Monday, November 10, 2008

To back up a little.....

When I first started this search for the perfect houseplan, DWELL magazine didn't exist. To find modern design houseplans, a person had to go to the library and look in fat, slick books by architects whose names were unpronounceable, or find the one and only modern house in a collection of "500,000 Budget Plans You Can Build" in the grocery store magazine aisle, or hope that the "Plan of the Week" in the News Leader had fewer than five bedrooms and three porches with a four car garage and a boat stall. DWELL brought hope and possibilities and websites other than the over-stuffed collection sites that had a different understanding of what "contemporary" was than I did. For the next few years, I looked at a billion houseplans on the internet, read DWELL, communicated with a few people who had some real promising plans they offered as "stock" plans, and started stashing pictures and articles from people like Gregory La Vardera, Atkison Studio, Dan Rockhill, Adam Kalkin, El Dorado Architects, and Rocio Romero. I had a list of 9 things I thought I needed in my house: kitchen, laundry/pantry area, bathroom, 2 bedrooms with closets, living room, fireplace, dining area, screened porch, storage. I wanted an agri-industrial-modern-galvanized metal siding house with concrete floors and high ceilings that looked like it belonged on a ridge in Webster County over-looking the James River.

During that same time, I used to give my old New Yorker magazines to Tom Netzer to read. In exchange, Sally Netzer would give me her old Springfield Business Journals. Who's to say who got the best deal, but that's where I first read about theworkshop 308 in the year-long series they did called "Evolution of an Enterprise" and that's what got me in their front door during that Summer of 2007. I could tell by looking at them, they would understand. And they did.

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