Thanks to all the current subscribers to the Elevate Architecture blog. We have decided to move new content to the main site, so for future updates and the latest news please go to The main site blog instead. Don’t worry, this in not an ending but really just the beginning. Thanks again, and see you around.
-Elevate Architecture
I recently found this glass house gallery on my favorite image browser, imjur. We dream of doing lots of glazing on buildings here in the Rio Grande Valley, but energy codes are highly regulatory on heat gain, and quite frankly the result of too much glass is often a very hot problem. Here at Elevate Architecture, we are always developing details to meet the demand for transparent architecture, and we will be bringing some to market hopefully in the near future.
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science opened in December of 2012. This new architectural icon in one of the Texas’ most beloved cities is a great addition to a metropolis pot marked with examples of great design almost as much as tragic ones. Like many American metropolises, Dallas is a city of contrasts which is why the site and project fit so well with the architecture of Morphosis.
Detractors would say this design is just another oddity of high brow architecture, but if you look under the hood, you will see the that the building illustrates a clear concept of the collision of forces happening in both the subject matter of the building as well as within the context of its site. A cube both fragmenting and reassembling itself sits atop of a wave formed landscaped roof deck. Morphosis excels at not only crafting heterogeneous spatial forms, but is also a master of conveying architectural poetry in material use and design. For example, notice how surface of the the concrete shell of the iconic cube starts its ascension to sky as if it is being uncompressed and stretched upward as the building cube form moves upward. This building really is a stellar example the mature form language Morphosis has developed over time. Love it or hate it, go see this building.
What do you get when you take an interesting shape and run it through a tomato slicer? Answer: The Dolomite Luxury Apartment Building of course! Call it what you will, but I love it. Inspired by the Dolomite Mountains in Spain, this highly formal, and beautifully crafted luxury get away is stunning. According to Inhabitat , the building is clad in copper and larch. This is how you elevate architecture….design a gorgeous art form that references the natural form of its context, and then bury it into the existing landscape. Its just too bad you don’t get a budget like that to work with every day. Here is another set of photos.
I found this great post on houses that are using green roofs. As you would expect, most of these homes are not in the US. Perhaps it is our climate, or perhaps the lack of “know-how” in our design and construction industry. Well, we always catch up at some point (about 5-10 years on average), so we can hope to see more of these in the US in the future.
At Elevate Architecture, it is in our plans to develop some home prototypes that use green roofs in the near future, but we have yet to develop those details/design. Achieving a successful green roof in South Texas should be particularly challenging because of the ultra-hot climate we have here. If you will notice this article features homes in mostly temperate to cool climates. There is a reason for that. When we develop a home prototype with a green roof system for the Rio Grande Valley, you will find it featured on our on the boards page.
House 3: Front Perspective
At Elevate Architecture, our main drive is to challenge the status quo of what to expect from everyday architecture. Yes, that involves an understanding of global critical theory as well as regional critical theory, and of course an understanding of how things get built. However, we also are in the business of just bringing back quality design to a place that needs a major dose of the stuff that is made of.
The new home housing market in the Rio Grande Valley is surprisingly robust. One of the products we are developing at our firm is a portfolio of homes that would sit nicely in the suburban landscape of McAllen, Harlingen, or Brownsville. These home designs are sited on existing lots, and will have a thoroughly developed concept for future owners to acquire and then customize to their liking, sort of like a virtual custom home. The project above is an early rendering of our latest addition to that portfolio. Visit our on the boards page in the weeks to come to see more of this luxury custom home infused with some Southern Californian Modern taste.
In his book Spomenik, Jan Kempenaers creates a beautiful taxonomy of the fractured past of the Eastern Europe block through his visual documentation of brutalist monoliths. These creations were used at one time to help unify, exemplify, and honor the character of those who had given their lives to hold up an ideal that was once embraced by the whole. Beautiful, yet haunting, this book of photographs captures the human spirit embodied in the pursuits of art and architecture in a very unique subject matter. See the full review on the American Society of Cinematographers blog.
Well, architecture certainly moves people in different ways. Mark Lascelles Thornton uses a literal impression of architecture in excruciating hand drawn detail overlaid by an artistic red tint that he colors into his latest art project call The Happiness Machine.
Elevate Architecture was present at the Power Network Luncheon put on by the McAllen Chamber of Commerce at the Yacht Club in McAllen. We thank the McAllen Chamber of Commerce and Mayor for hosting this event. While we met many innovative entrepreneurs in the area, the most notable item was learning about an ap called The Scanning Game, created by a partnership with the McAllen COC and a local company called MPC Studios. It is a fantastic networking utility for your smart phone, check it out. Now that’s what I call business innovation.
Couldn’t resist posting this one…we all know what this was like.