……… Renovation ………
The thought of existing architecture made modernized with new fashion and theories is a mixing of two worlds, an old generation meeting a new baby to foster. The old farm-house kitchen, the simplistic shaker style is a nostalgic modernism, an architecture that was built in need to host the basic function of preparing food.
A sustainable house is one that already exists. Can architects make good impact making existing things work better? At the Dairy House in Somerset England, architect Skene Catling de la Peña as described in Architectural Record’s Record Houses, does, by bringing a 1902 Hadspen Estate building back to life.
The slits of old wooden boards are held apart with glass, allowing daylight in, and acting as a night-light to the landscape by dusk.
Christopher Hawthorne describes it as Skene Catling de la Peña’s Dairy House, in England, meanwhile, not only brought a 1902 structure back to life but did so using local materials, craftsmen, and know-how, expanding the notion of green design to include what the client calls “social sustainability.”By defining sustainability in such a broad and thoughtful way, the Dairy House also offers a way to summarize the attitude of this year’s Record Houses as a whole. As Diana Lind writes in her description of the project, “When you get down to it, whether a work of architecture is green is usually a shade of gray.”
One more thing… this is a funky Architecture website I found myself at recently:
Passive Architect 