#gamble house

[coolthingsguyslike]

[drownmeinbeauty]

STANDING UP

Of Vitruvius' three fundamentals of architecture -- firmness, commodity and delight -- firmness seems the most straightforward. If a building is standing, can't we just check that box? Now, after visiting Greene and Greene's Gamble House in Pasadena, I think differently. The house, completed in 1908 for a wealthy industrial family, is the finest extant example of Craftsmen architecture. Built from thirteen different species, it's an exuberant expression of wood construction. All of its above-ground structure is wood and most of its finishings are too: walls, floors, ceilings, stairs, furniture, and even light fixtures. The building feels massive, as if it's more wood than space. Yet its scale is generous and its spirit open, Californian.

In its dazzling timber frame the house tells the story of its own making. It is ontological; it seems at this very moment to be being built. The structure is crowded with beams, eaves, lintels, posts, and brackets, and they all appear, to a contemporary architect, joyfully oversized. By legend, Charles Greene stood on site during construction, working through details of each connection with carpenters, while brother Henry Greene stayed inside, managing finances. Construction drawings show that key joints were thought through out in advance. But the house's shell is so complex, with irregular layered roofs and floor footprints, that joints couldn't be considered systematically.

In addition to its own history, the building holds a future architecture. There is the stirring here, in the house's low-lying exterior profile, heroic overhangs, open corners, and complex low-sloping roofs, more than a hint of Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses. Inside, its tightly-knitted rooms, nooks and corners, custom furniture, low ceilings, and faintly Japanese decorative motifs, also prefigure Wright. The Gamble House shapes a compelling low, horizontal, earthbound architecture. But, unlike Wright's houses, the Gamble House declaims its construction, its craft. In this sense it's resolutely pre-modern.

Our tour guide, a gracious retired architect, told us that Wright wanted to visit the house but never made it, instead communicating his dislike to the Greenes through others who did. Like all architects he had a ravenous eye. He would have found beauty in this dazzling timber-framed building, even in photographs, and kept it close.

Photograph courtesy of The Gamble House.

[newmosbiusdesigns]

[lindenardenshighlights]

garden series: sur la table

Please leave captions & credits intact and don’t reblog to NSFW/18+ blogs.

[shadowmcfly]

Throwing it back to 1955... 1985...?? Throwbacks get confusing after awhile. Either way, here's a photo from We're Going Back 2015 from the Gamble House! Just stopped by to see what the Doc was up to. McFly shirt by Shah Safari.

DeLorean and photography by Andrew Wells.

[hollyweirdangeleno]

[susanyung]

Sunday painting.

[threeriversforge]

There is simply nothing as good for the soul as surrounding yourself with quality craftsmanship.  Whether it’s wood or iron, or a combination of both, that quality uplifts and inspires, making you a better person.

Art in the Everyday.