to share all that I had seen with my colleagues. After having completed four presentations to the team, I’m finally ready to share my highlights with you!

Milan Design Week and Fiera Milano

Once a year during design week, nearly the entire city of Milan is transformed: literally hundreds of showrooms, exhibitions and installations open their doors to international guests. The largest number of events take place in the famous Brera Design District, which is not only the creative and cultural center of Milan, but also an international design showcase and reference point for designers worldwide.

The biggest and the most famous event at Design Week (and largest international world-wide furniture fair) is always Salone del Mobile. And this year was one of the most ambitious in the history of the exhibition. The 58^th exhibition was held at Fiera Milano in Rho – an impressive contemporary venue – the creation of Massimiliano & Doriana Fuksas.

The entire exhibition complex consists of 8 large buildings housing the exhibition spaces, as well as smaller buildings with everything from snack kiosks, shops and pavilions to hotels, offices and exposition spaces. All of these spaces are stacked on either side of the main pedestrian alley bisecting the venue and accessible by escalator. 

The central thoroughfare and all adjoining buildings are canopied in a lattice shell consisting of glass panels. Circular steel beams that mimic tree trunks and accommodate roof drainage. Standing inside, I was struck in awe at how the architects managed to create a space that at once feels modern, technological and grand, yet somehow organic and intimate.

Entrance area

Main pedestrian alleyway

View one of the cafes from main pedestrian alleyway

View from the lower level

View from one of the pavillions

Euroluce at Salone del Mobile

Design trends, just as the concept of beauty, are always subjective and often inspired by fashion, environment and time. Many of them come and go, but there are the few that somehow remain relevant, regardless of epoch and lifestyle. These rare designs owe their longevity to masters who have continued to develop their method and refine their craft over decades, and even generations. Such timeless designs transform along with the ever-changing world, reflecting the past while openly looking towards the future. This year’s design week once again showed that innovations in lighting, thoughtful use of natural materials and experimental design.

Salone del Mobile is held every year together, with Euroluce in odd years and EuroCucina (along with the International Bathroom Exhibition) in even years. This year Euroluce took center stage with 4 pavilions showcasing new lighting products and ideas, with a particular focus on recycled and low environmental impact materials.

Bocci Lighting

To find yourself among Bocci lighting is to be in a magical world filled with stunning luminous sculptures. The company seamlessly combines unique design and state-of-the-art technology – plus a touch of the unexpected – in artfully-designed products.

28 Series with stainless steel armature system in black matte finish

73 Series installation

28 Series with copper cables and pendants in a mix of color

16 Series trees

76 Series made from blown glass and copper mesh

Vibia

When looking at the Vibia pavilion, it seems that the designers were inspired by the theme of simple geometry. Perhaps they wanted to subtly illustrate how simple, minimal light can boldly illuminate space.

Entry to the pavilion

Sticks by designer Arik Levy

Plusminus by German industrial designer Stefan Diez

Palma pendants

Louis Poulsen

Established in 1874, Danish company Louis Poulsen had some of their best lighting on display, from iconic models to new developments. One might ask, “what’s so special about a lighting company established over 145 years ago?” Walking along the curved walls of the pavilion, the answer becomes obvious. When it comes to lighting, it takes both skill and a deep understanding of the craft to create products that makes you admire the design, and at the same time feel comfortable and delight in the atmosphere it creates. The classic PH5 pendant, which this year was presented in new colorful finishes, undoubtedly reflects the philosophy of the company: function, ambience and comfort.

AJ floor lamp

Colorful PH5 pendants

Radiohus pendants by Vilhelm Lauritzen

Kinetura

My new lighting discovery is a Belgian lighting studio Kinetura, which specializes in metamorphic lighting objects that combine modulation with physical transformation. The company first presented their metamorphic lights at Euroluce in 2015. Tokyo is probably my favorite model. When the fixture is in the closed position, all that you see is a thin circular line. When the light turns on the circle slowly retreats inside to reveal the light. Tokyo can be seamlessly integrated into walls or ceilings, or used to create a unique composition by combining different sizes.

Tokyo lighting composition

Flos

Italian company Flos is recognized as a world-leading lighting company. With their tracking magnet, Michael Anastassiades’ Coordinates system and new WireLine by Formafantasma, Flos masterfully plays with space and boldly questions the very essence of lighting.

The Tracking magnet system

WireLine by Formafantasma

Coordinates System by Michael Anastassiades

Preciosa

“Preciosa lighting brings joy, life and light to Milan” reads the company’s website, and I couldn’t agree more. Carousel of light by Preciosa is an amazing installation, with its rotating “dome” of lights. As you approach, it lights up – and fades away as you do. This installation definitely challenges your conception of what lighting is and could be…

Carousel of Light installation

Pearl Wave made from triplex opal spheres and gold finished metal rods

 

Studio Italia Design

Studio Italia Design’s installation LETS DANCE fully reflects the emotions that occur when entering the space! Probably hundreds of Jefferson suspended lights (the company’s signature product at Euroluce 2019) create unique experience. 

Composition of suspended lights

Bella pendant by Enzo Panzeri

Airnova

For more than 25 years, the Airnova has reflected the Italian spirit and love for color. With their liberal use of color, Airnova’s installation at Isaloni conveyed a sense of exuberance, joy and celebration. The photos speak for themselves.

Lagoon pendant light, Nelson cabinet and chairs in leather

Arketipo

Italian company Arketipo works with the best designers, thoughtfully creating their products. At Saloni de Mobile, the simple open form of their pavilion served to contrast the smooth simple curves of furniture, lighting and accessories.

Iride wall light by Bernhardt & Vella

Poliform

Poliform is known for pulling off truly impressive installations on an annual basis at the Salone del Mobile furniture exhibition. The 2019 exhibition space, divided into two main zones, occupied an area of 1,700 square meters and fully immersed you in the world of Poliform. New furniture models, reflecting a mix of research and unique aesthetic vision, revealed themselves within an elegant interior.

The Gentleman Collection by Marcel Wanders

Agape and Wall & Deco

Both companies Agape and Wall&Deco create unique designs every year attracting the best designers. This year they collaborated at Isaloni with the installation called “Havens.”

Ardea wallpaper by Elisa Vendramin and Rigo sink system by Patricia Urquiola

Rigo furniture system by Patricia Urquiola

Nori wallpaper by Studiopepe and Delove wallpaper by María Gómez García

Racine wet system wallpaper by Alhambretto and Am Prod Vieques sink by Patricia Urquiola

Wall & Deco’s Wet System

The wallpaper manufacturer Wall & Deco presented its wallpaper Wet System. The patented wall coverings met visitors with geometric and abstract patterns and beautiful designs. It seems that the company is trying to overcome the limitations imposed by styles and cultures by blurring these boundaries and showing that the real design is limitless and it does not have frames and boundaries (except for our imagination) Agape featured this year with new Rigo system designed by Patricia Urquiola,Ell series and Spoon M by Benedini Associati with Andres Jost and Diego Cisi. 

Vieques tub by Patricia Urquiola

Lariana washbasin by Patricia Urquiola

Revolving Moon mirrors

Poid Plum wallpaper by Christian Benini

Agape’s Rigo System

The Rigo system has a strong architectural inspiration and timeless materials such as marble, wood and aluminum make it truly unique. I was so impressed with the design that I did not miss the opportunity to visit Agape in Brera design district.

Rigo Marble furniture system by Patricia Urquiola

Rigo furniture system by Patricia Urquiola

Washbasin by Diego Vencato and Gypsum

Immersion bathtub

Antoniolupi

Antoniolupi is a company based in Tuscany that has been known for designer bath furniture for more than 65 years. I’ve always been fascinated by their brave designs and how they are able to rethink the use of traditional materials in combination with innovative new materials, so I visited both of their main exhibition spaces at Isaloni and near Brera. I’ll start with the space where I spent nearly two hours, located in a tower designed by the architects Baselli and Portaluppi and completed in 1950.

Looking at great antoniolupi designs it becomes obvious that the architects had a very difficult task: on the one hand create an interior with a strong character, and on the other hand avoid distracting from their products. In designing the space, the architects were inspired by Kılıç Ali Paşa’s Hamam, built in 1577 by the great Ottomanar Sinān.

The main purpose of the Hamam was to renew the body and the soul. Over time it became a place to meet friends, conduct business and argued over politics. The main distinguishing feature of Sinān’s Hamam is a clear separation between the upper and lower sections, the latter intended for baths and the former made up of large vaults and domes. Similarly, the showroom design focuses on the top of the space – the ceiling – which serves as a beautiful and logical completion of antoniolupi’s bold products.

Orma wall-mounted vanity unit

Cristalplant bathtub by Mario Ferrarini

Cristalmood sink in Sangria color

Antoniolupi at I Salone

Each year, Antoniolupi at Isaloni presents its products in a completely unique way. The space is a path paved in suggestions made by Antoniolupi’s products. Towards the end of this path, I found myself in a colorful world filled with transparent materials in Cristalmood, a colorful, glossy material composed of high quality transparent polyester resin and pigments. The clean Cristalmood shapes contrasted well with colorful textures of carpets by Paola Pastorini. I certainly did not expect to see such a riot of colors in one space! I also enjoyed the corridor of mirrors by Luca Galofaro and fashionable Gessati collection.

Gessati Carrara marble washbasin

Cristalmood tub in Ambra

 

Cristalmood sink collection

Valcucine, Logica Celata

Italian kitchen makers are known worldwide for their design. But here I’d like to highlight on an another important aspect – their attention to detail, ergonomics and technology.

I couldn’t bring myself to leave the Valcucine kitchen show space – they transform cooking into a very modern and extraordinary experience: their smart, patented V-Motion system simplifies daily kitchen chores by activating various functions with a gesture of a hand and moving a recyclable glass-and-aluminum façade that hides all of the main kitchen fixtures. 

Logica Celata kitchen

Logica Celata kitchen

Fantini

During Design Week I had an amazing opportunity to visit Fantini’s headquarters and showroom, designed by Lissoni Architecture. CEO Daniela Fantini was inspired by fascinating nature of Lake Orta to redesign the company’s factory and offices, and also create an adjacent hotel. The Offices and showroom are located along the lake, visually connecting with the surrounding nature through large glazed windows. One of the main tasks of the architects was to integrate the building into the surrounding environment, creating harmony between buildings and nature. Another important task was to transform a single 1957 building into a modern new office, while still maintaining the basic structure.  

The boutique Casa Fantini Lake Time hotel was also designed by Lissoni Architectur. The stylistic philosophy of the company’a brand can be clearly seen in the design of this 11 suite hotel, where modern forms meet traditional elements.

Fantini’s headquarters

Fantini logo wall composition

Iconic I Balocchi faucet by Davide Mercatali and Paolo Pedrizzetti

Walkway from the entrance the lake

By the time we were on our flight back home, we had already made a pact to come back next year!

In a basic sense, rammed earth is a kind of human-made version of sedimentary rock. Earth is compacted layer by layer in a formwork, which is then removed, revealing a beautifully stratified surface. David Easton, President of Rammed Earth Works, has been building with rammed earth for the past four decades. I sat down with him at his workshop in Napa, under a smoke-filled November sky, to talk with him about his experience bringing this ancient material into the modern era.

David Easton Interview – November 16, 2018

Oliver: Where did you first hear about rammed earth?

David: It was right after I got out of college. [In 1974], I found a book on the rack of a natural food store in Jackson, CA that was ‘How to Build Your House of Earth’ by an Australian named Rex Middleton. I was looking for a way to build my own house with a minimum investment in the cost of building materials. I evaluated rammed earth and thought that although there wasn’t much written about it, it seemed to be the most efficient way.

O: What inspires you most about this material? What has kept you interested in it all these years?

D: I believe that I was inspired because there was so little known about it – it provided me with a challenge to develop means and methods that didn’t exist. It was a situation of finding an enormous challenge that you could set a major goal to overcome. It was how difficult it was that made me want to perfect it.

O: What distinguishes Rammed Earth Works’ products from their competitors?

D: There are people building rammed earth all over the country and all over the world.  I believe that our company has been able to refine the process to bring it more in line with contemporary building standards and project management standards.  

What sets us apart is our professionalism.  A lot of the other rammed earth builders as I understand it are mavericks. We’ve tried to be more normal, fitting into the whole stream of construction that’s involved on the site and all of the tradesmen.  So we work with all of the tradesmen to use systems that people recognize – how doors and windows are mounted and how electrical and plumbing is installed and we’ve gotten faster so our timeline doesn’t require that a project be delayed months and months while the rammed earth walls were being built.

O: When you started, you were acting as a full general contractor, responsible for every part of the building process. When did you make the switch to specializing on just rammed earth and what inspired that decision?

D: Well, I switched about seven years into it because I wanted to concentrate on improving the rammed earth technology. I needed to build more rammed earth – I needed to do 12 projects a year rather than one. And if we were general contractors who happened to build rammed earth walls, we didn’t have as many chances to build rammed earth walls. It wasn’t a business decision as much as an exposure decision.

O: Is there a ‘secret ingredient’ to making good rammed earth or is it the product of many factors?

D: It’s the product of many little factors – there is no ‘secret’ to making rammed earth at all.  To make good rammed earth there is just experience. You need to have the proper mix design and the people that are doing the work need to be good at what they’re doing – as in any trade.

What sets us apart at Rammed Earth Works is the fact that we’re always pushing the envelope.  We’re always trying to get better – we’ve never been satisfied with doing something exactly the same way as our last project.  It’s not always a good way to run a profitable business, but no one can accuse me of having run a profitable business.

O: It sounds like profit is not your primary driver.

D: No, not at all.  My driver was to develop a construction system that was more ecologically responsible.

O: You ‘wrote the book’ on rammed earth-

D: – I wrote a book.  I’m embarrassed by the last book that I wrote, it had a lot of hubris in it. I thought I knew everything back there in 1982 and I was so wrong. It is one of my absolute goals to try to synthesize the work that we’ve done in the last 20 years and to write the book on rammed earth. I don’t want it to come across as some vanity piece. I want it to be ‘here’s everything we’ve learned after all these years and it’s an open source – try it.’ There is so much subtle nuance to what we’ve learned all of these years that is not written down. I’d like to do it.

O: What were the greatest obstacles you faced in making rammed earth an accepted part of the California building code?

D: Repetition. Just plain doing it. 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, 200 times, it’s the fact that we can point to projects that are featured in magazines and on tours. So you’re dealing with a new building official who says ‘I don’t like it,’ you can say ‘well, wait a minute. I have 300 building permits in 42 California counties. How can we work this out?’ And it just gets easier because it’s been done so many times before. That doesn’t mean that you won’t come to a jurisdiction that you haven’t worked in before and they won’t throw all of these roadblocks in front of you.  

There are now structural engineers throughout all of California that have designed big buildings with rammed earth and they are supportive of the system. So it has something to do with volume. Now, people still misunderstand what rammed earth is. They think it’s muddy.

O: There are a lot of people who think of rammed earth as just one more ‘hippy building material,’ the same as cob or strawbale. What do you say to those people?

What distinguishes rammed earth from the other “natural building” techniques?

D: Oh, god. Well, I think it’s most effective when you just say, ‘rammed earth is much closer to cast in place concrete.’ The clay content is really low.  In fact, mostly we use crushed stone now instead of earth. We like to still call it earth because that’s what it’s been called and that’s the placement technique.

Unlike adobe and straw bale and cob, which are hard to hard to quantify and classify, our material is very carefully monitored with special inspectors, it’s regulated, and we have compression testing. This stuff is 1500, 2000, 3000 psi, so you can see that it’s very close to concrete. But that doesn’t mean that this question doesn’t come up every single time when you’re dealing with somebody new.

O: What do you say to someone who needs to be persuaded in the opposite direction?  How do you justify the sustainability aspect of it given how far removed this material is from traditional rammed earth?

D: Honestly, I say you’re right, we do use a lot of Portland cement and I feel really badly about it.  We know from historical rammed earth buildings that they don’t need to be as strong as the building department and the engineers are asking us to make it.  We can look at these 400- and 800-year-old buildings without cement, without reinforcing steel, that are still standing, but the modern codes require that we meet these certain structural minimums.

As much as I regret it, to achieve these minimums I still rely on Portland cement.  My hope is that we can develop alternative binders, that we can get engineers and building officials to recognize safety at lower compressive values, but where we are right now is that if I want to continue to build rammed earth walls, I have to accept the reality that I need to use Portland cement.

O: What about if you were based in Texas or Arizona?

D: If I was in the desert, I could use way less cement. And our whole laboratory testing program that’s always underway is to find ways to attain the required strength at lower cement contents.

O: Is rammed earth just a luxury material? Do you see it becoming affordable for everyone?

D: It depends on where we’re building.  In California, our market is the luxury home buyer or the real estate developer or the property owner who wants a beautiful piece of art in their structure.

Labor rates are through the roof.  Engineering fees, legal fees, everything combines to drive the cost of a rammed earth wall away from the average consumer.  Mostly labor rates. When we go some part of the world where labor rates are low, then rammed earth is a very valid alternative to other methods of construction.

With a labor-intensive process like this, it takes 8 guys 2 to 3 months to build a set of walls, that’s $400,000 there just paying payroll.  And when they have to travel and you put them in a motel, that doubles the cost right there. I don’t see a way around it. So we’re stuck in this conflicting situation of just servicing the ultra rich with a product that was supposed to be for the poor.

O: Watershed Block was intended as that midpoint.  What happened?

D: I don’t know why I couldn’t get the block to sell. It seemed like such a good idea. We did a few projects and I don’t get any calls for it any more. We stopped marketing it because I couldn’t afford to market it when we weren’t selling it and we can’t produce it for the amount of money that it would take to pay the rent on the building.  So it just kinda fell by the wayside.

O: Is it just that it’s not far enough away from CMU for people to justify the cost increase?

D: Yeah, they won’t pay any extra for it as it turns out. They won’t pay 10% extra if they can get it from Basalite. People won’t invest in their green conscience. They’d love it to be green as long as it doesn’t cost them any more money.

Because of the slow rate at which the blocks are made and the cost of doing business, of renting a facility and paying skilled labor, we couldn’t produce the blocks for enough money to maintain profitability.  Which is why we pivoted to the idea of a transportable block plant.

Instead of selling block that we make here at the factory, now we are trying to make machines that go somewhere where there is a pile of aggregate and someone who needs blocks.  A big developer who’s doing a 100 acre site and he wants to put a block wall around it, or a fire-damaged area where people need to rebuild their houses, or an island where people need to rebuild after a hurricane, somewhere where people need jobs and need blocks and there is an advantage to making them onsite rather than importing them.

O: For centralized production, do you imagine automation or drastically decreasing the cycle time of the machine would make a big enough difference to reach that price parity point with CMU?

D: No. That was a mistake that I made at the outset.  If you are going to use compression – ultra high compression – to squeeze the block hard enough that you can get it strong without cement, that takes time. The compression cycle takes 20 seconds. So it’s a question of ‘do I have that 20 seconds or would I just be better off buying 10% cement?’ It’s cheaper to buy the cement than the time to make a squeezed block.  

Now, what we’ve been working on was an alternative to cement. We found that alternative but it’s more expensive than Portland cement. So we’re stuck for the time being until this binder is less expensive or until these other aspects of the block plant on the construction site pays for itself.

If I go up to where these fires were and people don’t have a lot of money and they’ve lost their jobs and I say ‘look, someone (not us) is gonna bring a block plant up here and ten of you are gonna run a block plant.’ There’s ten jobs, everyone gets 12 dollars an hour. And then we need 30 masons, so there’s going to be a masons training program. So now for everyone that’s up in this community where you all lost your livelihoods, there are now 40 jobs to build houses with block walls that won’t burn next time. So I’m hoping that will work. I don’t seem to have the ability to craft that whole thing into the compelling argument that would get someone to invest in it but it sounds really logical.  

D: Someday people will realize that the ground beneath your feet or in that nearby hole in the ground can make building products. And what we have done at Rammed Earth Works for all of these years is build credibility for this beautiful material. I believe, having written those books and done this high-visibility work, that we have built credibility for rammed earth – for earth as a modern building material. And I’m very proud of that. Didn’t reach all of my goals, which was that it was going to be cheap. But it’s certainly beautiful and strong.

I wanted to say earlier that the reason we’ve reached this level of respect and credibility is that maybe 10 or 15 years ago, [my son] Khyber and I made an agreement. A pact, if you will, to slow down and improve the quality, because I approached this from ‘faster is better’ even though faster got us into a lot of callbacks and troubles with out of square windows and doors and out of plumb walls and inconsistent quality. So he and I agreed to allow more time for every step of the process. So there were fewer risks and fewer callbacks. The cost went up, but the quality doubled. Well, actually the quality quadrupled and the cost doubled, so we were actually in a better place. So it was really after that change in our approach that we elevated our game and got to a different clientele.

O: What are the biggest challenges faced in building rammed earth of consistent quality in the field?

D: The biggest challenge is consistent mix design. You know, if you’re pouring concrete, you have standards that have been established over millions and millions of cubic yards of material and they use clean, washed sand and gravel and manufactured Portland cement so the formula never changes.

When you’re building rammed earth, the formula is constantly changing based on the aggregates that you have and you’re using a fine particle constituent, the dust, the silts and clays, to allow you to develop strength and to replace some of the cement. But those fine particles will vary from region to region and parent rock to parent rock. So it’s really about an understanding of the variation in mix design which affects the quality of rammed earth.

O:  At the outset of a project, starting with a soil sample, what kind of process do you go through to determine what amendments need to be made, how much cement you need? How do you test mix designs?

D: Well you start by taking your material that you’re hoping to develop a mix design for and you subject that material to standard geotechnical testing. Primarily you are looking at gradation – the relationship between the very fine particles – the clays and silts – and the sands and gravels, because there is a certain proportion between fine and coarse that creates the best possible packing index.

Then you test the fine particles that are in that aggregate to see if those fine particles are clay and hence sticky or silt and inert. Then you will also test for shrinkage and the specific density – is the rock itself hard and is it absorbative? But your two key tests are your gradation and your plasticity which is the percentage of the material that is clay. Those are your standard geotechnical tests.

O: So what comes after the geotech analysis?

D:  Then you have what’s called your trial mixes. Your trial mixes are using prior knowledge of how this material with these characteristics is likely to perform once its mixed with cement and compacted. So relying on experience you can say ‘this material should have more coarse in it, so I’m going to add some sand or some gravel.’ And then I try to reduce my cement content to something realistic like 7 or 8 percent, and then I make the sample, I cure them, I test them for their absorption, their shrinkage, and their compressive strength.

If my first trial mix hasn’t produced the structural metrics, the strength, absorption, shrinkage that I need for this project, then I will adjust my mix design and try it again. Another trial mix. Until I’ve achieved the strength I am looking for with the lowest cost. If I have to add sand, sand is expensive. If I have to add cement, cement is really expensive. So the trial mix designs are all about producing the desired results at the lowest cost.

O: Watershed Materials has experimented with using geopolymers in some of their blocks. What are geopolymers and what makes them different from other types of binders?

D: That’s a really technical question. That’s one that Dr. Munoz has been working on with his vast scientific background and is hard for a layman like me to answer.

-At this point, Taj (David’s son and chief mix designer) walked over-

D: But I’m gonna let Taj answer this question

O: So Taj, what are geopolymers and what makes them different from other types of binders?

Taj:  Well, geopolymers are broadly defined as a class of alkali-activated aluminosilicates, which create a cementitious binder not dissimilar to cement and having similar chemical properties to cement.

From a technical perspective they are very similar to Portland cement. They perform relatively similarly, but as I mentioned it really describes a family or a broad class of materials. Ordinary Portland cements are variable too and can have variable makeup and performance, but I would say geopolymers are even broader term. Especially when you consider the types of materials we’re experimenting with, which are on an extreme end of the spectrum in terms of the reactivity of the aluminosilicates.

Most of these geopolymers use highly reactive aluminosilicates like fly ash or slag, meaning that they’re very easy to get to react to create these sorts of bonds. The materials we’re using like clays are aluminosilicates with low reactivity meaning they’re less easy to get to activate in an alkaline environment. So it’s really a two part equation where you have some source of aluminosilicates which can vary widely and then they’re put in a highly alkaline environment and the curing is controlled and then these bonds are able to develop.

At a really low temperature or a really high temperature, the reactivity of cement is going to change a lot. The same is true of geopolymers, you just have a narrower range of operability.  So you have to have tighter controls over curing and the chemistry and it’s a little trickier to get right.

There’s a reaction and essentially you’re breaking down components and re-assembling them into something new.

O: Fascinating. David, where do you see rammed earth technology 100 years from now?

D: I don’t know. What’s gonna happen 100 years from now? Are we going to build durable, resilient, beautiful, solid buildings or are we going to move into portable, lightweight, factory-built structures that can be picked up and moved inland as the oceans rise? You would think that a technology that was built upon capitalizing upon local resources would have merit.

O: If you hadn’t discovered rammed earth, what do you think you would have done instead?

D: Well, the tongue-in-cheek answer is that I would have designed rocket ships and electric cars.

T: He would have been an inventor.

D: I would have been an inventor, yeah. I’m a compulsive tinkerer. Thinking back to those early days there when I thought I was a builder following in my grandfather’s footsteps, I built those houses and at first it was about building and then I discovered rammed earth and I got excited about something that no one else had ever done before. That’s how we started this whole thing. Why did I do rammed earth? Because no one had done it before.

T: That’s right. It’s very hard to imagine him, if it weren’t for rammed earth, going into a career in straw bale or something else that was so well trodden that he just fell into the pack, so I think innovation is pretty central to this guy’s personality.

D: Yeah, it’s in my whole briggs meyer thing too. I’m a compulsive inventor.

T: He would have been innovating and inventing new systems even if he wasn’t in building.

D: And that’s what I studied in university too after trying to be an engineer and trying to be an architect and trying to be a philosopher and then they had this new department that they called product design and woah, man! I loved it.

T: I think the scope too. I believe him when he says it had to be buildings because he’s someone who thinks in large scale terms so working on innovating on something small is not as interesting or important seeming as revolutionizing world housing. And he’s not a politics guy, he’s a technical guy so you take that –

D: Where did you come up with ‘revolutionizing world housing?’

T: (laughing) Well, I’ve known you a long time…

D:  Well that, as an idealistic 25 year old, that’s what I thought I was gonna do. I was either gonna be president of the United States or revolutionize world housing.

T:  You wanted to do something important.

D: Yeah, I wanted to do something important.

O: Well David, thank you so much for sitting down with me. I’m really looking forward to reading your next book.

D: Maybe I’ll write it in Palm Springs this winter.

Interior designer Steven Miller has created a successful and highly collaborative business model, partnering with other designers, clients, and artisans. Photos courtesy Steven Miller

What has changed is the breadth of his focus. We spoke about temporality, authenticity, design as a science, and his newest project, NWBLK – “the next big thing”, a collaborative showcase of products and events. How can the latest fad, “the new black” as it were, be true to itself, and remain authentic?

NWBLK’s Beginnings

“NWBLK started in 2011, at the tail end of the recession, which saw an aggregation by larger companies, with the little companies falling by the wayside. What was left? A disheartening distillation of design survivors. I wanted to provide an environment for smaller batch-made craft pieces.”

Steven Miller describes NWBLK as “experiential marketing”, showcasing a carefully curated collection of hand-crafted pieces. Photo credit: Steven Miller

NWBLK Today

The NWBLK gallery was located initially in a garage, and then at a larger space at 18th and Bryant in San Francisco’s Mission district. Currently, products represented by NWBLK can be seen and purchased through the Martin Showroom in St Helena, and through a hospitality partnership where guests and visitors are able to see these products in a living environment.

The new showroom is a disarmingly modest-looking cottage behind a larger home on a private piece of property with a serene and well-established residential feel. As is common in that area, many homes have small vineyards, as well as gardens and other features of country living. There’s a community garden right next door with educational examples of low-water and sustainable agriculture in action.

Built new to match the surrounding buildings, this guest cottage in Sonoma will be opened as new showroom/hotel in another few months. Photo: Mark English Architects

The partner for this hybrid showroom-hospitality venture is a former design client who lives right up front in a larger house close to the road. The NWBLK is currently working on a series of similar guest houses in partnership with this same client. All the built-ins and furnishings will come from the same partners as well, in a collaborative and mutually beneficial business arrangement.

As we walked through the cottage, he described how each detail, including the built-ins, were from other partners: custom walnut cabinetry and free-standing kitchen island from Henrybuilt Cabinetry, Porcelanosa finishes, and furnishings from some of the NWBLK exclusive designers. Others were from designers not credited on NWBLK. “They’re not all exclusives. But I can sell their work through NWBLK as part of this showroom. Visitors can see the items online and click a Buy Now button to place an order.”

Experiencing these pieces in person, as a guest, is the perfect way to fall in love with them. I was drawn to the Verellen ribbed leather sofa like a cat to a forbidden toy. The quality and craftsmanship radiated out into the room. All the items, even the mattress, are made with all-natural materials, too. The place smelled fresh and natural, even though it was still technically still under construction.

“NWBLK is an evolving business, a disruptor of certain aspects of the design world in which we’re involved,” Steven explained. “It’s an alternative to the customary notion of a retail design showroom. It started out as a guerrilla gallery, which was very successful, before moving to a larger space in San Francisco’s Mission district.  The new location allowed us to produce extraordinary events and connect with a whole new clientele. Throughout, we’ve continued to introduce curated collections of pieces to new markets in new ways. This hospitality partnership assimilates all we’ve learned in the past about experiential marketing and hospitality, and rolling all that into a brand-new concept.”

Steven Miller has several lines of furniture that he’s designed, such as this Stand and Deliver shelving system.

So how can you sell items from your competitors? I wondered. You’re actually referring people there from NWBLK. “My design studio is separate from NWBLK for that reason. I can sell my furniture to other designers who are providing design services for their own clients. Or, I can be designing an interior and specify their furniture, if that’s what would make the design more perfect. Part of this showroom is I can offer furniture from other makers directly, even where I don’t have an exclusive.”

Why Yountville?

We met at Steven’s house in Yountville, CA, up in Napa. Why Yountville? I wondered. Turns out Yountville is quite the up-and-coming place, still heavily centered around wine, but with an emerging design sensibility. “We moved there for the weather, the lifestyle, gardening, and wine.” (And if you’re looking for $250 pure white linen shirts, this is the place.)

“I just joined the Yountville Zoning and Design Review Board two months ago. It’s exciting to have some real input.” Steven mentioned the influence of the devastating fires in Santa Rosa and Sonoma over the past few years. “People need quick results”. He’d had to evacuate his house, too. A sense of temporality struck us both: even in such peaceful, sunny surroundings, it all could be gone almost in an instant.

Yountville is rapidly transforming from a rural town to a well-heeled getaway in the heart of California’s wine country. Original homes such as this re-done cottage co-exist side by side with new construction. Photo: Mark English Architects

What did Steven think about Yountville’s design sensibility? I’d spent an hour wandering around after allowing extra time for traffic that wasn’t there. “It’s in its childhood here. Not infancy, though. It reflects changing ideals, and more sophisticated people.” And, Yountville was the birthplace of the renowned French Laundry, a restaurant so exclusive that it has a 2-month wait list.

The image of a glorified country store came to mind, with old farming equipment repurposed as sculptural objects. Is that art, or kitsch? I wondered. “There are plenty of collectors up here. By that, I mean broadly including collectors of furniture, art, design, and architecture. The antiques represent a wine country of yesteryear, which employed vernacular as décor.”

Originality

We kept circling back to a few fundamental questions, such as what constitutes good interior design. Take the whole distressed-wood bar craze, for example. Or when every trendy new restaurant was suddenly wallpapered with antique player-piano rolls and featured retro Edison lamps with the exposed filaments. But it was so cool the first time!

“Duplicating bold moves… it’s not as fresh the 20th time.”

Steven Miller’s interiors don’t look trendy, but they don’t look dated, either. This one is both understated and inviting. Photo: Steven Miller

“There’s an assumption of durability in architecture,” Steven explained. “Interior design is more temporal, less static. It’s a reflection of changing tastes. You can try to be TOO far-reaching, and get hung up on fancy materials and ‘timeless design’. It just ends up being static.”

We were sitting out in a patio enjoying a handmade salad from Southside, an artisanal coffee shop and eatery. “Good interior design makes use of subliminal cues in the built environment. Even architects and designers, who should know better, don’t always consider the actual qualities of the materials. They think glass is transparent… but it’s reflective as well, creating a different sort of visual experience.”

The bright sunlight on the stone patio created intense reflections on the glass walls of Southside, creating a multi-layered effect. But you couldn’t exactly see inside. I thought that digital renders were good enough to capture most of that by now. “Renders aren’t perfect,” Steven responded.

This graffiti mural, part of a NWBLK event in San Francisco, respected the work of the original taggers, in fact incorporated multiples of their work – which effectively stopped it from being defaced. Photo: Steven Miller

Aging Process

What are your preferred materials? Steven responded: “Leather, concrete, and stone, because they age well. Not cotton!” We talked about pristine interiors that start to look shabby the instant that a speck of dust intrudes, or a white building when it gets weather-stained. “We build things to look new, and when an object doesn’t look new anymore, it loses its appeal.”

“The city of Rome is lovely, with its old stone walls showing wear and tear.” Indeed, Roman stone-work shows a variety of stone-working techniques that go well beyond the faux-stone looks of today. Other materials don’t age as well. “Glass gets scratched, discolored, and sealed glass constructions can get fogged from moisture intrusion.”

Steven Miller prefers durable materials for interiors. In this photo of his NWBLK showroom, the steel beams and concrete surfaces exude a sense of permanence but can also endure re-finishing and re-surfacing. Photo credit: Conroy + Tanzer

Steven, like his colleague and former employer Gary Hutton, has extensive experience in designing interiors for serious art collectors. “Sunlight degrades materials and artwork,” he explained, which seems obvious and yet, most homes don’t allow for an idealized, museum-grade environment. Sometimes, design trends do more harm than good, particularly the “California Modern” emphasis on large expanses of glass.

“A lot of the new buildings in San Francisco are all built for maximum exposure. They’re south-facing with floor-to-ceiling window walls, and no light control. Classic Roman buildings have deep-set windows to reduce direct glare, which is more environmentally responsive.”

Clients

How do you approach a new project? “I start with programmatic requirements,” Steven responded. “What the clients do in there, what they THINK they want… and, their assumptions about what they think they want.”

This private home interior by Steven Miller uses a lot of durable materials: leather, wood, metal, stone. But the design doesn’t call attention to itself. The focus is on the people, even though no people appear in the photo. Photo: Christopher Stark

What makes for a good client? “A lot of designers get hired for status: to make the client look rich, or so they can say that they hired a top designer. Some clients just don’t understand the mechanics of what we do.” For Steven, project acceptance criteria include a good personality fit. “Do we mesh? Or are they hiring me for the wrong reasons? Thus, authenticity extends beyond the design, to cover the entire process. “A red flag is, during an interview meeting, a client who talks nonstop about everything they want to do, and who’s not listening to me.”

A good design client may in some ways be different from clients for other types of professional services. “They don’t know what they want, but they’re excited about the opportunity to engage in figuring it out. They’re open to solving problems in new ways, and are self-aware enough to know how to trust.”

Did you ever have a client with very… unusual needs? I asked. Or special interests? “Sometimes interpersonal relationships can be complicated. I had one client who came out to me during a project. And he had a family! We saw a shift in programmatic requirements. It became clear that he needed his own master bedroom, and a private bathroom that wasn’t shared with two children.”

For special interests, Steven mentioned two projects: a surfer cottage, and one for a professional chef. “The chef wanted a dining room table that was fuckable, meaning he could make love with his wife on it.” Yes, built-in kitchen islands can be great for that as well. “The surfer needed a house that was tolerant of sand and salt water, and wet gear. Our hypothesis for that house was ‘We can make this beautiful’ and we set out to prove that.”

Disasters

Tell me about some project disasters, I said. Things that went south, maybe not anyone’s fault. How did you handle that? This question is not one they teach in design school… “

Sometimes, projects haven’t gone smoothly. If it gets past a certain point, it just cyclones. On one project for a couple, the wife’s indecision was a constant problem. She was fearful, and her husband was always apologizing for it. There was no definition of success. That project felt like it was doomed to fail. Eventually, I gracefully acknowledged that I couldn’t fulfill their needs.”

“When it gets to that point, you have to own the confrontation.”

Another project that Steven did jointly, as a junior designer, was even more instructive. “This project was beset by cost overruns. There was a meeting with the client, the contractor, and the designer. The client was a very high-powered lawyer, very strong-willed. She was used to winning cases in the courtroom. The meeting was to ask how did these cost overruns happen?

“The contractor had a binder full of Change Orders. The client slammed that binder shut and declared ‘There have been no Change Orders.’ It was as if she were upending the subject and declaring a new, alternative reality. I was just watching from the sidelines and I didn’t really know why the client did this. But it was a very shocking moment.”

Good Design

What constitutes good design? We came back again to this question. If you were teaching design students, how do you teach them to recognize it, in their own work or others’?

“Good design and successful design are not always the same thing. A successful design is one that fits the bill, one that the client likes.” I suggested that good designs were those that the designers were eager to include in their own portfolios.

Steven Miller’s project “Cocteau’s Dream” recreates the intellectual ferment of early and mid 20th century Paris. Photo: Matthew Millman

“A good design has to be aesthetically pleasing. It should take care of programmatic concerns, including comfort and ergonomics. It should be clear about its intention.” I compared bad design to amateur dance choreographies that were too frantic or busy, so that the viewer didn’t know where to look.

One issue in judging design came up: the tyranny of the photo. Every competition, and every design magazine, relies exclusively on the sense of vision. However, designs for living should engage all the senses in a holistic and experiential way.

“I really like the SF MoMA building by Snøhetta. The acoustics are perfect. I can talk to my friends and hear them, but it doesn’t bounce all over the room. And there’s a lot of reflected light, which is important for viewing art.”

Steven learned a lot about good design from Gary Hutton. “Gary’s solutions always carry the ultimate level of aestheticism, answering the question in a very elegant way. It’s also about knowing when to back off. Gary taught me to achieve a proper edit. If there’s texture in an art piece, repeat that texture someplace else. It’s subliminally important… Some designers throw everything they have at it. There’s no restraint. It’s too much stuff, layer upon layer. It’s distracting, inauthentic, hard to remember.”

Lamp detail from Steven Miller’s design work for the Hotel Durant. Yeah… it does look like a bong. Photo: Steven Miller

Authenticity

One of the least measurable aspects of design could be described as “authenticity”. What makes art, or design, or anything “authentic”? Establishing authenticity in other art forms, especially those with strong insider cultures, can be challenging. How can we clearly identify cheap knock-offs or cultural appropriations?

“I don’t like to be pigeonholed for a ‘style’. I’m interested in so many things. I like to jump around.” We discussed one of Steven’s showcase design projects, titled Cocteau’s Dream. “I wanted to tap into the collaborative multidisciplinary environment of early and mid-20th century Parisian culture,” Steven replied. “That was a time when artists, thinkers, jazz musicians, composers, philosophers were all friendly with one another. I wanted to capture a milieu that was rife with creativity and inspiration.”

Steven Miller’s interiors incorporate fine art, texture, and the clients’ own personal tastes. Photo: Steven Miller

“Good design is not about using a formula. It’s about suspending one’s fear in pursuit of good design. You have to go with your gut. Don’t just do something predictable.”

I ventured an opinion that the more successful multidisciplinary efforts were well-grounded in training of some sort. Jazz might appear to be free-form, but maybe only a master can get away with it. We considered the place of rigor in enhancing creativity: developing skills necessary for performance.

“You have to know when to walk away from your training. It’s like tension in a musical note, which is discordant for a reason.”

Design as a Science

Steven Miller was a philosophy major before switching to art, so when he used the phrase “design as a science” we explored what that meant, and what the word “science” itself implies. Does declaring something as scientific actually make it so?

Why is design a science? “It’s a process of asking,” Steven said. Of inquiry. “We’re asking how well the final design answered the question that the original design proposition was asking.”

Steven Miller’s design for a private residence includes a subliminal mural on the far wall. Photo: Matthew Millman

“Design consists of both intrinsically formed ideas and academic ideas, in pursuit of answers to questions that prove a hypothesis. For example, that surfer’s cottage. That house had to accept salt air, wind and sand, and wet surfboards. The hypothesis for that project was ‘We can make this beautiful’.”

Really? Even a dumpster fire? Well… yes, at least in theory. That would be an interesting design challenge, I suggested. Steven recalled a scene from the movie American Beauty, where a plastic bag swirls in the wind. Yes, even litter can be beautiful. “I choke up even now thinking about that scene,” he said. Strangely enough, so did I.

“In the right hands… even the most hideous can be beautiful.”

Rigor and Chaos

Speaking again about “Cocteau’s Dream”, Steven said “That project used Western ideals about proportion. These ideals are supposedly rooted in mathematics, and nature, and science.” Academically formed ideas, in other words.

You mean the Golden Mean and Phi? I asked to clarify, and said that my own amateur experiments with the Golden Mean had been unsuccessful. A strict application of that proportion to, say, page layouts, only produced static and boring results. They needed to be a little “off” in some indefinable way in order to be interesting. Randomness was needed somehow, but you can’t intentionally employ randomness because as soon as you add intention… it’s not random anymore. It’s predictable, conscious.

“Rigor isn’t clear unless it’s opposing chaos.”

Steven Miller’s interiors for a remodeled private home along San Francisco’ Great Highway.

NWBLK

“The New Black is the next big thing, a temporal way of looking at things.” We were talking about NWBLK, Steven Miller’s newest enterprise. “It’s about curating a collection of handmade objects, and presenting them for sale in an interesting way. I wanted to create a business that taught people why original and handcrafted was so important.”

(Note that NWBLK is distinct from another site also called NEWBLK which is also a very design-oriented, artful site.)

Immediately we got on the topic of knock-offs, the bane of many a designer’s world. “I was speaking at a Japanese wood furniture symposium in Asahikawa a few years back. There was a collection of furniture on display from a collector who’d explored authenticity in a very unusual way. There would be one original piece, and then 10 knock-offs in succession. Knock-offs of knock-offs. It was like a game of telephone.”

Steven Miller’s furniture designs for Conde House were for a Japanese furniture manufacturer. Photo: Conde House

Why events? Well, events are part of the “experiential marketing” concept at NWBLK. “Those events are all promoting product innovation and interaction design. Some of the concepts are thought-based, and others are about technology. NWBLK has seen product launches for two electric vehicles and the first Uber app.”

“People find us. We have a reputation, and people connect our reputation with the next best thing, with seeking out what that is. I drive one of Audi’s hybrid electric vehicles, and that car was launched at NWBLK.”

The connection between science (theory) and engineering (applied theory to solving problems) comes together in innovation as well. “Design is addressing problems that need to be solved. Mitigating greenhouse gases, or creating a living environment for a family of 5.”

Design Challenges

So, can you think up some interesting design challenges? I asked. Something that you could use to tie together a group show, or elicit a unified theme with a lot of creativity around solving a well-designed problem? “

Have two designers each do a room in the style of the other,” Steven suggested. We both sat back and wondered how… extreme… that could get. Steven mentioned Jimmy Fallon’s musical challenge, where a musician has to Improvise on the spot a well-known song and an artist’s style, for example “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the style of Michael Jackson.

Steven Miller carefully chose this black cabinet finish for its gleaming matte surface. Photo: James Baigrie

Steven recalled a workshop he gave at Apple, for one of their product design teams, to stretch them out of their comfort zone. “We laid out two squares on the floor, each 15’ square, with some design materials in each. Two teams, one hour. One team had access to a technician and a collection of power tools. The other had nothing. They had to pick something to make, and then present their work.”

It reminded me of the old TV show called Scrapheap Challenge, a sort of Iron Chef for makers and machinists.

This exercise yielded a surprising result, too. “The tools team was MORE challenged by having tools. They felt that they HAD to use them. The other team had a pregnant woman as one of the members, and they made her a swing bassinet.”

Image courtesy of Steven Miller

Links and References

1. Steven Miller Design Studio
2. NWBLK
3. Henrybuilt cabinetry
4. Verellen sofa
5. Gary Hutton Design
6. The bag scene from the movie American Beauty
7. Scrapheap Challenge, Wiki
8. NWBLK overview page
9. NWBLK “who we are”

All photos courtesy of Conscious Impact except as otherwise noted.

Arrival

In April of 2015, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake rocked Nepal, causing widespread damage and killing over 9,000 people. In January of 2016, I headed out there with the intention of using what I’d learned in architecture school to help the Nepalis rebuild – but also seeking the kind of education not found in schools. I’d learned much through reading and lectures at the University of Virginia, but I wanted to learn through doing.

This school in Nepal was rebuilt after a major earthquake in 2015, by volunteers, out of Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks or CSEB, a form of modular rammed earth construction.

A few days after my plane descended through milky layers of smog into the cacophony of Kathmandu, I found myself rumbling up the mountains in a bus destined the Sindupalchok region of Nepal. Riding on an overladen bus tottering along the edges of steep ravines, I slowly made my way up to a volunteer camp run by Conscious Impact, a fledgling non-profit organization focused on sustainable earthquake recovery. When we arrived, we were greeted by a large group of people from all over the world.

The volunteer camp was suffused with a special kind of energy that comes about when people from many different places and cultures converge around a shared purpose. For this group, that purpose was the recovery of the nearby villages of Takure and Nawalpur. Tucked into the picturesque mountainside, these small yet vibrant agricultural communities had lost 90% of their buildings to the earthquake.

Brick Production

We all worked long hours – some teaching at the schools, some working in the garden, and some making earth bricks at the “Training Center.” In each of these venues, hard work brought us closer together. Foreign volunteers and local Nepali workers sweated side by side together in the hot sun, harvesting soil from the mountainside and mixing it with sand from the river. We stabilized the mix with a small percentage of cement and poured it one scoop at a time into a powerful brick-making machine called the Auram 3000.

This machine, developed by the Auroville Earth Institute in Auroville, India, compressed the loose loam mixture into square bricks. This was the rhythm for months: harvest, mix, compress, and stack. Soon, the production facility was encircled by many large stacks of bricks that then had to “cure” for 40 days. As the stacks cured, more bricks piled up, eventually numbering into the thousands.

CSEBs were made using a specially-designed brick press from the Auroville Earth Institute, called the Auram 3000.

The School Project

At first, we didn’t have a building planned for the bricks. The idea was to build up an inventory over time and listen to the needs of the local community before deciding on a project. Several members of the community expressed to us the importance of rebuilding a school that had been badly damaged in the earthquake. The old school had been built from a series of steel columns set on a shallow foundation, with supporting steel trusses and a corrugated metal roof. Stone walls, held together by mud mortar, had been built around the columns to enclose the classrooms. During the earthquake, these walls had crumbled as the columns flexed around from within.

Fortunately, the roof and steel columns of the three school buildings had endured the earthquake largely unscathed. Another volunteer, a Canadian architect named Frederik Dolmans, developed a design which incorporated these surviving elements. Dolmans’ design called for improved foundations and buttressed walls built of the earth bricks we had been producing since January.

Extending bricks out from the wall plane creates self-buttressed walls at doors and windows, providing additional earthquake protection. Photo credit: Jonathan H. Lee

In the spring of 2016, we began transporting the cured bricks downhill to the school, one truckload at a time. The construction site began to fill with stacks of bricks as a team of masons started work on the new foundation. The construction method for these particular earth bricks incorporated a series of vertical reinforced concrete “cores” inscribed within the walls at structurally-vulnerable locations. In Fred Dolmans’ design, these “cores” were located at either side of every window and door and at the corners of each wall.

As we were informing the masons about this style of building, they were already hard at work on the new foundation, expertly stacking stones in gabion cages on the downhill side of the buildings and laying the groundwork for the new plinth beam. Once these foundations were completed, the masons began laying bricks on the concrete plinth beam in various arrangements around the rebar cores.

The local kids loved visiting the construction site to help move bricks when they were off school. Photo credit: Jonathan H. Lee.

With the walls growing ever higher, the bricks continued to flow from the Training Center with increasing efficiency. Specialists began to emerge from amongst our crew. The attitude was always jocular and athletic, and as sports teams grow closer, so did we. Through the many meals we shared together, we came to better understand each other’s cultures and where and how help was called for within the village.

We could never have understood local needs without growing closer to the villagers themselves. Over time, they gave us insight into the most pressing issues of their community. This interplay of local and foreign knowledge was one of the most important aspects of the recovery process.

It took two people several “pulls” of the lever to press a single brick. It was certainly hard work, but we still had fun.

Rammed Earth Construction

I left Nepal in May of 2016, as school construction began to wrap up. The school was completed by the local masons and a small volunteer crew. By June, the rainy season began to close in and camp was packed up for monsoon.

Meanwhile, I ended up in California, working for David Easton at Rammed Earth Works in Napa. Over the past 40 years, Easton and his crew have perfected the method of rammed earth construction and have refined it into an art form. (Their blog contains a vast wealth of information and case studies.)

Rammed earth is not a new method of construction. Rather, it is an ancient way of building that can be traced back to Mesopotamia, with examples all over the world. At Rammed Earth Works, they have infused this vernacular building technique with modern concepts of engineering and construction to create an entirely new building material.

Rammed earth construction is a simple yet nuanced craft.  A mixture of soil, sand, and gravel is combined with (if available) a small percentage of cement and subsequently hydrated with water to a suitable wetness. This hydrated mix is then thrown into a formwork and compressed (rammed) in layers by workers wielding tampers. Once the layering reaches the top, the forms are removed and the finished wall cures over the following days.

On the other side of the planet, Rammed Earth Works in Napa has refined this ancient vernacular craft into a science.

The Economics of Rammed Earth

At Rammed Earth Works, the nuance of this craft has been elevated from simple to sublime. Coming from Nepal, the contrast was striking. The primary difference between the two contexts is owing to simple economics. In developing countries, labor is cheap and materials are expensive: building with local materials, even if it is labor intensive, makes sense. By contrast, in developed countries, labor is expensive labor and transportation is cheap, making techniques like prefabrication and automation more attractive.

These conditions have led Rammed Earth Works to develop a variety of products around the same base concept of compressing earth. In addition to the more traditional cast-in-place rammed earth, they produce prefabricated rammed earth veneer panels. Their sister company, Watershed Materials, produces compressed earth blocks which are dimensionally identical to concrete masonry units (CMUs). In a later article, we will be digging deeper into Rammed Earth Works’ practice of their craft and the broader implications of resurrecting an ancient building technique in the modern age.

A wide range of colors are still possible even with all-natural soils.

Women’s Cooperative

During my initial stay in Nepal in the spring of 2016, another clear opportunity for a project had emerged, one that could greatly benefit the community: the rebuilding of an office and meeting hall for a local women-run microfinance co-operative. This organization is a cornerstone of the community. It not only provided loans to people within the village, but also served as a forum and a safe space for women. They had lost their building in the earthquake along with the other 90% of structures in the region. Without it, they were holding meetings in their homes and in makeshift tea houses by the roadside.

Local village women pitched in to rebuild a women’s cooperative that had also been destroyed in the quake. Photo credit: Jonathan H. Lee

Between August and December of 2017, I was working at Rammed Earth Works. My days were spent building rammed earth walls, making shop drawings, or testing mix designs. My nights were spent developing a set of drawings for the women’s co-op project back in Nepal.

With combined advice from David Easton in person and Frederik Dolmans remotely, I developed a design for a simple rammed earth building that aimed to strike a balance between sustainability and earthquake resistance. I coordinated with volunteers on the ground in Nepal to check the post-monsoon site conditions and stake out the foundation.

I then flew out to Nepal again in January 2017 to supervise the construction of the co-op. This departure time worked out well for leaving Napa, since wintertime is California’s rainy season and rammed earth construction requires drier weather conditions. When I returned to the village, the team there, led by Satwika Taduri and Nitzan Iserovich, had completed the foundation, and the plinth beam was curing.

Together, we ran a number of workshops for volunteers and local masons on the basics of rammed earth, and experimented with a few different mix designs for the soil from the foundation excavation. Eventually, we settled on a ratio of soil to gravel to sand with 8% cement to stabilize. Three wood forms for constructing the wall segments were built by a local carpenter. These forms were designed to be able to build all of the different sizes of wall segment we would need for the project.

Segment by segment, the walls were built over the course of a month. Many people worked together to measure, mix, and ram the earth into the formworks. The masons took to the technique quickly, and women from the co-op played an active role in the process. Once complete, the walls were topped out with a concrete lintel beam and a set of site-welded steel roof trusses bolted down to the beam. As with many buildings in Nepal, the intention was to allow for a second story to be added to the structure in the future. As such, the entire roof was designed to be removable to allow for upward expansion.

The women’s co-op had rammed earth exterior walls, with an interior wall of CSEB. Photo credit: Jonathan H. Lee

Just as at the Training Center, the construction process served as a uniting force between members of the community and volunteers. The shared act of building brought people together in a way that transcended barriers of culture and language. It also served as a demonstration of an alternative building technique for affordable and durable construction.

The completed building now sits steadfast on the mountainside as a symbol of the Women’s Co-op and its inherent importance within the community. It will continue to serve as a place for the women of the community to take an active and enduring role in the rebuilding of their village for years to come.

Earthbags

In the year since that project was completed, Conscious Impact has built a number of homes using a third technique of earthen construction: earthbags. This is arguably the simplest approach to building. At its most basic, a long tube of cross-woven polyethylene bag from a continuous roll is filled with earth of any kind and tamped flat. Once one layer of compressed earth-filled bag is complete, another is laid atop the first, with barbed wire in between to bind the layers together. Once the walls are complete, they are covered with plaster to protect the bags from UV light. If the plaster is maintained, walls of this kind can last thousands of years.

The fact that the binding element of the wall is on the outside of the wall in the form of a “bag” makes these types of walls especially earthquake resistant – even if the material within the bag “cracks,” the bag and thereby the wall will remain intact. This flexibility, combined with the affordability of the materials used, makes earthbag construction an ideal method for building in earthquake-prone countries with developing economies.

Construction of an earthbag home, also by Conscious Impact volunteers. Photo: Rebeca Segal

Conclusion

Around the world, earthen construction takes many forms. In almost every case, it represents a less carbon-intensive way to build long-lasting structures. Whether they be of compressed earth bricks, rammed earth, or earthbags, properly maintained earthen structures will last hundreds if not thousands of years.

At the start of the 21st century, global warming is a harsh reality. It is abundantly clear that drastic changes must occur in the way we live on this planet if our species is to continue. The built environment is certainly no exception. Currently, cement production alone is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions. Reducing the use of cement is a sizeable piece of the puzzle in fighting climate change. Construction techniques that reduce or eliminate the need for cement are a great way to decrease emissions.

In developing countries, where materials and transportation are expensive and labor is cheap, earthen construction presents a cost-effective alternative to the more common methods of reinforced concrete and fired clay bricks.  As these countries develop, it is imperative that they do so in less carbon-intensive ways than the now-developed countries which preceded them. Through use of earthen construction techniques, it may be possible for the developing countries of the world to skip the messy industrial revolution phase of development altogether and instead join us in the post-carbon future.

Links and References

1. Nepal earthquake, Wiki article
2. Conscious Impact volunteer organization
3. Auroville Earth Institute
4. Frederik Dolmans
5. Plinth beam, explanation
6. David Easton and Rammed Earth Works in Napa, CA <
7. Rammed Earth Works blog
8. Watershed Materials, produces rammed earth CMUs for Rammed Earth Works builders
9. Wiki on rammed earth as a vernacular <
10. Earthbags, Wiki article
11. CNN news special on Conscious Impact in Nepal

It’s a complex web of players. The Housing Northwest Arkansas initiative is a project at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in nearby Fayetteville. HNWA was funded by a $250,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation with the specific intent of spurring the creation of high-density housing in downtown Bentonville.

Bentonville is one of a cluster of towns located in the upper northwest corner of the state of Arkansas. Those towns: Bentonville, Rogers, Lowell, Springdale, Johnson, and Fayetteville, appear as the red area with greatest population density. Greater Northwest Arkansas consists of a cluster of 10 counties.

And why is the Walton family so concerned with housing in one particular spot? Because Bentonville is where they grew up, and they have an interest in promoting thoughtful forward planning as Northwest Arkansas experiences rapid population growth. Yes… it’s also the headquarters of Walmart, and spokespeople at both the Walton Family Foundation and HNWA have emphasized that their projects are independent efforts, and do not receive funding from the corporate entity.

What’s At Stake

Dean Peter MacKeith of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas outlined the reason why there’s such a pressing need for change in Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas.

“There are 650,000 people in a 4-county area and there will be 1 million in a decade. It’s an area of high growth, with low-density housing patterns. People are increasingly moving here for employment and quality of life. And they’re facing housing prices that are too high, with long commutes.”

We spoke about a new concept in home prices called attainable housing. Affordable housing has come to mean subsidized housing for very low-income clients. “Attainable” could mean “within the reach of anyone making a modest but steady livelihood”.

Bentonville, Arkansas, a town of 49,000 people, has three main employers: Walmart, Tyson Foods, and JB Hunt Transportation.

Housing pressures are already forcing up housing costs in a way that sounded almost like Manhattan. From 2012-2017, residential costs in downtown Bentonville rose 207%. Alice Walton of the Walton Family Foundation penned a guest commentary in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette saying, among other things, that “our communities need access to a robust mix of housing options so teachers, artists and firefighters can live in the neighborhoods they serve.”

A Three-Pronged Approach

Anne Fougeron, FAIA, described HNWA’s three-pronged approach.

• A semester-long design studio at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, where Fougeron is co-teaching as a visiting professor.
• A housing symposium, that took place this past February.
• An international design competition. Of 125 original firms, 25 were invited to submit entries for multifamily housing projects on one of 5 identified sites. Winners were announced on May 10, 2018. Presentation of the design competition winners opened with a developer showcase to stimulate interest.

Walton Family Foundation’s Role

The Walton Family Foundation is doing a lot more than housing. Their work focuses on three main areas: K-12 education, Environment, and something called Home Region: “Enhancing the quality of life in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta.” The vision is one of revitalization through education, economic development, culture, and recreation.

The Razorback Greenway in northwest Arkansas runs 36 miles from Bentonville to Fayetteville, funded in part by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. Photo: Northwest Arkansas Trails and Misty Murphy

The Walton Family Foundation’s Home Region page refers to support for “unique downtowns of the region… cultivate what makes each community unique” and a desire to “establish the region as a global leader and top destination in education, arts and culture and recreation”. It’s a very optimistic, forward-thinking vision – unhampered by the convoluted approvals process and gentrification concerns that bedevil any redevelopment attempts in California’s Bay Area, for example.

When I approached the Walton Family Foundation to ask about the specific significance of the HNWA, a spokesperson pointed me to a press release describing the Foundation’s focus on the the downtowns of northwest Arkansas. The press release also references a Downtown Vitality Report commissioned through the University of Arkansas, as well as a forthcoming study that will focus on workforce housing and long-term regional housing growth.

The foundation’s interest in downtown development includes support for the arts: one of the items in the press release described a $400,000 one-year grant to Artspace, a nonprofit, real-estate developer and property manager, to assess the availability of exhibition, performance space, studio area and affordable housing for artists in Northwest Arkansas.

A Few Anchors to Jump-Start

Bentonville’s transformation has already gotten off to a strong start: the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the 45-mile long Razorback Greenway, both sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation. (The Razorback Greenway received funding from other sources, including partner cities and various Federal and state-level transportation agencies.)

Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, founded by Alice Walton, boasts a large collection of American art and a series of outdoor forest trails. Photo: Adair Creative

Rather than a single monolithic effort, this is a series of boosts, strategically applied in the right place at the right time, appealing to influencers who can move faster than government agencies – and those governing agencies will be happy to jump on board once the train is already moving.

Why Multifamily Housing?

Even as we go along with the idea that all this is totally separate from Walmart, nothing to do with the corporate entity that is one of the biggest employers in the South and one of the three main employers in Bentonville itself, there is a parallel thread worth mentioning: namely, the competition between Walmart and Amazon, and the business pressures facing big-box stores in general as shoppers look to do an increasing amount of their shopping online.

Walmart is seeking to modernize all of its operations: online shopping with higher-end merchandise, crowdsourced delivery, in-store robotics, voice-enabled commerce, analytics. This means a technically savvy workforce: most likely, millennials, who are also a target customer demographic. And millennial workers don’t seem to want to live in the ‘burbs or embrace car culture. They want hip, walkable downtowns and might prefer to bike rather than drive if they can.

A tech-savvy millennial workforce is crucial for Walmart to transform itself from an outdated box-store model to an Amazon-inspired online shopping experience. Image: Kinesisinc.com

Walmart Labs is tasked with bringing this modernization about, expressed with the motto “a line of code can change how the world shops”. Walmart Labs is located in San Bruno, CA, right outside of San Francisco. There’s a direct flight every day from SFO-Bentonville, where Walmart has its corporate headquarters. Anything like HNWA that can inspire new patterns of living density is likely to attract the same urbanites that Walmart needs to stay competitive in a world that changes faster every day.

Another spur is sustainability. Unregulated sprawl can lead to an over-reliance on cars and private transportation, as well as straining municipal infrastructures for water, power, and emergency services. The new urbanism emphasizes high-density living and smaller footprints, smarter systems, with economies of scale in materials and construction.

Fay Jones Visiting Professor Anne Fougeron noted, “There’s no infrastructure out there. So far, it’s been everybody left to fend for themselves. It’s either sprawling strip malls, or it’s lovely. Downtowns are decimated. But things change very quickly now. If people don’t get what they want, they go someplace else.”

Rural-suburban typologies rely on car culture, which can lead to long commutes and strained municipal infrastructures (The jam is from Route 37 in California – on a Sunday.) Images: Realtor.com and North Bay Business Journal

Mark English, this blog’s sponsor, weighed in. “Paul Krugman of the New York Times gave a recent talk about the pace of change. During the 2008 recession, people were so preoccupied that they didn’t notice that the world was fundamentally changing. Technology such as the iPhone changed how people communicated and lived their lives. Things are changing so quickly… but getting things built is still slow.”

“You need private money to change things now,” said Anne Fougeron. “Government takes too long. A private foundation can move a lot faster. This could be a model for how private philanthropy can jump-start other efforts, too, make room for smaller developers who know the area.”

Regional Housing Symposium

I was interested in the housing symposium, which included national experts from various levels of government, design and planning professionals, academics, developers, and urbanists. Case studies ranged from Austin to Detroit, Northern Virginia, and Portland. Dean Peter MacKeith spoke about the symposium.

Detroit, the former Colony Arms Apartments now called River Crest Apartments, subsidized by Federal low-income and historic preservation tax credits. Federal tax credits for redevelopment and low-income housing are being killed now. Image: Crain’s

Do you see this as a model for other parts of the country?

“The ambition of the symposium was to explore the issues of housing in Northwest Arkansas through a broader context of housing issues across the country. We aimed to provide a set of examples, case studies, and means and methods that local stakeholders could implement. Symposium attendees included developers, designers, city planners, construction firms, and interested community members.”

The case studies presented at the housing symposium were far from uniform. “While many explored new construction of housing, Esther Yang’s examples from Detroit addressed repurposing existing structures. As she described it, Detroit’s financial crisis led to thousands of empty buildings across the city paired with community distrust of government initiatives, so the case study presented the Planning Department’s process to regain trust and invite the community stakeholders to provide input for renovations.”

“Case studies explored unique examples of funding, land donations, zoning changes, partnerships, and collaborations. Lisa Sturtevant’s example from Northern Virginia addressed sprawl and lack of attainable housing through a partnership between a university, the state, the city, and a non-profit entity to develop attainable rental housing for employees and students. The built project created a university community for the previously commuter-centric campus.”

“While most of the case studies addressed during the symposium were deemed successful, presenters also discussed the project aspects that were less effective, and what they learned from the process. Sometimes the lesson isn’t in what they did, but, in hindsight, what they wish they had done.”

Competition Winners

“We were incredibly gratified by the strong response to the design competition,” said Peter MacKeith. “Astounded, in fact. Competitions like this one are a very large undertaking for an office of any size. It indicates a passionate interest in affordable and attainable housing, and a strong belief in what we are doing here in Northwest Arkansas.”

“The competition brief emphasized quality of ideas, and also constructability.” Some of the entries were very explicit about construction methods and materials, and at least one proposed a Net Zero Energy project, meaning energy-efficient. “Developers so far have focused on single-family housing. Large, distant, and reliant on cars and extensions of city services. We need to change the rules of the game.”

The competition was a 2-stage, invitation-only affair: first, the HNWA sent out 125 request for qualifications, and received 55 responses. From that, the entrant pool was narrowed down to 25 invitees, all of whom submitted “very high-quality entries”. Shown here are the winning entries for sites 1, 2, 3, and 5, and commended entries for site 4 and 5. (No winning entry was selected for site 4.)

Project design image by Digsau, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Image used with permission from the Housing Northwest Arkansas Initiative and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

All the design entries are available to view on the Housing Northwest Arkansas web site.

The jury consisted of five highly distinguished individuals, three of whom were prominent architects: Anne Fougeron, FAIA (Jury Chair), Jeanne Gang, FAIA, and Marlon Blackwell, FAIA. The other two jurors were Brenda Anderson of the Northwest Arkansas Downtown Revitalization Fund in Bentonville, and The Honorable Shaun Donovan, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and a Harvard University Senior Strategist.

Competition Rules

The competition brief emphasized, among other things, a concept of “attainable” housing. This makes a clear distinction between “affordable housing” which is subsidized for very low-income populations, and “attainable housing”, aimed at a middle-income market – people who make too much to qualify for subsidized housing, but not enough to afford market-rate housing in the areas where they want – or need – to live.

The competition brief for HNWA’s design competition emphasized density, constructibility, and harmonizing with the surrounding context.

Some of the brief’s other verbiage seems to dovetail with green urbanism: walking and biking, interactivity, a porous flow of people rather than isolating residents from their surroundings. There were 5 infill sites selected, and each invited firm was assigned one of these sites.

Proposals should “complement [ existing ] plans for the pedestrian and bicycle oriented environment… embody and enrich the urban fabric in unique and innovative ways… encourage residents to interact with other residents, [ and ] engage in alternative means of transportation… and to participate in… the vibrant downtown culture of Bentonville…”

Designs should also “… avoid the mundane, the redundant, or the uninviting.” Filling up every available inch of land to maximize investor return was also discouraged. The buildings had to meet current building and planning codes, and local zoning requirements.

Gallery of Jury Comments

So, why were the winners selected? All of the entries looked so intriguing. The juror comments spoke overall about creating a “compelling sense of place” and a sense of confidence in the winners’ “abilities to develop the projects into outstanding housing…”

(All images below used with permission from the Housing Northwest Arkansas Initiative and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.)

Design Studio

I asked Anne Fougeron how the students were doing. “They’re befuddled by housing. They’re more used to designing museums.” Peter MacKeith remarked that “housing design as a topic for education is normally not met with student enthusiasm, no matter how important the topic is for us all.”

It seems that the students rose to the task, according to MacKeith. As part of their final studio project, they prepared entries for the same competition, using the same program as the professional competitors. “The students emerged from the studio with a real appreciation of the issues and a belief in the typology.”

Other builders are trying new housing typologies as well, like this cottage revival from GreenSpur, proposed for Bentonville

The students aren’t the only ones appreciating rural vernacular. A developer called GreenSpur has come up with high-performance models that incorporate public gathering spaces and explicitly references a “pre-World War II American lifestyle”.

Will Any Of These Get Built?

I asked Peter MacKeith whether any of the proposals would actually get built. “That is the question. In the minds of the Walton Family Foundation, the question isn’t if – it’s when.”

“The school can educate students and the community and serve as an ideas incubator for housing in the region. We can facilitate the introduction of these ideas to the developer’s bottom line. They have to cost out the buying of land, as well as design, financing, and construction. The school can play a role in the dissemination of ideas.”

A raze-and-replace approach to development could destroy Bentonville’s downtown charm. Image: Talkbusiness.net

“Some things could happen. A private foundation could provide financial tools. Municipalities could lower the cost of land, and incentivize good design through tax credits and land banks.” Anne Fougeron also noted, “Developers need seed money to get through initial permits and entitlements. Later, they can get a bank loan.”

Events as Anchors

Peter MacKeith also mentioned something else regarding future developments. It’s not just about design, or about buildings. This came up as we were discussing inclusivity, actually.

Can you really design your way into a civil society?

Peter MacKeith responded, “That’s the question. It’s difficult.” Stephenie Foster elaborated. “A strategy of both place-making and community activities seems to be helping in Bentonville. Activity-centered design elements like bike trails, and museums and parks that host concerts and festivals, help to promote interactions between long-time residents and newcomers. These events are well-advertised and promote a welcoming and inclusive community.”

Like many other towns, Bentonville has regular events on “First Fridays”.

Like many other towns, Bentonville has a “First Fridays” event, as well as other street festivals, which… well, they’re probably not like Burningman. And maybe that’s OK, if it’s Middle America they really want – urbanism without the edge.

“Festivals bring people together for a purpose and when participants leave with pleasant memories of interactions with strangers in special settings, that goodwill carries over to the place. These positive interactions help long-time residents become more accepting of newcomers and less likely to feel threatened or suspicious of them.”

Hijacking Local Culture

I wondered about other cultural shifts, and spoke from my own biases. Is this Trump country? What about all the OTHER cultural trappings of urbanism? Political liberalism? Multiculturalism? Interracial dating? Unisex bathrooms? Godless atheists? Rootless cosmopolites? Solar panels? Can you really transform a city’s entire cultural and political climate with a bunch of apartment towers? And could this wave of new development address decades of structural racism, or will neglected and excluded populations remain left behind yet again?

Bentonville’s town square features a Confederate monument. What will they do with that? Image from KUAF National Public Radio

The Bentonville downtown square apparently has a Confederate monument (which was the subject of a local petition last August). Not having visited myself, I’m limited in perspective as well. I would like to think that there is a place for historical openness, eventually. In order to be sustainable and credible, this should stem from local sentiment rather than outside pressures.

Would I Go There?

Absolutely! If for no other reason than to experience firsthand all of these elements that I’ve written about from afar. Like any area, there are many layers of culture to be discovered, and it could be a very interesting time to see what happens to a town that reaches a certain tipping point. Hopefully, it will be a positive change that sets a tone for other redevelopment efforts elsewhere.

Stephenie added, “Bentonville has a quaint, beautiful little town square. It used to be sleepy and would shut down at 5pm. Now you can be out at 10 pm and see 25 people in the square, out and about.”

Links and References

1. Walton Family Foundation
2. Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas
3. Housing Northwest Arkansas
4. Housing Northwest Arkansas, design studio
5. Guest commentary by Alice Walton, “Northwest Arkansas can shape housing future with bold action”, Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, June 16, 2018
6. Housing Northwest Arkansas, housing symposium
7. Housing Northwest Arkansas, international design competition
8. Walton Family Foundation, Home Region page
9. Walton Family Foundation, press release describing the Foundation’s focus on the the downtowns of northwest Arkansas.
10. Walton Family Foundation, Downtown Vitality Report
11. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
12. Razorback Greenway
13. Walmart Labs
14. Lisa Sturtevant’s talk about Northern Virginia, HNWA housing symposium
15. Esther Yang’s talk about Detroit, HNWA housing symposium
16. “Tax reform could hit Detroit redevelopment hard”, by Chad Livengood, Crain’s, December 1, 2017
    Also notes that Federal tax credits for redevelopment, low-income housing, and historic tax credits, are being killed. Corporate tax cuts and removal of Federal tax credit could disincent ALL redevelopment.
17. “Rural Redux Unites an Arkansas Cottage Community”, by Leah Demirjian, Builder Online, March 2, 2016. In Bentonville, Ark., GreenSpur’s high-performance Silo model is one of 11 houses in a cottage community with rural roots.
18. “The History of Bentonville’s Confederate Monument as Some Call for Its Removal”, by Zuzanna Sitek, KUAF National Public Radio (NPR), August 23, 2017
19. “Dueling petitions circulate on future of Bentonville’s Confederate statue”, news broadcast from 4029 TV, August 19, 2017

Reducing the Steel

The structural engineer is responsible for ensuring that the architect’s design has adequate framing to support the weight of the building. Unless the architect specifies a framing type as part of the design, the structural engineer can choose the framing system – for example steel, wood, or reinforced concrete.

Greg Corbett, Staff Architect at Mark English Architects in San Francisco, explained how one private home design needed refinement in order to reduce the amount of steel.

Steel framing is shown as red in this structural model done in Sketchup. Image: Mark English Architects

In order to reduce the amount of steel, the architect built a structural model of the engineer’s proposal in Sketchup and invited the engineer to come in and review it.

Did the gray areas for the upper roof plan really need to be steel? Image: Mark English Architects

One drawing showed two gray areas from the roof plan as all steel. The architect wanted to know if wood could work instead. However, any material change could alter the height of the section. Things had to match up. Creating a structural model allowed the team to easily spot these small alteration before they cropped up in the field later on.

Kubity Visualization App

The architect employed a mobile app called Kubity that designers can use to share 3D structural models in either Sketchup or Revit, adding virtual-reality features such as walkthroughs, fly-throughs, and augmented reality. The structural engineer scanned a QR code that downloaded the Sketchup model onto his phone for review prior to the meeting.

Kubity is compatible with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality systems. Users can walk through architectural designs so that owners, engineers, architects can all fully envision the project.

The architect used color coding in the Sketchup model to call out different material conditions: Blue for missing pieces, red for steel, yellow for wood, and purple to indicate an issue with that portion of the structural design regardless of the material.

The architect used Kubity to import a Sketchup model for viewing on mobile devices. Image: Mark English Architects

Using the Kubity app has helped identify problems and alignments that the structural engineer may not have been able to foresee. The mobile version lets the user flip the model and zoom in on potential areas of concern. In one spot, a purple beam for a higher floor plate didn’t come down all the way to meet the beam for a lower floor plate.

There was a gap of just a few inches between the beams, when they should be touching. The floors were actually about one and a half feet apart, with a short set of stairs between them. The beams needed to be touching, for stability. The architect requested a wider beam in that spot, in order to ensure that the steel framing members matched as intended.

The digital models, together with Kubity, provided a set of tools that were easily transferable from one consultant to another, or even to the owner. The model could be spun around to see different aspects of the building, or to troubleshoot some parts of the design that are not coming together as they should.

The use of 3D visualization tools can help to forestall construction difficulties later on. By digitally constructing the building’s skeleton, especially when there is a lot of steel involved, the architect can assist with future steel shop drawings and explore questions of how things may come together in the field. Thus, creating a virtual model of the building up front, can help in all sorts of ways during the actual build.

Communicating on the Drawing

I suggested that thinking holistically would probably take longer. It’s more streamlined for the engineers to stick to what they know best – calculations and safety margins. And, in some spots, there might be issues that the engineer couldn’t have anticipated. One such area in this project was the lower right corner, where the ground dropped away sharply. The structural engineer had called for a footing that extended out past the house, which wouldn’t work on that terrain.

Red items on this annotated architectural progress set are comments to the structural engineer. The yellow marks a corner where the ground drops away sharply. Image: Mark English Architects

Another drawing sheet from the same progress set showed the upper floor and lower roof, including a garage. The garage structural plans called for three pieces of steel, which might not be necessary given the garage’s actual size. Plus, wood could be cut onsite without the need for special steel-cutting equipment.

This small garage didn’t need three pieces of structural steel. Image: Mark English Architects

A Few Inches

The dimensions of the framing materials can have a big impact on the building’s final appearance. Even a few inches can make a big difference. The architect wants to keep profiles small. A beam that’s too thick could force the builder to create additional bumps in the ceiling in order to accommodate that thickness. That’s bad for aesthetics.

Another area on the same drawing sheet shows where the structural engineer had called out a W18X steel I-beam. The architect wanted to make that beam a W10 – slightly smaller – and add a post. Would that work?



Could this roof beam be reduced from a W18X steel beam to a smaller size? Image: Mark English Architects

Different members of a design team come to the same project thinking differently about various aspects of the design. The architect is thinking about the plans: integrating the structural system into the overall design, and about finishes and aesthetics. The structural engineer is thinking about efficiency and safety factors. Having access to easily visualized models includes 3D hand sketches as well. A cross-functional design team can communicate using various types of drawings.

A hand sketch using trace paper over a 3D axis illustrates an area where two beams need to meet. Image: Mark English Architects

Beam Tilt

Next, the architect took the engineers steel profiles, put them into a drawing section, and reviewed the resulting exploration with the engineer. The question was: Is the beam orientation structurally sound? Some of the beams have a tilt in order to follow the roof profile. If any of those tilted beams sat over a support column, that detail might need adjustment.

The roof profile contains structural steel beams that might be tilted to follow the roof profile. Image: Mark English Architects

Column Placement

Another drawing showed a top-down view of a wall thickness, with different wall protrusions at each story. The intention was to see if there were any unintended consequences of placing structural beams a few inches over one way or another.

Top-down view of a wall that is multiple stories tall. The red is the basement, blue is the main floor. Image: Mark English Architects

In one corner of that same drawing, a gray square depicted a concrete wall, with a green square inside of that. That green square represented a steel column, located over a concrete wall.

Top-down view showing steel column placement over a concrete wall. Image: Mark English Architects

If the column were to be centered inside the concrete square, it would push out the wall finishes on the upper stories. The architect wanted to locate the column 3.5 inches closer to the edge of the wall. The drawing also served as instructions to the builder on where to locate that steel column.

Interior Stair Assembly

Sketches on an axonometric grid can be tool for envisioning and working out how different parts come together. In one drawing showing the top of an interior stair, the engineer had a W10X steel I-beam. The architect wanted a welded plate assembly, in an H shape (shown in the sketch as the red piece).

Welded steel plate at top of stair. Image: Mark English Architects

The next sketch added the stair as a cutaway assembly. The architect had to work out how the interior stair would fit in. The stair treads needed to wrap around the steel, as shown in the cutaway portion of another drawing in the same series. This drawing also showed how the top surface of the topmost stair tread and two types of floor surfaces all aligned horizontally, with vertical glass sheets that would serve as the stair rails inserted into a special shoe, which was inside the H-shaped welded steel plate.

The stairs weren’t solid blocks of wood. They actually wrapped around the steel on all sides. Further explorations occurred in Sketchup renderings.

The stair meets up with the welded plate assembly. Image: Mark English Architects

Putting the Stair into CAD

After working out these details, the design went back into CAD. This drawing sheet served both as instructions to the builder, and for the Building Department to review for code compliance. On the right, the 3D views showed a bookshelf that was also a rail. This helped the owner to envision how the stair comes together with other design elements in the home. On the upper deck the floor was translucent, made from frosted Lucite. The rails were clear glass.

Architectural details on drawing sheet. Image: Mark English Architects

Construction Assembly Notes

The CAD drawing sheets contained detailed construction assembly notes, as well as further comments and questions for the structural engineer.

Drawing sheet explores the base plate connection and foundation footing. Image: Mark English Architects

Roof Deck

Another detail that required exploration through hand sketches occurred at the roof deck and exterior. The axonometric hand sketch was quicker than doing it in Sketchup. Although it couldn’t be rotated interactively, it was faster as a first step to figure out how the components came together. Using trace paper over a pre-printed grid, the architect could ensure that the drawing was proportional by counting the squares.

Exploratory sketch of roof deck. Image: Mark English Architects

The development of these projections, especially the hand-drawn isometrics, not only allowed for the structural details to be figured out fairly quickly, but also assisted in understanding some finish details as well – details that might otherwise be pushed down the road a bit.

The railing isometric detail drawing was developed to ask the structural engineer how the concealed railing could be attached below the deck. When doing this drawing, the only real question at the time was: How does the railing attach? However, the projection was seen as an opportunity to see how the different materials at this corner come together: wood deck to copper fascia. to stone wall to cable railing, etc.

The engineer might not care too much about other aspects of the design – only the rail attachment. However, by investing a bit more time, the architect could develop the detailing of the finished look, which could then be shown to both the owner and the builder.

What Tools Do You Need?

• It’s an iterative cycle through a number of tools to explore the same conditions using:
• Physical models
• 3D digital visualizations, like Sketchup and Kubity
• CAD drawings, in Revit
• Hand drawings, done in pencil on trace paper
• Sketches scanned and then colorized, annotated or included on CAD drawings

Stairs at roof deck. Image: Mark English Architects

The architect explained that these graphical projections, including hand-drawn isometrics, computer digital models (Sketchup + Kubity + VR) and physical models, could all help the architect dialogue with a structural engineer in order to get a better understanding of how the details of the building come together.

Exploration is Time Well-Spent

This process informs staff training as well. We live in a world where rapid execution is prized above all else. In this arena, the architect has to reassure new interns that it’s OK to take an extra 45 minutes, if it helps to solve problems by looking ahead. That drawing can expedite the review process, and can communicate design intent with many different parties all at once.

How do these drawings serve the project?

• The architect can review the drawing quickly and understand right away what is being proposed.
• The engineer can comprehend the problem or question at hand.
• The builder can see how it all comes together.
• The owner can see how components fit together, and how it will look after it’s built.
• The metal fabricator can use this drawing to dimension and create the components.

The process requires an open mind, a willingness to ask questions as a way of teasing out possible methods of bringing components together. “These sketches are useful to many people, and the first party is YOU. Then we can start thinking, who else needs to know this?”

A drawing can be used as a starting point to explore one question, and then allow the architect to leap forward to explore how other pieces around it come together – sometimes, just with a pencil and trace. Sometimes the simplest of technologies can be the most powerful tool of all.

The explorations occur across the design development and construction drawing phases. Image: Mark English Architects

Most of what we’re showing here happens during the design development and later phases. Earlier, during schematic design, the architect is mainly concerned with volume, materials, and initial reviews by the Planning Department. Design development starts to look at code compliance, structural calculations, and Building Department review. Construction drawings are shop drawings. Hand sketches may also be used in the field during construction administration to solve issues that crop up while the project is being built.

When is a Drawing “Done”?

How do you know you’re not overthinking things? I wondered this because there’s obviously a point where going over and over the same ground yields less and less new information. So how do you know when it’s time to move on? How do you know when your drawing is “good enough”?

One art teacher has said, “A drawing is done when you don’t know what else to add… when you don’t know why you’re still putting the brush to the canvas.” For this architect, the drawing is done when it needs to be passed on to someone else. A hand sketch allows the architect to take a step back and see new things. Or, maybe the architect starts adding color, and begins to contemplate the drawing on a different level.

Physical Models

Physical models serve the design as well. Physical model-building is a means by which to experience the space in a different way, and is perhaps the most accessible to a client without formal design training, because we can pick up and handle the model using our hands. This practice engages more closely with our own sensory system. It is less virtualized and more tangible. By combining physical models with the 3D modeling and other types of drawings, the architect gains a better understanding and communicates that understanding more effectively to the project’s advantage.

Image: Mark English Architects