Houses and Origins

David Stark Wilson Foreword by Russell Abraham

David Stark Wilson Foreword by Russell Abraham

+ ORIGINS

Published in Australia in 2012 by The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd ABN 89 059 734 431 6 Bastow Place, Mulgrave, Victoria 3170, Australia Tel: +61 3 9561 5544 Fax: +61 3 9561 4860 books@imagespublishing.com www.imagespublishing.com Copyright Š The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd 2012 The Images Publishing Group Reference Number: 977

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Wilson, David Stark Title: Houses & Origins / David Stark Wilson ISBN: 978 1 86470 466 2 (hbk.)

Subjects: Architecture, Domestic.

Other Authors/Contributors: Russell Abraham Dewey Number: 728 Design: Public Edited by Debbie Ball Pre-publishing services by United Graphic Pte Ltd, Singapore Printed by Everbest Printing Co. Ltd., in Hong Kong/China on 150 gsm Quatro Silk Matt paper

IMAGES has included on its website a page for special notices in relation to this and our other publications.

Please visit www.imagespublishing.com

Every effort has been made to trace the original source of copyright material contained in this book. The publishers would be pleased to hear from copyright holders to rectify any errors or omissions.

The information and illustrations in this publication have been prepared and supplied by David Stark Wilson. While all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the publishers do not, under any circumstances, accept responsibility for errors, omissions and representations expressed or implied.

Cover Berkeley Courtyard House and Left Fork of North Creek, Utah, 1996 Back Cover Stair detail, Berkeley Courtyard House End Sheets Saratoga Creek House landscape sculpture from above Title page Berkeley Courtyard House in the fog (Photo by Russell Abraham)

6 Preface 8 Foreword10 Berkeley Courtyard House 38 Tahoe Ridge House 62 Stinson Beach House 82 Portland Sequoia House 98 Strathmoor House 118 Napa Ledge House 136 Folger Offices 150 Willits Compound174 Norfolk House 192 Saratoga Creek House 222 Information

Several years ago, while preparing for a talk on my work, I reviewed dozens of photographs I had taken of my built projects. As I bent over the slides, I began noting similarities between the architectural forms and textures and natural shapes, textures and landscapes of my mind’s eye. My family is oriented towards the outdoors, and from a young age I have found wonder and meaning in places such as the high mountains of California’s Sierra Nevada and the sandstone desert of the Colorado plateau. I pulled out my photographs from these wild places and began comparing them with the photographs of my buildings. The influence of my outdoor experiences on my architecture burst forth on the light table.

One of the basic tenets of site-specific architecture is that local natural features should inspire a design.

In keeping with this fundamental idea, in this book I have chosen to place project images next to images from nature. The pairings are not intended to show the faithful representation of a specific natural form at the time of design genesis. Rather, they indicate how broad similarities in form, color, and texture between the built and the natural permeate my architecture. Much of my work revolves around attempts to elicit emotional responses to buildings, responses similar to those we have to the natural world.

In nature colors abound and, from the postcard sunset to the wildflowers of spring, they can explode upon your senses. Colors elicit a strong response, but it can be very challenging to introduce color into architecture. In our work, we use color to emphasize elements of a project, but also to connect to nature. In the Napa Ledge House, the green of the exterior was matched to the color of the spring grass, the brown to the stones of the site.

For interiors, I have often found that the palette has to be developed one color at a time. As the combination of colors develops, the eye often craves a complement, perceives a missing piece.

In the Norfolk House, I took this combination to the extreme, eventually adding the last color, purple, to the curved loft railing.

I have also chosen to pair alongside my architecture selected images of vernacular structures of Northern California. In the mid-1990s I became fascinated with the rapidly disappearing agrarian buildings of the Central Valley, the foothills of the Mother Lode, and the Sierra Nevada and spent several years photographing them. I assembled the images into the book Structures of Utility, published by Heyday in 2003: “Structures I encountered began to inform my own work. Designing a building, I labored for the very qualities they embodied effortlessly—purity and lack of pretense. Their origins were in simple utility, in adaptation to functional requirements, yet they had attained an elusive and austere elegance. The structures haunted me, and their forms filtered into the morphology of my work. The structures in these photographs share a common origin: they are all structures of pure utility.

Working structures scaled to the landscape and people around them, they enrich the fabric of our built environment and, by contrast, call into question the value of current development. Purely functional yet visually exciting, their forms are deeply rooted in the land and local history. They narrate the ebullience of miners, the needs of small farmers, and changing industries. An intimate acquaintance with these structures of the past can illuminate our search for meaning and distinction in the contemporary.”

In the Great Central Valley I found grain elevators and tank houses. Quonset sheds and other vaultedroof structures sat iconically and timelessly on the landscape. I searched out and photographed the few remaining Gold Rush stamp mills of the Sierra.

The projects depicted in this book have a handful of critical influences besides these vernacular buildings. Natural forms, textures, and color—all have contributed raw design material. Clients, colleagues, and my family have also been essential in the development of my work. The influence and expertise of Chris Parlette, senior architect at WA Design, extend through almost every one of these projects. My best idea is rarely my first and it’s most often my clients who know that and push me along. Clients are underappreciated in architecture.

It is the clients, with their very personal stake in a project, who often have the resolve and perseverance to motivate the design. At times this can be hard. As an architect, you often like what you have designed and it’s only at your client’s request that you look again at design options. It is this iterative process that leads us to places we haven’t been, to new and fresh work.

I have tried to avoid subscribing to most conventional architectural styles. Physical materials, architectural forms, and light all generate an emotional response. It’s that response, with its strong parallel in the natural world, that is my strongest design influence. I hope that the binding thread in the projects illustrated in this book is the simple spirit of exploration guided by awareness of the myriad factors that allow good architecture to happen.

David Stark Wilson

Preface HOU S E S + OR IGIN S

PRE FAC E 7

Some people consider Northern California the Shangri-La of North America. Its rolling coastal hills are graced with vineyards and orchards. Its magnificent mountains are covered in snow six months of the year and offer a ready playground to skiers and hikers alike. It is a place with a climate mild enough that a person can get around for 10 months of the year in shorts, gym shoes and a polo shirt, and many people do. It is also the home of our most progressive new technology titans.

Great inventors and entrepreneurs of the 20thcentury’s post-industrial society have chosen to make Northern California their home. It is a place where innovative ideas can be nurtured and grown. Between Stanford University in Palo Alto and the University of California in Berkeley, there are more Nobel Laureates than in any other place on earth. It is a place where intellectual curiosity, entrepreneurship and an outdoor-oriented lifestyle blend together in an almost seamless fashion. It is here that David Stark Wilson was born and raised.

It is where he went to school, got married, brought up a family and built a career in architecture.

It is a place where he became a polymath in an environment where being a polymath is not that unusual. Wilson is a man of many talents with an endless curiosity, great intellect and an extraordinary eye for high design. His hands-on approach to architecture is both practical and inspirational. He has learned how to practice a complex art with a rich history outside academia.

Architecture, like other arts, has its own traditions, jargon and culture. It is almost medieval in the way the craft is passed on from generation to generation.

In the 20th century, academia has taken the place of craft guilds in producing great architects. Most, if not all, of our notable architects have been produced by a handful of academic institutions and influential practices. Of all the arts, architecture is probably the most backward-looking. Buildings must pass the “test of time.” At the other end of the spectrum is the gnawing desire to create something new and innovative. “An architecture for our time” is the rallying cry heard from architects across the land.

Yet what gets built, sadly, is often a rehash of another time. There is often little creative wiggle room in architecture. There are codes, clients, budgets and planning commissions to be dealt with.

There is a strong desire to conceptually revisit what was done before, but paint it a bright color and move on. There are very few Bruce Goffs or Frank Gehrys in the world. Wilson can be considered one of those innovative outsiders looking in. His work is unique, rational and dramatic. It takes traditional forms, incorporates Modernist design concepts and creates something completely new.

David Wilson was an atypical child growing up in Berkeley, California in the 1970s. His father was a computer scientist and avid outdoorsman who moved to California in the early 1960s. Many weekends found the family scaling a mountain or on a winter backcountry ski trip in the nearby Sierras or elsewhere. Wilson believes that his sister is the youngest person ever to climb Mt. Shasta. His sister was six and he was nine. At an elevation of 14,161 feet, Shasta is one of the tallest mountains in North America.

Russell Abraham

Foreword HOU S E S + OR IGIN S

Mountaineering would continue to be a significant avocation for Wilson. The Sierra Nevada with its close proximity to the Bay Area and its majesticgranite peaks was a convenient venue. The Yosemite Valley’s 3000-foot-high sheer granite cliffs were a favorite spot. Wilson first climbed the 2500-foot vertical face of Half Dome when he was 17 years old. He has continued to climb the great mountain ranges of the world, from the Himalayas, to the Alps, to the Andes. He claims Mt. Fitzroy in Patagonia as his greatest climb.

Wilson majored in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, a difficult major in a worldrenowned department. The physical world had always held an interest for Wilson. “Venn diagrams and Euclidian forms” easily translated into Japanese cabinetry design. In an effort to earn money for school, Wilson started doing small construction jobs for his neighbors in the “gown” section of Berkeley. The “town and gown” cultural bifurcation holds as true in Berkeley as any college town in the United States. The western side of town is dotted by small industries and working-class bungalows, from the 1920s. The eastern hillside of town is dominated by the university and its surrounding elegant residential neighborhoods, dating from the early 20th century. It was these neighborhoods lined with houses designed by the great Beaux-Arts architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan that Wilson passed by on his frequent runs in the Berkeley Hills. As a youth, he would marvel at their beauty and subtle architectural innovation.

Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan are cultural heroes in Northern California. They were Americanborn, European-trained architects who returned to the Bay Area to make a significant mark on its architectural heritage. During the early part of the 20th century both Morgan and Maybeck were popular architects who designed everything from tasteful hillside homes to eclectic churches and neo-classical car dealerships. The majority of their residential work was in the area around the University of California and parts of the adjacent city of Oakland. Although trained as neo-classical architects, their residential style was decidedly “Arts and Crafts.” Nearby redwood forests provided

an ample supply of building material. A great fire that consumed much of the Berkeley Hills in 1923 gave the architects a clean slate on which to work.

The “Bay Shingle Style” architecture that they and their counterparts developed has endured to the present day. Its design trademarks are wellproportioned homes with deep roof-overhangs, dark-shingled exteriors and extensive, woodpaneled interiors.

David Wilson is a keen observer. In high school he became fascinated with photography and started taking a camera along on his climbing expeditions.

One of his climbing partners was the late Galen Rowell, an internationally recognized alpine climber and photographer. As something of a personal challenge, Wilson decided to climb all 15 California mountains above 14,000 feet. He packed along a very unusual film-based camera that had a rotating lens and rendered an image with a panoramic 145-degree field of view. The images were compiled into a breathtaking photo book, titled Above All, published in 2008. In it, we get a glimpse of the austere and majestic landscapes that remain the privileged view of the hardy climbers who are willing to scale them. This was not Wilson’s first photo book. In 2003 he published Structures of Utility, a photo-essay on the abandoned agricultural and industrial buildings of the Californian interior. From Gold Rush stamping mills in the Sierra to grain elevators in the Central Valley, we get a view of a utilitarian aesthetic that has become very influential in Wilson’s architecture.

By the end of his senior year at U.C. Berkeley, Wilson sensed a shift in his likely career path. His small remodeling projects in school gave way to larger building projects. He became a design-build architect in short order. His first major commission was a house for his mother. He designed and built the house with the help of his sister and a few friends from high school. They did most of the construction themselves, from foundations to casework. Wilson says of the work, “We salvaged granite from a quarry in the Sierra foothills and cut it on site, flaming pieces with a torch to roughen them. The granite, Douglas-fir and hand-applied white gypsum plaster became the palette of materials for the home.” Plaster, especially with

its integral color, grew more important still in the homes Wilson would build. He became highly proficient with a trowel and would plaster a smoothbarrel ceiling as fast as the mixers could mix.

Stylistically, Wilson started from the Arts and Crafts houses with which he was most familiar.

He instinctively appreciated their fine proportions and attention to detail. The Maybeck homes are sometimes compared to Japanese cabinetry with their intricate wood trim. However, he was also aware that he lived in the 21st century, not the early 20th. Wilson rejected the idea of simply copying the older styles. He observed the work of contemporary architects who integrated traditional forms with modern design ideas. At the national level, Will Bruder and Antoine Predock were iconoclastic architects experimenting in ways that were creative and innovative. Locally, Richard Fernau and Stanley Saitowitz were Bay Area architects whose distinctive regional modernism Wilson looked to for inspiration and ideas. Wilson says, “While reinventing the wheel on each project is important, at the end of the day, the wheel still has to turn.”

Since his early Berkeley houses, Wilson has developed a distinctive architectural style that incorporates both Modernist and traditional forms.

In much the same way that Samuel Mockbee was an innovative regional modernist in the South, Wilson carries that torch in Northern California.

He borrows forms from the utilitarian structures he found in the Central Valley as Mockbee did in the rural South. He subconsciously uses the everpresent nature of Northern California from the rolling hills of the Coastal Range to the Sierra Nevada to shape and color his ideas. He takes the best ideas of the Arts and Crafts architects and works them into his designs in new ways. He uses Maybeck’s oversized clerestory windows and stretches them. He takes a simple shed roof, inverts it and makes it into a bay. Maybeck’s deep eaves are now stretched even deeper and supported by tall thin steel columns often painted oxide red. The clever, articulated staircases Maybeck designed in wood, Wilson designs in stainless steel.

All of Wilson’s work has a strong attachment to both nature and the land that it sits on. He likes to think of his architecture as being part of the land and not on top of it. For this reason, natural artifacts are often built around rather than over. The colors of surrounding hillsides or woodlands find their way into finishes and textures. Woods, metals and stones are left unfinished or rough. One of his favorite building materials is Cor-ten steel, a naturally rusting steel with an intense color. Wilson says, ”The colors in nature resonate for all of us, yet there is a general reluctance to introduce color into architecture. Color is used in our projects to emphasize elements of the architecture and also to connect to nature.” Wilson is not only designing a building for his clients, he is thinking generationally to the building’s next users.

Through observation, discipline and a hands-on approach to design, David Wilson has created a unique regional modern style of architecture, which both pays respect to his antecedents and shows us a way into the future. It is an architecture that is energy-conscious, people-friendly and strikingly beautiful. His buildings sit on the land in a rational fashion and grace the environment. He has reinvented the wheel and the wheel not only still turns, it glides.

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Berkeley Courtyard House HOU S E S + OR IGIN S

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BERKELEY COURTYARD HOUSE

Berkeley, California Built 2006 4880 square feet

The clients for this Berkeley Hills home had recently retired from a life in academia. Moving out from the East Coast, they bought a home we had designed in the early 1990s. After a few years in that home, and now familiar with our work, they contacted me to pursue their dream of building a new home start to finish. We looked for land together and eventually they bought a double lot with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay. The primordial relationship of water and canyon wall was the metaphorical origin for the layout of the home. The water is constrained by the topography and yet needs an outlet. Each material and force yields to the other. At each end of our zinc canyon, at the outlets, a courtyard would naturally form, one towards the hillside and protected from the wind, the other towards the west, hanging, completely open to the views and the winds of the Bay.

Our concept was to create three wings connected by two breezeways, one open-air breezeway and one glazed. The transparent breezeways allow views out of the courtyard and their low rooflines accentuate the massing of the primary building elements. Set perpendicular to the glazed breezeway are two water features that appear to extend through the home and axially emphasize the view towards San Francisco Bay. Punctuating the hillside end of this water axis is a monolithic outdoor fireplace. Breaking the house into separate wings allowed us to create two distinct courtyards, one protected and the other open to the almost constant onshore fog and breezes from the Bay.

The house’s exterior is alternately sheathed in zinc shingles, reminiscent of the Craftsman architecture of a century earlier, or stucco. We designed strongly canted shed roofs with deep eaves and delicate structural steel supports to give the house a distinctive look and provide protected exterior circulation and ample surface area for the extensive photovoltaic arrays that power the house.

The hardscape is minimalist, with white concrete extending seamlessly from inside the house and granite cobble bands set to the rhythm of the structural steel frame. The construction module of the home is literally encountered at street edge as you step across the first band of black granite cobbles. A progression begins. The landscape plantings are set on a rigorous grid behind low retaining walls of Cor-ten steel and further extend the strong organization of the building architecture onto the site.

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1 The western courtyard, facing the San Francisco Bay. The courtyard is split by a raised and tiled lap pool. Oxide red, tube steel posts provide a sheltered transition from interior to exterior. 2 West elevation/section 3 Main entry. We studied different perforation patterns for the bronze gate that leads to the garden. Eventually we used the plan outline of the home itself in differing scales and orientations. The clients enjoy asking guests if they’ve figured out what the shapes represent. 4 A fall leaf drop in the canyons of the Escalante River, Utah, 1996

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Residence Garage Studio Parking courtyard Courtyard Planting terraces Driveway Lap pool Hot pool

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5 The Cor-ten steel terraces transition the grade up from street level. The terraces are hidden by the grasses each spring and revealed in the winter when the grasses are cut back.

Nasella tennuisima is a grass that registers every hint of wind, and the entire hillside waves and shimmers with the slightest breeze.

6 The clients onsite before construction. Visible in the photo are the remnants of the foundation of the previous home on the site, which was destroyed in the 1991 fire. 7 View east to the hillside above the site 8 View east to the hillside above the site 9 View southwest toward the San Francisco Bay (Site photographs provided by client.)

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UPPER FLOOR 1 MASTER BEDROOM 2 MASTER BATHROOM 3 MASTER CLOSET 4 BATHROOM 10' 5 STUDY 6 LOFT 7 STUDIO 8 BREEZEWAY BELOW 9 OPEN TO BELOW 10 DECK

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Master bedroom Master bathroom Master closet Bathroom Bedroom Loft Studio Breezeway below Open to below Deck

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Entry Living room Dining room Kitchen Laundry Pantry Bathroom Breezeway Bedroom Library Courtyard Lap pool Hot pool Driveway Garage Parking courtyard Grill area Outdoor fireplace Planting terraces

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10 View from the dining room towards the kitchen. The concrete wall extends into the home from the entry patio.

11 Dining room and lap pool beyond 12 Kitchen with white concrete counters and custom range hood 13 Main stairway.

Open stairways often require non-standard details and this was no exception. The stainless steel stringer was sized to span to the wide flange post. We wanted a two-inch square cross-section, but the engineer needed two-and-a-half inches.

The rail in the center extends through and stiffens the center span. 14 A Japanese tansu chest inspired the stairway from the media room to the upstairs bedroom 15 The enclosed breezeway that connects the two main wings of the home.

We used seamless detailing top and bottom to capture the glass and help blur the indoor/outdoor distinction.

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MAIN FLOOR 1 ENTRY 2 LIVING ROOM 3 DINING ROOM 4 KITCHEN 10' 5 LAUNDRY 6 PANTRY 7 BATHROOM 8 BREEZEWAY 9 BEDROOM 10 LIBRARY 11 COURTYARD 12 LAP POOL 13 HOT POOL 14 DRIVEWAY 15 GARAGE 16 PARKING COURTYARD 17 GRILL AREA 18 OUTDOOR FIREPLACE 19 PLANTING TERRACES

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16 Kitchen. The open plan of the main floor meant the kitchen was entirely visible, and this called for a more furniture-like approach to the cabinetry. We chose a Californian walnut veneer and then edge-banded with metal. The main island is undercut, separating it from the floor plane: it hovers. The kitchen hood vent also hovers, disconnected, in front of the blue-tinted glass. Every element of the kitchen was treated as a unique piece of furniture. 17 Master bedroom with sculptural plaster and steel fireplace 18 The master bathroom counter is fabricated from concrete embedded with small stones. The same concrete material becomes the shower bench, interrupted only by a clear glass partition. 19 Entry and loft stairway 20 Living room and concrete fireplace surround. Half-inch-thick stainless steel plates capture the concrete panels. To the left in the image, behind the cabinet doors, is a television. The ceiling panels were milled from sustainably harvested bamboo panels. Considerable integration was required to ensure all light fixtures and sprinkler heads penetrated the eight-inch-square ceiling panel layout on center. 21 Zinc shingles and the fall foliage of ginkgo trees 22 A skin of glacial polish on Sierra granite, Tuolumne Meadows, California, 2010

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23 Outdoor eating area with studio beyond 24 Custom concrete furniture and western patio (Photo by Russell Abraham) 25 Boardformed concrete and open railing detail 26 The pool, a vessel suspended in a soft field of grasses

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27 The granite cobble bands occur on the module of structural steel posts 28 Garage parking courtyard 29 Board-formed concrete wall, stainless steel planters, and Meyer lemons 30 Allium ‘Globemaster’ planted amid alternating gray and green Santolina

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31 Parking courtyard and gate. The bands of cobbles organize all the hardscape elements and establish a rhythm that extends throughout the home and landscape. Under this parking area are the 200-foot-deep bore holes and the ground source heat exchange loops that are integral to the energy systems of the home. Our client, a prominent scientist, impressed us with his high level of inquiry into the home’s complex systems and details. 32 Eastern elevation with view into courtyard 33 The lap pool gestures west towards the bay view. We went back and forth with the clients on finishes for the pool. We all wanted the interior to have the same finish as the raised side walls, ensuring that the entire pool would read as one hollowed-out vessel. Eventually we arrived at painstakingly installed one-inch-square glass tiles. 34 West elevation from the end of the lap pool. Visible through the glazed breezeway is the hot pool beyond. 35 Looking west from the parking courtyard. On the left, down the driveway, is the car gate. The highest building element is the study loft above the entry.

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