Coast Redwood Siding
We recently returned from a week of camping on the Sonoma Coast and relaxing at Sea Ranch. Sea Ranch’s original designers had high aspirations for connecting to the land along the Sonoma coast, and in many ways they succeeded. One of their main responses to place was the prominent use of the defining wood of Northern California: Sequoia sempervirens, the Coast Redwood.
Designed for Gardening
It’s the middle of summer and our vegetable garden at the Middle Creek Bungalow is in full bloom, providing food for our family and a bounty for local pollinators. When you take the time to prepare for it, and the time to notice it, a garden is incredibly full of life. The practice of gardening has much in common with the practice of good architecture, and the pursuit of happiness.
Soil Heath and Zero Foodprint
We have been very busy lately, but I couldn’t let June pass without pausing to reflect on our first official year in business. In celebration of that milestone Knowles Architect Inc contributed 1% of our first year’s revenue to Zero Foodprint and committed to contribute 1% of future revenue to provide grants directly to farmers and ranchers ready to make changes to their land designed to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and re-store it underground as healthy soil.
On the Boards: Farm-Creek Renderings
Some projects are just so exciting that we have to share the progress renderings. The Farm-Creek Residence currently in schematic design is one of those. This combination of people and place hits the mark on so many levels: a renovation & addition to create a family’s forever home, on land mostly dedicated to farming which supplies the client’s farm-to-table restaurants with fresh produce, with a blue-line creek lined with heritage oaks running across the southern edge of the property.
Bonds of Attention
How does architecture connect us to the rhythms of the natural world and the life that it supports? We use architecture, the shape of a space, a view, the way daylight falls on a material, how water flows across a surface, or how a window or door opens to a breeze, to draw our attention to those rhythms of life.
How long to do you plan to stay?
How long do you plan to stay in a place? When we start talking about a project this is one of the first questions we ask because it is so fundamental to the way we approach design. The longer you plan to stay in a place, the more it makes sense to build it well and the greater the harvest you reap from making that place healthier over time.
What is “place”?
What do we mean by “place”? A certain intellectual heritage in architecture gives extra meaning to that word. The first obvious and most common connotation is the building’s site and its relationship to the physical characteristics of that site. For us, and for some others, it’s not just the building site, but also the neighborhood that it sits in and the ecosystem it will inhabit.