Tag: gas stations i want to live in

If the Eames House was not available, I decided it would be fine to live in a gas station felt like an appealingly modernist alternative. I’ve kept a list, to which I also added a decommissioned Minneapolis skyway, a temporary MoMA fire escape, and a reconstituted world’s fair pavilion or two. I would also add a greenhouse. There used to be a most excellent abandoned greenhouse on the roof of a building which you could see from the Roosevelt Island tram. Perhaps, I thought, Lacaton & Vassal could help me persuade the family, who, it turns out, really do not want to live in any of these repurposed industrial structures.

Now there is another. [shoutout Geraldine for the heads up] From 2011 until 2013 Stockholm architect and organizer Viktor Marx worked with Cyklopen, an autonomy-minded community organization, to rebuild their gathering space, which had been firebombed by neo-nazis. The result, Cyklopen Kulturhas is as spectacular as it is utilitarian.

The 2-storey, 459 sq. m. structure was optimized for safety, for flexibility, and for the self-sufficient group’s donated labor. A laminated lumber core was raised by hand, Amish barn-style, and ringed with upscaled scaffolding, on which the greenhouse-style tinted polycarbonate skin was hung. The upper floor, aka The Box, is enclosed and climate controlled; the open ground floor and mezzanine space are not. Let’s say it’s responsive to the climate.

There is room to spend a little more than almost no money to bougie up the place without, I think, losing the adapted reuse credibility. Solar panels. Radiant floors. Some Kieran Timberlake-style Bosch Rexroth extruded aluminum beams. [It’s fascinating that even with some formalist similarities, KT’s Cellophane House was optimized for the diametric opposite factors to Cyklopen: high end components were pre-constructed offsite, then shipped and craned into place in midtown in a few days, with stupendous logistical complexity and expense.]

Ultimately, I find what is holding me back from living the gas station/greenhouse/shed dream–besides the family buy-in, obviously–is the suburbanity, the single family house-ness of it all. I am a city person. We are city people, and a site where I could reasonably build a Swedish anarchist Bifröst greenhouse is nowhere near a subway–at least since MoMA built that Jean Nouvel supertower on the vacant lot next door. So I will add Cyklopen to the moodboard in my heart, and wish the original a bright and impactful future.

They accept donations, btw. [cyklopen.se, thanks to @geraldine@post.lurk.org for the heads up.]

where we’ll live in this unused 1954 Shell station by Peter Celsing. It’s so funny, I always imagined Sweden was cold and dark, but just look at this picture, taken at 3AM. Now we know that Ikea gets its blue from the color of the always-sunny Swedish sky.
[via andy]
Here are photos of the Shell station when it was still in use. [zlattes.com]
Previously: I want to live in a gas station

For some reason, I was thinking of totally livable, modernist gas stations yesterday [actually, it was because I heard fellow prefab gas station fan Mister Hoopty on the radio] and so I started digging, trying to find out more about Clauss & Daub, the architects of the 1931 porcelain-enameled steel Sohio station that Philip Johnson included in The International Style, his and H.R. Hitchcock’s era-defining exhibition/catalogue. [above]
Turns out there’s very little info at all online, except some references to the duo in an Architronic reminiscence of Cleveland. But it also turns out that Johnson was instrumental in getting his Mies-connected colleagues in touch with Standard Oil in the first place, via his own well-connected father. 40-200 of the Clauss & Daub stations were planned, but I have no idea how many were built or if any survive.
The idea of hanging industrial/commercial grade enamel, steel, and glass on steel girders fresh in my mind, I saw MDesign’s MCube Modular Prefab System as a tantalizing update of the technology that I could yield a fine, gas station-like home without the environmentally catastrophic site issues.

The MCube is based on a 10-foot post&beam module that’s endlessly flexible [sic] and affordable [$80/sf!], and Inhabitat’s description of Mark Baez’s design is unusually upbeat, even for Inhabitat:

Because the panels are translucent like Japanese shoji screens, rather than transparent like glass, they also protect privacy and block views into the interior. Better yet, each daylighting panel is moveable/operable like a shutter, allowing the occupants to open up any part of their little cube in order to let in the breeze. There aren’t any real glass “windows” per se in the house, but since each and every wall is essentially a window, there is no reason for separate windows in a house like this. To top it all off, the movable/removable wall panels allow for transformable space, so you can enjoy an ever-changing domestic space for years to come.

No “windows” “per se”? No problem!

I’m sure Baez’s patents are all in order, but a flexible, affordable, extruded aluminum cube-module-based house sounds almost exactly like George Nelson’s once-famous Industrialized House, which he proposed in 1958.

[The web dates this house to 1960, but only because that’s when Science and Mechanics Magazine published it. Architecture & Building had actually covered it two years earlier. It’s also depicted on the cover of Stanley Abercrombie’s monograph, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design, too.]

While being entranced by the Industrialized House a few months ago, I came across Mark Wigley’s discussion of the promise and reality of “total design” in an old Harvard Design Magazine. Wigley cited Nelson’s House, but he could just as easily be talking about the MCube, or any one of a dozen new prefab “systems”:

Clearly, the dream of the total work of art did not fade in modernism’s wake. On the contrary, all of the issues raised by architects and theorists of recent generations that seem, at first, to signal the end of the idea of the total work of art turn out to be, on closer look, a thin disguise of the traditional totalizing ambitions of the architect.
Fresh Herrings
Consider “flexibility,” the idea of an architecture that could assume any particular arrangement. Most flexible projects turn out to have inflexible aesthetic agendas. Or, more precisely, flexibility is itself a singular aesthetic. Look at the 1958 “Industrialized House” project by George Nelson, an architect who became famous as an industrial designer. The house is conceived as an industrial design product, a system of parts that can be infinitely rearranged. But Nelson never published more than one arrangement of the house, which included detailed color images of the model’s interior, complete with wall hangings, carpet, and dinnerware. At the very moment that he announces that the architect should provide only a framework for change, Nelson installs a total work of art. Likewise, Christopher Alexander’s 1977 A Pattern Language installs a singular aesthetic regime in the guise of a set of innocent building blocks that seem capable of infinite rearrangement. The last of these 253 “patterns” is an attack on “total design.” The hypocrisy of the attack is evident in the final lines that instruct the reader to hang personal things on walls rather than follow the dictates of designers. A designer claiming a total vision dictates that the totalizing instincts of all other designers should be resisted. The apparent flexibility of his system actually integrates all design into a transnational and “timeless” aesthetic pattern that can only be perceived by the master architect/manager. With systems theory, cybernetics, semiotics, and fractal geometry, the number of ways of absorbing difference into a singular structure continues to grow and to act as the totalizing architect’s best friend.

So I can’t hang a painting or look out a window because of “the totalizing ambitions of the architect”?
It seems almost easier–and more flexible–to rehab an old gas station.
Still, when an architect’s designing an off-the-shelf cube home for himself, he can be as totalizingly ambitious as he wants. Ralph Rapson’s family still uses the 1974 Glass Cube he built as their country retreat. It’s 26 cubed feet of glass awesome. Materialicio.us just pointed to Architecture Week’s excerpt on the Cube House’s construction from Rip Rapson’s book, Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design

I’ll come clean. We’ve started contemplating a dip of the toe into the real real estate market in Washington, DC. There’s precious little to choose from, though. DC’s longstanding status as an officetown means there are almost no industrial or commercial loft buildings [though there’s now no shortage of “lofts,” which is shabby developerspeak for “exposed ductwork.” Besides, thanks to unchecked flippery and speculation, the condo/co-op market is a zombie, unaware of its own death.]
What passes for modernist architecture in town, too, is either a McMansion tarted up in Richard Meier drag, or is located in an ever-to-revive? neighborhood of lackluster Sixties urban revitalization gone to seed, or is an aging suburban utopia [sic] of some kind.
Almost any foray into DC mid-century-onward modernism includes stops in architect Charles Goodman’s various developments: the sylvan Hollin Hills along the Potomac and the much more ambitious, [sub]urban experiment of Reston, a city begun in the rural farmland of Virginia in the early 1960’s. Goodman’s densely packed, slightly rural-toned Interational Style homes, townhouses, and apartments are known as Hickory Cluster. They front on the manmade Lake Anne, and are connected by trails and bike paths to the rest of Reston [which has exploded into a car-centered, Galleria-style ring city of its own, ten minutes on a good day from Dulles.]
What might it be like to live in the perfect modernist suburbs, I wondered? The vintage interior photos of Hickory Cluster on the Reston Historical Trust and the Storefront Museum of Suburban History website offer a tantalizing–and tempting–glimpse.
On a clear day in Reston, for example, I might lounge in my Saarinen Womb Chair and look out past my palm trees across the valley to the mountains. Maybe I’ll even eat one of those grapefruits, picked this morning from my own tree out back.

Or maybe I could do a little work in my home office/studio, maybe polish off a film project for my client, a large, international business machines manufacturer, then head, where? Over to Outback for a Bloomin’ Onion?

Can I just say that, my entire design-sentient life, I’ve dreamed of living in just such a space? Only somehow, I always thought it would be at the end of a narrow street, up against the hill, overlooking the ocean in, say, Pacific Palisades, California. That’s the freakin’ Eames House, people.
Reston looks like this, freakin’ shoeboxes with room for a dinette set and ceilings no taller than the 8′ patio door that is the only source of light.

Does anyone know a good way to steam motor oil out of a concrete floor, because at this point, the only option for us is to live in a deconsecrated gas station.
[update: I’ve since visited Lake Anne, as the original core of Reston is known, and have learned that Hickory Cluster is actually a series of Goodman-designed townhouse neighborhoods on the other side of the ring road from the town square, which architect James Rossant designed to emulate–what else?–Portofino.
In at least one respect, he succeeded: apparently, the pedestrian-oriented center is dead in the non-summer, and businesses on the plaza can’t survive. Which is one factor driving a current government/development push for “revitalization.” The other most immediately obvious characteristic of Lake Anne is its Latino-ness. It’s like Reston Town Center for Mexicans, and visiting it makes me realize how overwhelmingly non-Latino the RTC crowds and target demographics are.
The only larger concentration of Latino Reston/Herndon residents I’d seen was in the parking lot at KMart, which serves as a kind of impromptu zocalo con coches. Rather than providing an idealized escape from the “problems” of the “inner cities,” such as density and a heterogeneous racial, cultural, and socio-economic population, Reston turns out to have [at least] two cultures and economic strata superimposed on each other, equal on the parkways, but separate on the town plazas. I wonder if anyone’s asked a Mexican about the Lake Anne “revitalization,” or is he the problem to be solved?]