7.28.2008

Ray Kappe









"I've always sought out the edges, the views, and a feeling of expansiveness."

"I was once asked what I think are the ten most important principles that helped make me a successful architect, planner, and educator...

(1) Think positively, not negatively.
(2) Accept structure but know that it is to be questioned and broken when necessary.
(3) Always be willing to explore, experiment and invent. Do not accept the status quo.
(4) Know yourself and keep your work consistent with who you are and how you think.
(5) Maintain good moral and social values.
(6) Be humble, honest, compassionate, and egalitarian.
(7) Have conviction about your work.
(8) Be open and say yes to most ideas and requests. The good ones will be valuable, the bad ones will cease to exist.
(9) Allow employees and fellow workers freedom and the ability to work to their strengths. Avoid hierarchy.
(10) Money should be the residual of work, not the goal. But do not compromise your worth."

Ray Kappe website.

He's designed several houses for LivingHomes.

There is a new feature of his own house in the new issue of dwell magazine. Unfortunately it does not appear that the feature is available on the dwell site.

7.23.2008

More Photos...







...added to the sets: Downtown Winston-Salem, including West End Village, and Winston-Salem's Family Services Building.

7.16.2008

Proximity Hotel


My ARC 230 Environmental Systems class took a field trip over to Greensboro this week to visit the Proximity Hotel, which is expected to be the first LEED Platinum hotel in the country.

It is modelled after typical textile mills found in the area--straightforward rectangular grid with large windows--and named after a specific mill just a mile or two down the road from this site. The bistro nextdoor is named after the Print Works which was situated directly nextdoor to the mill.

Here is a link to the set of pics on my flickr page.

The official Proximity website.

7.01.2008

CU-ICAR






Visited the Clemson University-International Center for Automotive Research this past seekend while staying with friends in Greenville, SC. It is a complex developed recently for (as the title suggests) car-ology. Apparently Clemson has the only Doctorate in Automotive Engineering in the country.

I don't have all the details about the buildings and could not go inside any of them other than the parking garage (the place was oddly empty), but I do know that Greenville firm Pazdan-Smith worked on at least one of the buildings (the one for Timken). Also quickly visited another LEED-seeking building designed by Pazdan-Smith in Greenville.

I've got a set of pictures from Greenville/ICAR on my flickr page.