Dan Phillips’s “tree house” made from recycled material. He built and rents it to low-income artists in Huntsville, Texas.

This interesting story appeared in the NY Times today about Dan Phillips, a Texan who makes homes out of salvaged homes for low income buyers.

Kate Murphy writes:
AMONG the traditional brick and clapboard structures that line the streets of this sleepy East Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston, a few houses stand out: their roofs are made of license plates, and their windows of crystal platters.

They are the creations of Dan Phillips, 64, who has had an astonishingly varied life, working as an intelligence officer in the Army, a college dance instructor, an antiques dealer and a syndicated cryptogram puzzle maker. About 12 years ago, Mr. Phillips began his latest career: building low-income housing out of trash.

In 1997 Mr. Phillips mortgaged his house to start his construction company, Phoenix Commotion. “Look at kids playing with blocks,” he said. “I think it’s in everyone’s DNA to want to be a builder.” Moreover, he said, he was disturbed by the irony of landfills choked with building materials and yet a lack of affordable housing.

To him, almost anything discarded and durable is potential building material. Standing in one of his houses and pointing to a colorful, zigzag-patterned ceiling he made out of thousands of picture frame corners, Mr. Phillips said, “A frame shop was getting rid of old samples, and I was there waiting.”

So far, he has built 14 homes in Huntsville, which is his hometown, on lots either purchased or received as a donation. A self-taught carpenter, electrician and plumber, Mr. Phillips said 80 percent of the materials are salvaged from other construction projects, hauled out of trash heaps or just picked up from the side of the road. “You can’t defy the laws of physics or building codes,” he said, “but beyond that, the possibilities are endless.”

While the homes are intended for low-income individuals, some of the original buyers could not hold on to them. To Mr. Phillips’s disappointment, half of the homes he has built have been lost to foreclosure — the payments ranged from $99 to $300 a month.

Some of those people simply disappeared, leaving the properties distressingly dirty and in disrepair. “You can put someone in a new home but you can’t give them a new mindset,” Mr. Phillips said.

Although the homes have resold quickly to more-affluent buyers, Mr. Phillips remains fervently committed to his vision of building for low-income people. “I think mobile homes are a blight on the planet,” he said. “Attractive, affordable housing is possible and I’m out to prove it.”

Freed by necessity from what he calls the “tyranny of the two-by-four and four-by-eight,” common sizes for studs and sheets of plywood, respectively, Mr. Phillips makes use of end cuts discarded by other builders — he nails them together into sturdy and visually interesting grids. He also makes use of mismatched bricks, shards of ceramic tiles, shattered mirrors, bottle butts, wine corks, old DVDs and even bones from nearby cattle yards.

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a complete set of anything because repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern,” said Mr. Phillips, who is slight and sinewy with a long gray ponytail and bushy mustache. He grips the armrests of his chair when he talks as if his latent energy might otherwise catapult him out of his seat.

Phoenix Commotion homes meet local building codes and Mr. Phillips frequently consults with professional engineers, electricians and plumbers to make sure his designs, layouts and workmanship are sound. Marsha Phillips, his wife of 40 years and a former high school art teacher, vets his plans for aesthetics.

“He doesn’t have to redo things often,” said Robert McCaffety, a local master electrician who occasionally inspects Mr. Phillips’s wiring. “He does everything in a very neat and well thought-out manner.” Describing Huntsville as a “fairly conservative town,” Mr. McCaffety said, “There are people who think his houses are pretty whacked out but, by and large, people support what he does and think it’s beneficial to the community.”

Click here for the rest of the article. and check out the multimedia presentation here.

Visit Dan Phillips’ Phoenix Commotion, where you can donate to his cause, and here’s a video on his business:

]]> http://www.brooklynmodern.com/ny-timescom-mans-trash/feed/ 2 http://www.brooklynmodern.com/alice-tulley-hall/ http://www.brooklynmodern.com/alice-tulley-hall/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:20:48 +0000 brooklynmodern http://www.brooklynmodern.com/?p=2405

The principals of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro were on Charlie Rose (see interview) a while back, talking about the redesign of Alice Tully Hall. From an architectural woodworking standpoint, the project is pretty amazing and was fabricated by Fetzer Architectural Woodwork,  Salt Lake City, Utah. I just came across this article on the construction in Design Solutions, which details the process and includes drawings.  Click to download the pdf.

Last week we posted on a documentary that will be coming out this fall on Julius Shulman. Two days later, Shulman passed away. If you’re an admirer, there’s a good article and video on him at  Los Angeles Times. Claudia Luther writes:

Julius Shulman, whose luminous photographs of homes and buildings brought fame to a number of mid-20th century Modernist architects and made him a household name in the architectural world, died Wednesday night. He was 98.

Shulman, who had been in declining health, died at his home in Los Angeles, according to gallery owner Craig Krull, who represented him.

Starting with Richard Neutra in 1936, Shulman’s roster of clients read like a who’s who of pioneering contemporary architecture: Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames, Raphael S. Soriano, John Lautner, Eero Saarinen, Albert Frey, Pierre Koenig, Harwell Harris and many others. His work was contained in virtually every book published on Modernist architects.

To continue reading about Shulman and his extensive career, visit latimes.com.

See coverage of Julius Shulman within the Interior Design Hall of Fame.

Last night I came across Daily Routines, a rather fascinating blog about how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. While I always assumed that the creative mind works best late at night, some of the interviews illustrate the contrary: both Gerhard Richter and Gio Ponti started the day around 6 a.m. Winston Churchill, who was actually a writer by profession,  awoke at 7:30, but worked from bed until 11 a.m. Here is an interesting piece on Le Corbusier. Enjoy it with some morning coffee:

Le Corbusier’s working hours were implacably regular. During my four years at the atelier, he worked at the rue de Sévres from two in the afternoon to around seven. The hour of 2:00 P.M., I soon learned, was holy. If you were a minute late you risked a reprimand. At first Corbu arrived either by subway (a convenient, direct metro line connected his Michel-Ange- Molitor station with the atelier’s Sévres-Babylone) or by taxi. Later on he started driving his old pistachio-green Simca Fiat convertible. In his last years it would be the taxi again. The process of returning home revealed quite a lot about Le Corbusier’s character. If the work went well, if he enjoyed his own sketching and was sure of what he intended to do, then he forgot about the hour and might be home late for dinner. But if things did not go too well, if he felt uncertain of his ideas and unhappy with his drawings, then Corbu became jittery. He would fumble with his wristwatch – a small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw – and finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon the project and me — and us — in a predicament.

Via NY Times’s The Moment Blog.
Photo by David Heald, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1, Madison, Wisc., 1936-37; developed by Situ Studio, Brooklyn.

In “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” an exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, the models of Wright’s designs are attracting as much attention as the exhibition itself. Perhaps the most notable model is that of Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1 of 1936-37, the first of the architect’s pioneering open-plan, energy-efficient Usonian houses. The basswood model takes the house’s components — from its window frames to its innovative copper-piped radiant-heating system — and explodes them, so that they seem to hang in midair.

See the exhibit and watch an interview with Situ’s architects.

This and the exhibition’s five other models were designed and made by Situ Studio, a four-year-old Brooklyn multidisciplinary firm known for its cutting-edge approach to digital design and fabrication technologies. It’s current projects include fabricating a bamboo and birch lobby for One Jackson Square, a soon-to-be-completed building by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The Guggenheim curators chose Situ because they were determined not to go the usual architectural-model route and they even put a clause in Situ’s contract forbidding the use of those fuzzy little hobby-shop trees. Given the museum’s ramped floors, the architects also decided to forgo the usual flat plinth on which most building models sit. Situ’s Wright models seem to grow out of the Guggenheim’s curving parapet, or cantilever off its walls just above eye level. The tabletop terrain model of Taliesin, Wright’s Wisconsin home and studio, functions as a contoured screen (complete with Monopoly-scaled versions of the property’s structures) for the projection of historic landscape reports and plot maps. The display — to which Situ is still adding data — demonstrates the depth of the young architects’ research. They admitted that before embarking on this five-month project, they had only a cursory knowledge of Wright. “He’s not taught in architecture schools like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,” said Bradley Samuels, one of Situ’s partners. Wes Rozen, another partner, added, “He’s more difficult to analyze.”