Research

A study tour of the Maine Cottages of Fred L. Savage

During the design of the Westport Cottage, I discovered a wonderful new book by John M. Bryan documenting the life and work of Fred Savage, who was an architect living and working on Mt. Desert Island, Maine from 1885 to 1924. His work was primarily Shingle-Style, but not exclusively, and it maintained a certain quality that set him apart from his "out-of-town" contemporaries.

The Rosserne Cottage, probably Savage's best work

In late August 2007, I made a special trip to the island to see some of these buildings for myself. The book is a great work, but seeing these projects in real life, taking in their full surroundings is worth the trip (Mt. Desert is nice too of course).

If you go, be sure to stop in at the Bar Harbor historical Society, and the Northeast Harbor Library.

Here are some of the photos i took with some basic captions for now.

You can check out Bryan's book, Maine Cottages: Fred savage and the Architecture of Mount desert here...

 

The State Archives
a brief outline of a developing geneology...

The link below contains selected pages from my personal sketchbook written during the time when I was working for another firm as project architect for a proposed new VT State Archives building. I was trying to understand what exactly it was I had been tasked with designing.

These notes have very little to do with that particular project and are primarily a study of State Archives in general as a specific type of building. If you have any interest in libraries, museums, etc., their cultural programs and how that translates into a specific type of building form and space, you may find these notes interesting. Someday, I'd like to find time to work on this some more.

I owe much of the basis for this line of questioning to Amir Ameri, Associate Professor of Architecture at CU Denver, who has remained a major influence on my thinking and work since my time as a student at Temple University in 1994.

State Archive Notes.pdf

 

As a child I was already an apart.ment

Undergraduate Thesis, 1994
Temple University
Amir Ameri, Advisor

The project was a small psyhiatric clinic on Pennsylvania Avenue in Philadelphia. There were 15-patient beds and an outpatient clinic as well. Prior to designing the building, a semester-long written study was done that traced the development of the psychiatric hospital as a building type throughout history, in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of the design problem. The images of the finished design below represent an exercise in attempting to understand the formal and spatial experience of the psychiatric hospital as it exists today, rather than project some new, or alternative form or program for the type.

view from the Youth Detention Center across the street

view from the Benjamin Franklin Parkway

The concepts are more fully explored in the thesis document, which you may read here: Thesis Document PDF

The document is best viewed as a two-page spread in acrobat. Please excuse the poor photo quality of this scanned document. The original QuarkXpress file has long since disappeared.