Lea Cloud of CDR Studio Architects | Bushwick Townhouse in Brooklyn | Townhouses Then and Now

Transcript

Announcer  00:02

Welcome to American Building, a weekly recorded show whose mission is to share an alternative perspective of what we build in America, and why. Together we discover how the work of the real estate industry connects to every American. In season two, we focused on how buildings changed as a result of the pandemic. In this season, we're revisiting conversations from previous seasons, to see where Americans put their heads down at night. Together, we will discover the many definitions of home across the New York City metropolitan area, which includes over 23 million Americans. Each week, we'll visit a new building and explore complex and confusing issues related to housing access to see what they can teach us about ourselves, and our country will meet those who work to develop in thoughtful and impactful ways, who build neighborhoods to be more sustainable, affordable, accessible, or inclusive, who labor to create thriving communities, and transform the lives of generations to come. Through their stories, we will humanize often polarizing topics. Profound, surprising, and hilarious. This show is for developers and builders with boots on the ground for innovators trying to find ways to improve our industry, for the policymakers and public employees. And for any person who has walked by a building and wondered why. And now your host award winning architect turned developer and startup founder Atif Qadir, AIA.

Atif Qadir  01:53

This is American Building. And I'm your host, Atif Qadir. I'm the founder of Commonplace. Join me as it take a drive by the skylines and strip malls, crosswalks, and rail crossings, balconies, buildings and boroughs to discover a new generation of housing. Let's build common ground.


Atif Qadir  02:25

In this episode, you will learn about the history of townhouses in New York City and about the term gentrification which intertwines race and class with this housing type. You will also join me in learning how a townhouse in Brooklyn was thoughtfully and creatively redesigned. So the term townhouse, also known as townhome, row, house, row, home, brownstone, and even gray stone are terms that are used to describe urban housing of particular physical structure by its adjacency its location or its building materials. So what is that physical structure? Townhouses are multi level housing that's attached on both sides to other buildings, with an entrance that's directly to the street and no unit above. In New York City, the entrance is iconically a stoop that has a half storey up, allowing access to what is known as a parlor level, which sits right above a partially underground basement level, called a garden level. 


Atif Qadir  03:40

The reasoning for the raised entrance was to allow residents to avoid the streets as much as possible, because in the 1700s, and 1800s, they were typically filled with wait for it, horse feces and urine. That's because horse drawn carriages were the most common form of transportation before motor vehicles were invented. Townhouses often appear together in entire blocks, with minor or major design differences between adjacent townhouses. The term town in townhouse harkens to the British usage of the housing type, as the urban or in townhome of the English nobility, who also had country homes. The term townhouse is used in New York City, and is relevant here based on this history. But the term is also used to describe a similar physical structure in suburban communities as far flung as the Eastern reaches of Long Island and the i 95, corridor communities and New Jersey. 

Atif Qadir  04:48

Townhouses can be made of a variety of materials that are usually in a two layer system. The inside or structural layer is typically concrete masonry unit but can also be called foreign metal framing. The outer or decorative layer can be clad with brick, concrete, faux stone, or natural stone such as limestone, gray stone, or quintessentially in New York City, brown stone. Brown stone is a sandstone from the Jurassic era that largely came from Passaic County, New Jersey. So thank you to the Garden State. 


Atif Qadir  05:27

New York city neighborhoods where townhouses are common, like Harlem, Long Island City, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Dyker Heights and Astoria and across the river in Jersey City, and Hoboken are also the epicenter of gentrification in this region. That makes this elegant building type perhaps the physical symbol of this class change. So what is gentrification? gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents. The intentionality of that change is often the spark for resentment, frustration and anger about who gets to own what and who gets to call a place home.


Atif Qadir  06:16

John Palin and Bruce London in a fascinating book for SUNY press, called gentrification displacement and neighborhood revitalization lays out the economic, cultural, social and psychological issues around this process. In our region, this process of dominantly white and or wealthy people moving into neighborhoods with dominantly. Minority and or poor people goes back to the 1980s as the reverse trend of the white flight that had begun in the 1950s. For a sense of context, New York City has 8.5 million people today and is a majority minority city, with 29% of its population being Latino, 23% black and 14%. Asian. There are about 1 million millionaires and 1.4 million people below the poverty line. In an OnPoint thought piece for Otto straddle. Writer, Lily Alvarado talks about the racial and class dynamic of demographic change through the individual perspective of tick tock influencers, live streaming slow motion gentrification through $1 coffees and thrift store purchases. The link to the article is in the show notes. 

Atif Qadir  07:40

In this episode of American building, I am sharing an edited version of the conversation I had in December 2021 with Lee cloud. Lee is a founding partner at CDR architects in New York City based design firm with a focus on housing. Prior to starting the firm, she was at PK SB architects, where she worked on the renovation of the famous Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Eli Cohn and Robert Jacobs leave serves along with me as a city planning commissioner in Hoboken, New Jersey. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. We talked about the renovation she did have a townhouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, enjoy the conversation. 

Atif Qadir  08:28

Thank you so much for being here with us, Lea.


Lea Cloud  08:31

Delighted to be here after.

Atif Qadir  08:33

So I really want to have a chance to to learn about this amazing project that you're working on the Bushwick townhouse. So tell us about the neighborhood in Brooklyn where the Bushwick townhouse is located and what's around the site?

Lea Cloud  08:47

Sure. Well, first of all, you know, I didn't know that much about Bushwick when he got it started. But it's a you know, it's a real working class neighborhood was originally founded, I think, acquired by the Dutch back in the 1600s. And Bushwick literally needs into the woods, which I was curious to find out. And so that tells you a little bit like it was originally farmland. And so there's still a lot of old growth trees there. But then it went through a whole series of immigrant changes, right. So the Dutch had at the Germans had it it was brewery row. It was at one point, a big theater area and then later, it's now it's really, I think, mostly there's a very large immigrant population there. So I think a lot of Puerto Ricans and South Americans, so it's very varied. And that's really wonderful. It's a really a microcosm of New York. And in the area, particularly, it's in the southeast of Bushwick, so further away from Manhattan, and it's on a very wide Avenue. So it's got these fabulous trees. And then in that particular like two or three blocks zone, there's a series of brownstones townhouses and there's a community The Resource Center nearby, there's also some great little cafes that are, you know, sort of small businesses starting out. So it's really kind of varied area. And most of the buildings are four to five storeys. So it's very residential neighborhood.


Atif Qadir  10:19

It's amazing because I would imagine that when someone thinks of New York City and thinks of Brooklyn, there's a singular vision of what that actually means. And when you're in a place like Bush, like I've had the opportunity to visit as well. It's not quite that way. It's exactly what you described. And I'm sure that created a terrific opportunity in terms of inspiration for the work that you did. So who is the client? And what was the prompt that that he gave you? Basically, what did he want you to accomplish with your design?


Lea Cloud  10:50

The clients, a wonderful client, first of all, he's in the medical profession. He's a doctor. And I think he's pretty recently out of school, I want to say like the last 10 years, so he's a single guy is interested in lots of different things. But he came to us sort of circuitous Lee he had done, he was working with an architect, and he decided that he wanted to do a passive house. So he left that architect, and then he found my partners in this project, a firm called BKD. Briggs knows architecture and design, who I went to RISD with. And Victorian, I went to RISD with a long time ago, and they focus on passive houses, but they are primarily in Providence, because they teach at RISD also. So he had seen a lot of their work and approach them. And then they approached us, because we were, you know, we've done tons of work in Manhattan, in New York City, and they want to be with us. So that's a long route in so really, what he wanted was a passive house. But he also wanted a house that would allow him to grow and change. So he comes from, but he's single at the moment. And the building a bot is a two family. So it's an apartment exists on two levels. And then an apartment exists on two levels. So what he wanted was to change it to a one family with a single unit on the bottom. So it's still two family. But the unit on the bottom is just one floor and has the ability to either be overflow for a family, or entertaining space, or it might be his office for a while. And media room, you know, it's so it's this idea that he has flexibility. So that's the first thing that I think, in addition to the Passive House, the second prompt was, he really wants the house to be very open, he wanted real connectivity and real community within the house, he didn't want it, everybody would go to their own room, and not come together. 


Lea Cloud  12:55

So he wanted that quality within the entire house, not just on like one public level. So that was kind of the one of the big prompts. He's also a Sikh. So I assume a religious person. So he also wanted the ability to have a prayer room within the house. So that was an unusual program. So that's sort of the range of things that he brought to us. And he also, he's an excellent educated client, because he came with a series of images. He came with a series of words describing. So he's just incredibly creative in a way that I found fascinating because I don't necessarily, you know, this may be my bias. I didn't associate that with somebody from the medical world. So he came with all these images, he came with words, he came with ideas, and he continues to evolve those.

Atif Qadir  13:48

So you mentioned one of the aspects that your client emphasized in a prompt was this idea of openness and light and air and bringing people together. So that line of thought walk our listeners through the townhouse describing how it'll be once it's completed.

Lea Cloud  14:04

So from the street level, from Bushwick Avenue, which is where he's located. It looks like a three storey townhouse, right? On the ground level, you would walk in, there's a bedroom that is functioning as an office. It's a flexible room, so it can be an office, it can be a guest room, it can actually be opened up to the full width of the brownstone. So the brownstone is also about 16 feet wide by about 40 feet long, just for context. Behind that is a small bathroom and a kitchen that's wide open to a back media room. So those two rooms are open, they flow out into a lower terrace. And then there's a couple of steps up that go out to the yard. So it's this very open space to the back. There's a separate stair Hall that's enclosed. That goes up to what we call the main townhouse, right? So the main townhouse is three levels, and actually four levels and as a four level on top, we've added on to that, on the main level is an open dining kitchen living space with a deck off the back. And at the kitchen level, it's, you know, common problem in these towns don't townhouses that are narrower, is the stair oriented the long way, you know, deep into the lat or is the stair oriented the perpendicular way, because it's a narrow building perpendicular is often not the way to do it. 

Lea Cloud  15:29

But what we looked at was actually allowing it to be perpendicular and allowing it to wrap all the way up and making this open slot that goes up three storeys, right. So that's where you get this idea of connectivity, right. So you come in, you see the dining room, you're in the kitchen, all of a sudden, you can look up, and you see this open 10 by full width, 16 feet, all the way up to the top, and there's a curtain wall at the top of storefront at the top, so there's a lot of light coming down and through. So that's the main level on the upper level. The next level up, it's two bedrooms, with bathrooms off of that main open stair area. And then there's a master bedroom above that off that stair area. And there's a terrace, an outside terrace off the front of the building. And then above the master bedroom suite is a prayer room. So the prayer rooms at the top, and it has a skylight and light out to the back of the house. So this sort of stair Periscope piece that we call it that lets light in also functions in the sense that from any level, you can come out, and it's a very light and open stare. And you can see what's going on in the house. So it creates this sense of community and connectivity. I think that's so that was the goal. And I think we're getting there.


Atif Qadir  16:48

That sounds fantastic. And when you compare the the goal of where you'd like to go to where the project is right now. So when you visited the building, as it is for the first time, what really stood out to you?


Lea Cloud  17:00

Well, it's it's a beautifully crafted, it's one of four. So you know, often you see this in New York, where it's a series of brownstones, they're all connected, and they all look the same, right? So it's a third one, a four. And what was really beautiful about it is it has this incredibly tight little stair, but it does have light from above. And when we came to it, it had been demolished. So all we're seeing is the wood framing within and you're struck by, wow, they built these houses really solid, and they're really beautifully built. So we are maintaining a lot of the framing. And we will reuse a lot of the floor framing. And again, that's sort of in the goals of passive houses to is to keep as many materials as we can and just supplement them. So we're minimizing the waste. And so that was really lovely component to find.

Atif Qadir  17:54

Were there any really beautiful historic details like plaster medallions or, or wood paneling that you saw originally?

Lea Cloud  18:04

Well, it was all demolished when we got there. So there really wasn't but right, because the previous generation of what he had done had gotten to that point. But what we did, one of the nice characteristics is it is one of those classically beautiful outside buildings, right. So it has a beautiful wide staircase. It's all done in brownstone, and it does have a vestibule door that has this lovely curved arch to it. So we will maintain that and use it within the house. So we're using what we can of what's there.


Atif Qadir  18:35

That sounds terrific. And when I renovated a historic townhouse in Hoboken on Hudson Street, I found that there's this whole niche industry of retailers and salvagers that purchase and then resell historic details that architects or developers or owners aren't able to use and townhouses in Hudson County, New Jersey or Brooklyn, for example. And some of the most beautiful things that I've I've seen often are stone mantel pieces, the entire face for a fireplace. Those are some of the most beautiful things as well as extremely large, oversized wooden doors. Some, for example, from Hudson Street project we sold 14 foot high curb solid wood doors. Stunning, absolutely stunning.

Lea Cloud  19:20

Yeah, well, none of those were left in this particular instance. But I totally, totally know what you're talking about, especially in Hoboken. There's a lot of that here.

Atif Qadir  19:28

Yeah. And I think from what you're describing is this idea of making a space open and larger. That means that unfortunately, some of those things if they were there just don't really fit anymore. And that's basically the reality. Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned earlier BK ad, and that's the firm that you're partnering with on this design. So tell us about the logistics of how, how does it work when there's two firms that are working together? Like who's responsible for what, um, how do you like share files and things like that?

Lea Cloud  20:00

So, you know, these are folks that I are some of my closest friends. And I've known them for a really long time, right? So the lovely thing is we have periodic calls on teams, or we do it on Zoom. And we just kind of go through the process. Here's what we're thinking about this idea. And we each come to the table with thoughts, and we do it in real time. Right? So we'll put up ideas, and we'll talk through how to solve the problems or potential ways to think about things. How do we share files, we do use Google Docs quite often. And there doesn't seem to be a complexity in terms of how we do that, it seems actually pretty straightforward. I think the way that we initially talked about the project is we would split, they did the initial design, and then we were going to execute, but because we've known each other for so long, and because we are all designers, and we pretty much work through every single part of it together. So that's it's actually wonderful, because it doesn't feel hard, it doesn't feel challenging, it actually feels richer, because each time we hit a problem, we're like, Okay, here's what I'm thinking, What are you thinking, and then, you know, like, everybody brings something to the table. And it's fascinating to see where it goes, how we the logistics of we are actually filing the job we are we will oversee the construction, they will come down periodically. 


Lea Cloud  21:23

So it seems really fluid. And I think a lot of that is the nature of our friendship that's helped it. So there's not a lot of ego involved. It's you know, we want to do the best thing, the right thing for our client.

Atif Qadir  21:33

That's nice to hear that they're architects that don't have egos, or not too much egos. And the is the terminology correct, at least to say it's called a design architect and architect of record. Are there other terms that are used for those relationships?

Lea Cloud  21:47

Those are the correct terms. I would say, though, I Yeah. In this instance, I'm not sure it's that clear. But yes, that's how we initially started it. And that's how we're clarifying it whenever we hit a problem that we are not comfortable with, we go back to our original rules.

Atif Qadir  22:02

Okay, so Lee, give us a primer about the codes and the rules that dictate the use, the quantity, the layout, the dimensions, all that minutia, about the stairs and residential projects like this one. Okay,

Lea Cloud  22:17

so there's a lot of minutia, right. But the big overview is you got to know what code you're filing in Manhattan, New York is, you know, ladened with code issues. So in residential districts typically have some basic standards, though, in our particular situation, we were able to open a stair three floors, you probably can't go greater than three floors. In a multifamily, you have to have two means of egress, we have two means of egress for each of the units,

Atif Qadir  22:45

right? And egress means basically ability to leave or that sort of egress means

Lea Cloud  22:49

correct, it means the ability to exit in that in a life safety issue. So if there's a fire or there's an emergency, you can get out two different ways. The next I think thing to think about is residential stairs typically have to be at least 36 inches wide, right? So three feet wide. That's a standard, there is a sort of standard code rule of the dimensions of the stairs, right? So the rise of the stair is the vertical component, and the horizontal is the tread. So in New York City, it's if you take the addition of two risers plus one tread, it cannot be greater cannot be less than 25 and a half inches. So that's an important thing to understand. Okay. So do you think about seven by 11, right, which is a standard stair dimension seven inches high by 11 inches deep. So it's 14 and 11 is 25. So it can't be less than 25 and a half, so you got to get another half inch in there. Right. So that's kind of a rule of thumb treads have a minimum depth of nine inches, which, if you ever gone up a really steep stair, you know what that feels like? It's very limiting risers that can be between four inches high, and eight and a quarter. Like that's a really big variation in terms of how you move through a stair. So and then there are certain like tolerance levels between how from if you're going from floor one to two, and then floor two to three, you can't make them too different. So the stairs wanted to have to be, I think it's like three eighths inch difference in terms of height, you can't make them. And then in a residential stair, you can actually have a handrail at three feet wide. 


Lea Cloud  24:34

You can have handrail only on one side, often and you'll see this in most townhouses, right, you have that main balustrade, but you don't have our handrail on the outside of the building. Right. So that's kind of like the basic rules of thumb. And, you know, obviously, when you're doing a house you're really conscious of or any kind of a building the floor to floor heights, and the differences in Florida floor heights. So in a lot of these townhouse Since the parlour level was always much taller than the bedroom levels, or the lower level, in fact, because often the lower level was a service level as well. So getting your stairs to work in all of those aspects is always a challenge. And then you can only have so much length of stare before you have to introduce the landing, right? So like, those are all, it all sounds easy when you think about one thing, but when you have to pull them all together, it's often this jigsaw puzzle of, okay, I took a quarter inch out of here, but I gotta meet this, you know, so you're always doing this until you get it exactly right. And then you have to work backwards and go into the design that you're trying to get to. Right. So how do you make that all come together? So that's kind of a quick overview.

Atif Qadir  25:50

There was a lot going on there. And I think that was a fantastic summary, taking a bird's eye perspective of this is the the idea for such a wide range is to accommodate the fact that if you have someone that's five foot tall, versus they're six and a half foot tall, that there's a very different experiences is that the reasoning for such a wide range of things?

Lea Cloud  26:10

I think it's actually both from the experiential side. But a code perspective, it's probably both on the experiential side of, you know, size of people, but it's also to be allow for variation in construction. Right? So it's trying to marry it, depending on what the situation is. And it's true. I mean, as an architect, you know, this, you know, you go to different buildings, and you can feel the difference. If you're in a stair that's more landscape oriented, it's very low and shallow, and you feel like you're just walking really fluidly. Versus a steep house, you know, it's a struggle to go up the stairs, right? So there's a whole experiential level that's involved in how you want to think about the stair and what you want to achieve as well.

Atif Qadir  26:55

Got it. I would imagine, in the case of when you're renovating or redeveloping, you have certain constraints physically around which you must work. So that flexibility allows for you to build within the constraints that are there that that makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So you mentioned earlier, when you were walking the listeners through the townhouse, as it'll be completed, what a intrinsic role, the staircase and the stairwell overall plays in terms of the feeling of openness and the design. Tell us more about the details of what's going on with this. There's like, for example, connecting what you just talked about in terms of the codes to how that actually informed your final design for the staircase and some of the materials that you chose in order to be able to get that final vision that the thing that you wanted the client to be able to experience.

Lea Cloud  27:45

So as I mentioned earlier, you know, when you have a narrow a lot, right, it's 16 feet wide, and it's 40 feet long. So you know, sort of the natural predilection is to go the long way with the stair because of the distance of the stair. But because we wanted to create this almost this interior room of light, we flipped it the other direction, right? So that gave us a certain amount of limitation, right? We knew that we had so many stairs we had to fit in, and we had to flip the other way. So we then thought about what is the experience of, of actually passing through that space. So what we did was, from the parlour level to the first bedroom level, there is a limitation, I mean, it is a certain height that's different than the upper levels, right. So we were able to fit the stairs on the upper levels, on the narrow side on the 16 foot side, right with landings between. But on the parlour level, because of the height, we had additional stair. So we both transverse we go across the 16 foot, then we come down a long distance, and then we turn it so we make a more public piece. At the lower at the parlor level, we make it more like a series of stairs that you could sit on, that's actually part of the living room. And it creates more of an experience about the stair, and we've integrated a piece of cabinetry into it. So it feels like it's much more than just a passageway. And then the other things that we thought a lot about was because as I mentioned on the upper level, we do have the storefront of glazing and we are trying to bring light, a lot of the challenges of townhouses like this when they're deep is there's not a lot of light on the interior, right. So that was also a real key component of developing the stair this way. 

Lea Cloud  29:37

So we have a storefront of full glass wall at the top level. Is that where the prayer room is? It's actually on the master level. There's just one bedroom. There's the stair and then there's an outside terrace. So at the outside terrace, we pulled up a full storefront. So there's about us 15 foot glass wall here because we added the level of the prayer room onto the building. Right? So you've got this, you know, 1516 foot high glass wall. And we wanted to bring that down through the upper three storeys, right. So that was a really critical part of the stair design. So when we looked at the materials of the stair, we were really conscious of not wanting them to be too heavy of wanting them to allow light to pass through of wanting them to be true to the structure of the building. So we did a series of designs where we thought through, okay, how do we you know, what supports a stair is typically called a stringer. It's a beam, that's a diagonal beam that supports the stair. And that's what makes your stair have a certain thickness, right. 

Lea Cloud  30:45

And we wanted to make sure that our stringers were either not visible, or they were integrated into the stair the way the stair was designed was such that its structure was able to handle itself on its own. So after lots of testing, we've gotten to the point where we are now most of the upper level stairs, all steel plate, so it's a very thin steel plate. So you can imagine, there's not a lot of structure to it, because the structure is all been buried in the walls. So it's very lightweight, so more light can pass through. And then the handrails were another big component because the sides of the stair which you have to enclose so that nobody can fall out, could be solid. And we didn't really want them to be glass because it was too hard and modern and didn't feel warm enough for this particular residence. So what we're investigating is using a perforated metal, so very lightweight metal, that's perforated so that all the light can come through. And what's beautiful about that is, you know, over the changing day and the light, you get all of these different patterns. And so you you experience the day as it changes as you're moving through the stair. 

Lea Cloud  31:57

So your experience at night is very different than your experience a day. So what we've done right now is it's steel plate, it's got this perforated side rail. And then because the steel as a tread to walk on is kind of cool and could have a lot of sound, we wanted to warm it up. So right now we've got a wood tread on that. So then it's connected to all the wood floors, and you feel this continuity of all of the floors. But when you look up from below, you just get this very lightweight, sculptural steel plate. So that's where we are now.

Atif Qadir  32:31

That's really fascinating, because I think the easy answer would be Oh, it's going to be a metal stair and have this be completely different than what surrounded. And I think that's clever to use a similar type of floor material to connect with the the actual floors themselves. Yeah, so natural light is a lot of what is influencing this, but tell us about nighttime. So tell us about the lighting that you have chosen in terms of the light fixtures that will continue this idea of continuity at nighttime. That's

Lea Cloud  33:00

a really good question. Okay, so there's other a couple of other components within the stair that I haven't articulated so much about, which is that on one, so I've talked about the perpendicular, right, so the perpendicular meaning the 16 foot wide dimension. So the stairs are moving up that 16 foot wide dimension on one side of that we pulled a full wall of cabinetry that goes the full three or four storeys, right. So that cabinetry holds a lot of functional pieces at the lower levels, the kitchen, you know, it's closets for utilities as you go up, and then there's a little open bar on the top. But because of that, what we've done is we are washing that wall with light, what we've done is that cabinetry wall is not only at the stairs, but it extends into both bedrooms on the bedroom levels. So that, again, it creates this context of the whole building, because when the doors are open to the bedrooms, it's all washed with light. So you feel that as one bigger figure in this whole house. Right? So because we have this wash of light on the cabinetry wall, and then on the other wall opposite, we are developing a tile that is sort of connected to the idea of the brownstone or the brick of the building, but that is articulated in such a way because of the way the texture is being developed, it will push the light down. 

Lea Cloud  34:30

So the experience you can imagine over the day is the large glass window that I was describing is really on the south, it's more to the south east. And so there'll be a lot of morning light that will completely wash that space. So there will be no need for any electric light. So over the day, and depending on whether you're in the winter or the summer, over the day, that light will move to the west, and you'll have a very different experience right so that over the day you'll get all this Chateau fabulous chateau. And then as the evening comes on, the electric light will wash the cabinetry wall. And you'll get this reflected light back from the cabinetry wall and a little bit of reflected light from the tile wall. So you'll have a very different that stare will become a little bit moodier, it'll still have a lot of ambient light from those electric lights. But it won't be such a big feature, you won't see so much light coursing through the building. But there still be the sense of continuity and connection across the spaces.

Atif Qadir  35:34

That's fantastic. Because I can imagine that at nighttime, clear sky, the lights on that this feature, the sculptural element of the house, which is this staircase really comes alive on its own as well. And that that experience is probably different during the morning, as well as the nighttime. Have you guys done any renderings or imagined the way that that would look and before it's built,

Lea Cloud  35:57

we have we do we actually have done a lot of those, we do a lot of three dimensional modeling. And we do do some studies. And because it's really critical, we're trying to figure out how much you know, as you probably know, from Passivhaus, you're constantly trying to balance the amount of heat gain in the building and making sure that you're okay, so we've done a lot of light studies, we're trying to figure out whether we're going to do some planting on that upper terrace to shade that large window, we may do some mechanized shading devices there to minimize the heat gain. So we're in the process of doing that on a regular basis as we move through the project.

Atif Qadir  36:31

So late you did another residential project that prominently features stairs, and that one is in fabulous Snowmass Colorado. So tell us about that.

Lea Cloud  36:41

It was a really different project, very steep site, 60 degree site. And the house was that was an existing structure. But we ended up rebuilt, basically building it back up from scratch, because it was in such bad condition. And again, because the client wanted a pretty it was a pretty large program, what we did was we use the stair, and because it was such a steep site, the stair became almost like parts of the topography. So you move through the house like topography. So at one at the big level where you walked in, it was again, a very light steel stair, so that you had this big, large open public space. But as you move through it carved into the structure, so it was almost a solid wood stairs as if you were carving into the ground. So what was wonderful about that was we were able to create really different experiences. So it was a very in on the upper levels, it was very public. And that was really in line with what the public the client wanted, it was a very public space she did, she was part of the Aspen Music Festival, she had big events there, etc. But as you move down into the more private levels, you had these. So at that point at the public level, you you could see out this great VISTA to the mountains beyond. So you had a connection in a really large world weigh, you know, both to the mountains, to this big public space. 

Lea Cloud  38:07

But then as you move through your stair have focused you on windows that actually focused on smaller connections to the landscape. So again, it changed the scale, it changed your experience, it changed your connection to the site. So that was a constant theme in that project where we were making the stair move through the site like you would actually move down the hill, and creating connection to the landscape in ways that were varied and created an experience of the site from within the house because as you know, the climates pretty severe. So you had these different experiences, you know, we had a little bridge with a telescope off one, we had this little moss garden off the other, you know, so there was this constant change and carving into the site. So it was a really completely different way of approaching the stair.

Atif Qadir  38:58

What's really fascinating is that, even though that an architect might be starting with the same point of view of the codes and the legal basis for how to design a staircase when you have a truly exceptional architect, you could take that and make something that is literally a sculpture on its own as opposed to just a perfunctory means of getting from one level to another. Absolutely.

Atif Qadir  39:27

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