How They Pulled It Off: Curved Windows Turn This Minnesota Home Into a Sundial

Modernism is not so much about the materiality or the color or even the style. It's about how space works, how planning works, how buildings connect us to each other and to the outside and to the world. We want our work to feel like this house has been here for a while and can be here for a while. I want something to last. Today we're sitting in our project we call Crescendo, which is located on Minnehaha Creek in Minnesota. The creek is a meandering presence through the Twin Cities. My client grew up here on this property with her three sisters and they had owned the house and it had been in their family since the house was built and they loved the property. They didn't have a need to save the home. It was a bit run down and so they said let's live there again on that amazing property on the creek. We try not to come to assumptions right away. We trust the process and the process is to emerge ourselves in who you are, what the place is like, what the history is like and this house is a great example of that. They already knew that they wanted to have an agent place home and that they wanted to have two families. So it was my client, husband and wife, and then her sister has a separate apartment in the house. So they already knew that that was the program. They wanted a house that would support them in retirement. He's a lawyer. She is an artist and really practices art every day. Her art is all over the home and so they wanted wall space in the design. They have a heirloom grand piano that they wanted a space for. We did want that to be an honored place that was beautiful and it didn't feel like the piano was pushed out of the way. This space we designed for it is really a hybrid space. We can imagine that if a different family were ever here or if they changed their mind, this could be the dining room. In addition, they have a very large book collection and they were very concerned that we would have enough bookshelves. So we have bookshelves throughout the house and they actually are embedded in our extra thick walls. So on one side of all these thick walls is a bookshelf and the other side might be a public space, but we also have bookshelves lining the piano room and then that also creates places for her art. We spent a lot of time working out the organization of space and then how each of those spaces connects to the world outside as well as inside. The initial challenge was the floor planning. We want to capture the view to the west that can take advantage of the creek as much as possible and also be sensitive to the amount of light that comes in from the south. The homeowner has always loved Louis Kahn and said to me early in the process that all great architecture has lift. We have the living space in the middle, the bedrooms and offices and art studio on the outside. The only way to get light and volume is to lift the roofs up and let lighting come from the south and that also then allows for the owner's bedroom, the living room, dining room, kitchen and the art studio to face the creek. We had lifted roof lines and that intersected with the wall and we simply didn't want a sharp angle there. We introduced the curve simply to soften the light have it cast more gracefully throughout the space and we wanted that expression of the curve to show up in detail throughout the house so that you'd always be reminded of where the light's coming from and where the house is pointing to to reach for that light. With the windows it was critical that that transition was visible through the glass and that meant the glass had to follow that same shape. Within the same window it had to go from a flat vertical wall to a curve and then to a flat ceiling again is really challenging and it's actually why we chose Marvin frankly for this house. They can make anything you need and their performance is outstanding. The rooms facing the creek have awning windows so they bring in a lot of fresh air that way. We wanted the house also from the outside to have a sense of permanence and so we introduced the idea of brick. We don't see a lot of brick these days. It's considered difficult but now we use a thin brick which is applied like a stucco but it gives a sense of weight and visual texture. The sister's apartment is on the lower floor and we worked for a while with two front doors but ultimately we didn't like that there could be confusion. You come in the front door then she can immediately turn off of that space into her own mudroom. She can access the staircase directly but then there are times when they want to go downstairs. We thought well let's have a way to get down directly from their space to her space as well so she has a half flight from her mudroom they have a half flight from their living space and those two half flights merge to join and continue down to the basement. What I like about designing a agent place home is that actually from the outside the house sits very beautifully really sort of nested right into the ground. We have very minimal steps into the house. Everything is on a single floor once you move in right so that's access to all the rooms all the doorways are three feet wide that can accommodate a wheelchair in the future and we put an elevator in so that if they do want to go downstairs they can do that. As an architect we believe that a great plan matters so the plan has to be beautiful and it has to support the life that's there and I want whoever owns this home in 100 years to feel like that kind of heroine into it.