Wright Chat

Peter Zumthor is one of the greatest architects of our time.

Dan, I am so sorry to hear about the sudden passing of your very special father who had such a great influence on your life. I can appreciate how much he will be missed.

Best,
Paul

Paul- thanks. Always wondered. What do you know about the John Haynes family and the contemporaneous cultural scene in the town? All that I know about the John Haynes family is what I read on the Haynes House web site. John was a salesman for a local insurance company, Lincoln Life. Lincoln Life wa...

After receiving my bachelors degree I lived and worked in Fort Wayne for 3 years. Orus was certainly the finest architect in his day in Fort Wayne. He did many fine buildings in the Fort Wayne area. He wasn't afraid to take risks and try out new ideas. Fort Wayne has under-achieved in the recent pas...

The Davenport House has a back interior stairway that leads to the exterior and also down to the basement. The stair treads, nosing, and floor at the landing are pine and original to our 1901 house. They will be sanded and refinished. I am looking for a product(s) to protect them similar to a carpet...

A 3' 6" module yields clunky proportions.

It is a very impressive building.

Those are great ideas. Unfortunately for me, the Tugendhat House is closed for restoration starting January 1, 2010. That doesn't mean I won't be able to tour the house, it will just take more effort to do so. Here is the web site: http://www.tugendhat-villa.cz/html.en/ We will definitely tour the B...

Like many great works of art it is difficult to point to one source of inspiration. Frank Lloyd Wright called the Mrs. Thomas Gale House (some historic revisionists now refer to it as the Laura Gale House, but the drawings state Mrs. Thomas Gale) was "the progenitor for Fallingwater". Othe...

Some of the blown insulation on Davenport hung up without an obstruction.

Without tell anyone my age, I have seen numerous great new construction products fail with time. I like products and strategies that are conservative in their impact on other original historic building materials and are reversible. We did try foaming insulation as a test around an original 1901 wind...

My concern about foam insulation is the possibility of creating exterior walls that can't breathe. I didn't even use a vapor barrier in the exterior walls of Davenport because of concerns about trapping moisture within the walls.

We encountered an insulation surprise on Davenport last December that I am going to share with the group. We had a plaster wall that had issues and had to be redone. In the course of redoing there no choice but to take the plaster down to the wood lathe. This was a wall where we left the original pl...

Kudos to them. They are catching it at great time for any any construction project.

This summer Cheryl and I will be touring Prague and Dresden. We will have a car and we will be staying in Prague at the Maximilian Hotel by a really fine London based Czech architect, Eva Juernica. It is a wonderful rehabilitation project and it is realtively cheap in light of its quality and locati...