Set Dressing

This is a screengrab from a Cleveland TV station (who sent a reporter to Ann Arbor to investigate a city without a daily newspaper; here’s the source article).

They did their interviews with Dave Askins (pictured) and Mary Morgan of the Ann Arbor Chronicle at Workantile.

In this picture, in the background, you see the phone booth I built for Workantile as well as the AIA board for AADL Pittsfield (a project I did while at Luckenbach|Ziegelman Architects) with my photograph of the building.

 

Cold Frames [Repost]

[I was reminded of this old article of mine after seeing John Robb's recent post about cold frames. I'm sure there are better DIY instructions out there, but some people found this helpful and maybe a repost will be useful to some more.  (EDIT: Added comments at the bottom about angles and sourcing materials that I also posted on Robb's G+ article about this.)

This was an article I wrote several years ago for Green Options, and was probably one of my most popular pieces. (GO eventually turned into a number of different blogs, including Green Building Elements, where I wrote for a couple years, and you can find the original there.)  It's a longish piece, as well, since it's DIY instructions, so I'm tucking it behind a cut. The links didn't copy over (and are probably out of date, for the most part), but I'm tracking down a couple of the images and adding them back in. I had a nice hand-drawn diagram illustrating the construction, and I need to see if I still have a copy of that somewhere that I can add in here to help make this more useful.]

Weekly DIY: Cold Frame

This weekend we got the first tantalizing taste of spring as the weather was clear and bright and temperatures rose well above freezing for the first time in months. Snow melted (though not entirely yet), and started the thoughts of summer gardens in mind. But nighttime temperatures are still falling below freezing, and it’s far too early to put plants in the ground, unless you provide a little assistance.

If your garden has a spot with good access to the sun throughout the day, you can use a cold frame to start your plants earlier in the year than you would otherwise. A cold frame is a very simple item. It is really just a small greenhouse. Daytime sun will warm the air and the ground inside, making it easier for plants to start growing. Nighttime temperatures inside the cold frame may fall back close to outdoor ambient temperature, but the extra heat gained during the day and the wind protection the enclosure provides will help keep the plants alive even if there is an overnight frost.

Building a cold frame should be a simple project. An elaborate structure is not required. It should cost little or nothing to build and nothing to operate. Plants can be started close together while they are small, and then, as they get bigger and the weather gets nicer, they can be moved out of the frame and put into the garden.

 

Collaborations

There are a couple of new projects on the horizon, and although I’ve been working as a sole-practitioner the past couple of years, the new things are looking to be collaborations with other people. This is not a bad thing. Some of it is building on previous work on a project I started a couple years ago, and another is an opportunity to collaborate with another local, sole-practitioner.

Following on with the very successful addition to the Corner Brewery (and the significant energy efficiency building upgrades that were carried out) several of the people involved in that project are continuing to work together to provide consulting services for other beer-making operations. There was enough press about the project for the Corner that other breweries have called them to find out about doing similar sorts of things for their own facilities.

By way of a little backstory, one of the things I had thought about doing as a possible thesis project when I applied to grad school was something involving a brewery. The law had recently changed in Michigan at the time, and the first brew pub in Ann Arbor was getting under way. I thought that my recent interest in homebrewing might lead to working on brewpubs as a specialty, and I think I harbored some hope that I would be able to work on the first brewpub in Ann Arbor, though that didn’t happen. (I was working in a print shop before going back to grad school, and some of the early plans for Grizzly Peak came through the place while I was there. It ended up getting built while I was off at school.) Still, I continued as a homebrewer, and I really enjoyed it when the opportunity to work with the Corner Brewery came along, especially since it was a project that combined two aspects that were (and are) of particular interest to me: brewing and green building.

That whole experience had me thinking once more about working on breweries and related projects. It turns out, as I mentioned, that Jarett Diamond – the guy who served as the project manager for the entire Corner Brewery renovation project (and the storage addition I worked on was just one facet of that whole larger undertaking) – has gotten some inquiries about consulting on other projects. It’s something he wants to pursue, as well. The two of us have talked about working together on some of these things. He has gotten a lot of first hand experience with a number of the mechanical systems involved, for both the brewing process as well as building operations. He’s also gotten very familiar with the incentives and programs to encourage energy efficient building and renovation. My contributions to the team will be in providing architectural and building-related expertise, energy modeling, and other general green systems knowledge. There are a couple other people we’ll work with who have specific knowledge about brewery operations and brewing equipment (which is an order of complexity above and beyond simple homebrewing).

The other collaboration that is starting is with another local architect with a sole-practitioner practice. Maria Kook and I have a lot of parallels in our professional lives. We both came to Ann Arbor at about the same time, although neither of us attended the University of Michigan. We both worked for different firms in town, and it’s a little surprising that it took so long for us to cross paths with one another. She has been working on her own for about the same period of time as I have, and, in addition to working on AIA-related activities, we’ve been getting together periodically to stay in touch about running our respective firms.

[last paragraph removed for editing and revision; to be returned when re-written -psp]

 

Communications Glitches

It’s our season of hosting and domain renewals (and our DSL provider is also ending service, so we’re also having to migrate that service now, as well). So there’s a temporary (and hopefully only short term) problem with the psproefrock.com domain for web hosting and for email. If you’re trying to get in touch with me through those channels, things will be back in order shortly, but, in the meantime, you can also use my Gmail address (you know how it goes: psproefrock [at] gmail etc.) to contact me until normal services are restored.

 

JK Residence Interior

Starting to go through the pictures from this weekend’s photoshoot of the JK Residence, and this one is good for giving an overview of the addition.

The project incorporated an extension of the back of the house, with a new kitchen and a new laundry room (out of view to the left). Existing kitchen and a small room (nicknamed “The Vortex”) were torn out and extended to create the new kitchen, dining area, and TV area for a family of three.

 

Expanded Presence and New Links

I was reminded of the various other outlets I have for work that you might be interested in (if you are someone who is reading this blog regularly to follow my work). There are several other sites where I’m participating in one fashion or another that might be of some interest.

Yesterday, I was talking about the Arcbazar site that I have been participating in for some small project competitions. I also mentioned that the Arcbazar site doesn’t have a good direct way of sharing work. (If you’re on Facebook, you can ‘like’ Arcbazar and see the results of all of the projects, but even I don’t necessarily want to see all of that.) I will probably end up posting links to the project if and when any of my entries ever wins an award. Otherwise, things will probably just be posted here as I see fit, like I did with the last set.

If you are interested in finding more of my work, not everything is getting filtered through the blog, so you can also check some of these sites, as well:

Tumblr – cornellbox – collected works of art, architecture, photography, and design; stuff that I like. The p s proefrock blog (this blog) is also now set to auto-post to this Tumblr.

Tumblr – SpeedGraphicBellows (aka Phlat Phield Photos) – this was my first experimentation with Tumblr. A series of photographs that I’ve been taking since Spring. The images are things that have texture or pattern, and things that generally are context-free and are somewhat monolithic (with a tendency to photograph

Houzz – p s proefrock architecture – a website for residential architecture and remodeling.

Facebook – p s proefrock architecture

Twitter – cornellbox 140 characters or less

 

Competitions and Updates

This is a proposed addition for an existing 2-story brick house that was to add a new eating area attached to the existing Kitchen and a new Master Bedroom with a Master Bath and a closet and dressing area, within a fairly constrained envelope size. And the owner wanted it to resemble an orangery.

(the rest of the boards after the cut, along with some further thoughts about online competitions and freelance sites)