I hesitate a bit to share this, just because it’s more a feat of bureaucratic wrangling than actual modeling, but it’s a cool project nonetheless. I was exceedingly lucky to snag a tiny midcentury modern post and beam house a few years back, and have been in the process of renovating it and fixing a looooooong list of problems related to permitting - or rather - 50 years lack thereof, by previous owners. This house was originally built by Paul A. Greene, who was a builder and developer well known in the Santa Barbara area. He was also the co-founder of Motel 6, which is pretty cool. He built this house in 1954 as his personal “studio apartment.” He only lived here for about two years, and then the house went on to a string of new owners who did terrible, horrible things to it. I’ve been working for the past few years to get this structure right with design, right with history, and right with the city. Little by little, we’re getting there.
I created this model as a way of better understanding the design decisions being made, and to sell those ideas to the Historic Landmarks Commission, so it’s not quite fully detailed out, but it’s still fun to look at. I’m most proud of the roof, which took a ton of work to get right. The house as it currently exists has zero insulation - it’s just tongue and groove ceiling boards with asphalt shingles on top. I wanted to add at least 6" of space for foam insulation, but didn’t want to bump up the roof fascia by more than an inch or two - simply adding volume to the entire roof really upsets the side elevation of the house and wrecks the balance. The solution as it currently exists is to add the desired volume to the roof, but then taper that volume down as we go to the fascia - hence the “tapered” strip around the perimeter. Huge thanks to Mimic3D, who did the laser scanning. There’s so many trees and so much change in elevation, it was very difficult to work on some aspects of this from a topo map, even a digital one that’s well made.
Ha! I spent a year and a half going around in circles with the city historian and the historic consultants you’re required to hire for this process, to end up at exactly the material I was going to use before the house got deemed historic. So on the one hand - victory! On the other…a year and half of time/money.
Commendable work on this, there must be so many modern architecture gems fading away in the North American context, great of you to have taken the time to pull it back together and completely feel you on regards to the annoying “bureaucratic” obstacles that are often set in the way… local authorities tend to completely disregard good design produced between the 50’s to 80’s for some reason…
And love the use of point cloud data as a way to represent site context!
Hi Sky G, I hope you see this!! I have bought a very similar home. Built in 1950 by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. I am having issues with my home after having done some renovation trying to modernize it. Spent $$$ and a year gutting it. I had new insulation put in a few ceiling areas and had stained wood put under the soffits for decoration- covered existing soffit vents- and contractor made new vents but small (maybe not sufficient and suffocated the house). It looks amazing BUT we discovered we have extreme condensation since the reno. Looks like insufficient soffit ventilation (after we added the decorative wood) and there was no output for the air- no vents exist on the current roof. Also new fiberglass insulation was installed way too tight by contractor not allowing any flow of air. No baffles were used. I am located in NJ and at a complete loss as to how to remedy this. Since you have been working on this would love your thoughts. We plan to rip off roof, remove all plywood, remove all insulation- mold remediate if needed from roof, then the question is what type of insulation- what type of roof- how do I ensure air flow input and output. Some fiberglass and then more R value Poly ISO from the top? How do you properly ventilate this roof and humidity control without having huge eye sores coming off the top, and lastly is EPDM my best option. Any help would be hugely appreciated!!
We are…days away from getting our permit (fingers crossed) and are going to exclusively use spray foam insulation on our house. This is generally more performant than fiberglass, and since it is closed cell, does not require any ventilation. So, I’d highly suggest you look into the same - it seems to be the best option by far.
Then EVERYTHING gets filled with spray foam, including the eaves. If we didn’t fill the eaves, we would have to vent them, and we’d be looking at tons of vents all around the structure:
Beautiful work, sky! Just a bit curious, what were those “terrible, horrible things” that were done to the house by its previous owners?
And from what I know of a friend of mine, who’s an architecture professor in a university I’m aiming for, having to deal with the legal aspect of architecture is a long and tedious process; one that took him years to complete for a project he did in the UK (Nottingham Trent University: Newton & Arkwright Buildings Redevelopment). So here’s hoping that you won’t have to go through something like that. (more than you already have)
Also, was the terrain mapped with a drone with a LIDAR camera attached? or did you have to run around the area holding a 3d mapping camera?
As for terrible horrible things - in 1969 someone tacked on a second bedroom, that’s since been demolished. It was on the right side of the structure, looking from the front. It was horribly designed, horribly built (no foundation, just some concrete blocks with lumber literally resting on top) and four feet over the property line to boot. The previous owners also took off the board and batten and swapped it with…shingles. A very odd choice. New windows were put in, that totally wrecked the front elevation, so those aluminum windows you see will be added in.
Yeah the process has been properly awful. Two plus years ago, we were days away from going before the design review board, when the city historian stepped in and diverted our project into the Historic Landmarks Committee. This added multiple years and $15-20k to the process, and in the end, after all that work, the HLC denied the application for structure of merit. A truly pointless diversion. I have…feelings about the HLC lol.
Mimic3D out of LA did all the LIDAR work, using a tripod scanner (Surphaser in this case). They do utterly amazing work - I just had a Airbus A320 land in my lap this morning from them, and the data is absolutely flawless - truly the only vendor I trust to do it right.
For jobs like this, would be in the low thousands. We only did a partial scan really - just enough to understand some of the tricky interactions of the house with the surrounding topography.
My desk is currently in that corner. The deck is being revised - it currently wraps around the front of the building - another weird blunder that was done over the years. Eventually we’ll be building dedicated offices for me and my lady, in this crazy corner of land we have in the back yard, with an amazing view to boot. Currently the concept for that looks like this:
I was just talking about an office set up like that with my wife only Id want a wall that is folding glass doors that could open up the wall to the outside. Make a great backdrop for zoom meetings.
The entire back wall of mine will be a 3d printing studio, mainly for resin printing and resin casting. Cabinets and countertop, with a soffit above. It’ll be all enclosed with sliding glass panels, custom lighting and ventilation. Should be a half way decent zoom backdrop…
You should hope there is some link to the G&G craftsman style. Yours looks like a generation later to me. Those G&G are highly prized and hard to come by if they have that pedigree.
