Green roof will be installed soon thanks to Green Builder, Polly Bart.

“At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth. The effect is miniscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was  known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on…high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.”

“…To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live the longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs. Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbor, he believes that neighbor will not become stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not lose his hair until later, will not wrinkle until later, will not lose the urge for romance as early. Likewise, a person looking down on another house tends to dismiss its occupants as spent, weak, and shortsighted. Some boast that they have lived their whole lives up high, that they were born in the highest house on the highest mountain peak and have never descended. They celebrate their youth in their mirrors and walk naked on their balconies.”

“… A small number of residents in each city have stopped caring whether they age a few seconds faster than their neighbors. These adventuresome souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under the trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie in the warmer altitudes, roll on the level ground. They hardly look at their watches and cannot tell you  if it is Monday or Thursday. When others rush by them and scoff, they just  smile…”

above passages from
Einstein’s Dreams
Alan Lightman 1993

New aging embodies the dichotomy in Lightman’s tale: taking every opportunity to extend youth versus taking every opportunity to savor the moments of life. Rather than wood stilts, these  towers are supported on their elevator and stair towers. The living spaces include private apartments and common areas, and recreational areas on the roof.

“we have some Ambulatory Towns, and some Sedentary; the Ambulatory, as for instance this wherein now we are, are Built in this manner: The Architector, as you see, builds every Palace of a very light sort of Timber; supported by four Wheels underneath; in the thickness of one of the Walls he places ten large pair of Bellows, whose Snouts pass in a Horizontal Line through the upper Story, from one Pinacle to the other; so that when Towns are to be removed from one place to another, (for according to the Seasons they change the Air) every one spreads a great many Sails upon one side of the House, before the Noses of the Bellows; then having wound up a Spring to make them play, in less than Eight days time their Houses, by the continual Puffs which these Windy Monsters blow, are driven, if one pleases, an Hundred Leagues and more.

” For those which we call Sedentary, they are almost like to your Towers; save that they are of Timber, and that they have a Great and Strong Skrew or Vice in the Middle, reaching from the top to the Bottom; whereby they may be hoisted up or let down as People please. Now the Ground under neath is dugg as deep as the House is high; and it is so ordered, that so soon as the Frosts begin to chill the Air, they may sink their Houses down under Ground, where they keep themselves secure from the Severity of the Weather: But as soon as the gentle Breathings of the Spring begin to soften and qualifie the Air; they raise them above Ground again, by means of the great Skrew.”

I came upon an excerpt of this book in the lobby of the Williamsburg Inn in 1990 and made the following watercolor sketches based on the passage above. I am thinking again about the idea of a house being ambulatory or sedentary–houses that adapt to and with their environment. How might our houses move to adapt to their environment?  I should have some new ideas in the coming weeks.

These are studies for a modest, single family detached house  on an inner city site.

This community began with a house drawn from my daydream memories. Like many people, this house has lost its roots. Unlike most houses it has neither cellar nor attic, no repository of memories, no history; it is a house for the present. The attic or garret is an open terrace and for that reason it may be a vacation house. In this exercise I have grouped the house with others to form a new community. The stone wall separates and connects the dream community from its context.

Sections of Baltimore City (ie vacant lots and buildings) represent a huge and flexible resource for new and innovative reanimation. The Baltimore Infill Survey is a Flickr-based site that has been set up as a forum to discuss how this resource may be used. You are invited to participate in this discussion. Just download the image at  www.flickr.com/photos/baltimoreinfillsurvey/ and alter it with a possible vision for how these spaces can be used again. Any and all ideas from the very practical to the purely hypothetical are encouraged.

The photograph is of a middle of the block site (no longer existent as pictured) including occupied and vacant homes and vacant lots. The space between the buildings is approximately 85 feet (6 house widths). After you have modified your image just send it with any accompanying text to gkachadourian@promotionandarts.com. Your image and the accompanying text will be posted.

This was an ad hoc project coordinated under the auspices of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts and the Baltimore Design Conversation.

Response

Imagine:

The proposal is to provide six single family detached houses on the property, each with a side yard and each sharing a common garden.

The proposed houses are to constructed from reclaimed lumber, brick, and other materials from the many vacated row houses in the City. The existing row house stock would in essence feed the new housing. The intent is to redirect the  current inertia toward chaos into an inertia toward order.  The inspiration is the following quote, borrowed from Alan Lightman’s, “Einstein’s Dreams”, page 51.

Imagine a Baltimore where “…the passage of time brings increasing order. [Where] order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points to order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation. …..In such a [Baltimore], people with untidy houses lie in their beds and wait for the forces of nature to jostle the dust from their windowsills and straighten their shoes in their closets. People with untidy affairs may picnic while their calendars become organized, their appointments arranged, their accounts balanced. Lipstick and brushes and letters may be tossed into purse with the satisfaction that they will sort themselves out automatically. Gardens need never be pruned, weeds never uprooted.” … “When a pipe lets smoke into a room, the soot drifts towards a corner of the room, leaving clean air.” In Imagined Baltimore, each day vacant lots are filled with houses and gardens where happy families dwell and children play. Vacant schools are rebuilt with large windows for light and air, streets are repaired, and water lines flow.

Sketches from a snow day.

Reading to the children and imagining, with them, how the story might be different if the pigs had worked together on one house rather than going it alone as they did in the story.
This house is version one. It is one house for all three pigs that expresses each pig’s identity: house of straw (strawbale, the environmental pig); house of wood (wood shakes the coastal pig); and house of brick (brick tower, the urban pig). The houses surround a triangular atrium where the pigs have meals together. (please notice the revised entrance view- the wolves in guarding position seemed a bit too scary for the pigs to walk past every day.)

At every Ignite, 16 artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities take the stage to answer this challenge: Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say?. The goal of Ignite Baltimore is to spark new conversations and collaborations across cultures and disciplines.  
http://ignitebaltimore.com
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See also on http://rmsarchitecture.posterous.com/

The book is titled “houses, towers, cities.”

In 1984, oil was cheap compared to the cost during the oil embargo of the late 1970′s. Development was car-centered, and the Apple computer had just burst on the scene. The Inner Harbor of Baltimore was the focal point of development as the city and the harbor were being reconfigured. People from around the world were looking at Baltimore as a model of urban redevelopment. A Motorola cell phone weighed 30 ounces and cost about $3,500.

Developers wanted to be at the Inner Harbor, often to the detriment of the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. In my view of a future Baltimore in 2010, the rooftops of buildings would become habitable green spaces with dwellings and gardens. Large computers in public spaces would tell us of the activities and events and send information to visitors in the inner harbor-some connecting from their boat.  Pratt Street and the spaces around Harborplace in the Inner Harbor area would be infilled with more offices, shopping and dwellings. Although the City had a clearly articulated master plan and urban design concept for the Inner Harbor, it was obvious, even then, that the political class lacked the commitment see the plan through. Hence the dark towers looming over the eleven story datum of the Martin Milspaugh vision of the Harbor.

The images below are those selected by the Sun Magazine for publication.