Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Tips for your home office

House in Mt Eden. Existing sunroom opened up to lounge, home office created
in new sunroom extension (at rear of picture). Pic by Organon Architecture. 

SO YOU'VE BEEN FORCED to work from home, and we're all pretty clear nothat it's likely to be for a very long time.

You can only work from the kitchen table for so long. And using a laptop on your lap for any length of time will quickly leave you with neck pain and feelings of frustration.

Having had my own office at home for many years now, I've learned a thing or two so that I can help you setting up your own.

We all know the usual tips for working from home: get dressed, have a regular routine, don't work in any kind of pants that have a drawstring....

But what about how to set up your home office, now that you know you may be using it for some time.

I don't know much about drawstring pants, but I do know a bit about spaces and how best to arrange them. So here are a few tips ...

Four major don'ts: 

1. Don't work from your master bedroom. You need your regular bedroom for sleep, especially when (like everyone at the moment!) you really need that sleep to heal. There are ways to make it work architecturally (if no other option are available) but, in general, don't confuse your subconscious by mixing work and sleep -- especially if you're the sort of person whose desk isn't clear at the end of every day!
2. Keep away from the fridge!  It's too easy to graze all day when you're at home, without realising the message your mirror is sending you. So try to keep to a regular schedule of breaks and meals instead of being ongoing. And if you do lack the won't-power, then set up a kettle in your workspace so you can avoid the temptation. (A good idea anyway of your house has too many other distractions.)
3. Don't spend all day in your pyjamas. Yes, it is a cliche. That's because it is too easy: throw off the bed-clothes, stumble into the kitchen, rub sleep out of your eyes as you drink your first coffee at your kitchen-table desk ... and then realise several hours later that those online quizzes and twitter chats aren't going to get your work done, and you're already full of aches and pains from sitting badly for too many hours. So do make sure you have a place that tells your subconscious "I'm going here to work!" and then get dressed for it and ready for it as if it's a regular work day. Because it is. (And then make sure you separate yourself from your work once the work day ends too. I recommend a martini.)
4. Don't stay inside! One of the great things about working from your neighbourhood is (hopefully) access to gardens, trees and open spaces. Use them! Get outside regularly. Take regular walks, have lunch in the open air, talk to other people (from a suitable distance!). In short, avoid cabin fever and keep yourself linked into the outside world. (Especially important is to spend at least thirty minutes, early in the day, out under the open sky. Sleep researchers tells us this is the single most important thing we can do to lock in the circadian rhythms that support healthy sleep.)

Another thing: with the possibility of schools and daycare closing soon, your children may be in the house with you. Which makes it even more important to carve out your own special space away from all the hubbub so you can focus. If your partner is home too, maybe you rotate shifts keeping an eye on anyone who needs it, but do make sure you can carve out three-hour blocks of time (minimum) to focus on your work. [I'll make a few comments in a few days about home-schooling, if anyone's interested.]

And you are going to need that quiet uninterrupted space too when you get into all those online work meetings. Who can forget this now-famous TV interview -- you (possibly) don't want this happening to you!

So, some Architectural Tips. This may be your workstation for some time. Do it properly. You may need to do some minor (or major!) renovation to your home; or you may be able to think laterally and only move around a bit of furniture -- it's amazing how a bit of lateral thinking can free up space! - but you have to make sure that its going to work so that you can enjoy working there. It has to be ergonomic, have decent shelving so your stuff is all to-hand, it is has to work efficiently and productively.

And it has to feel right, to support you psychologically. Especially now, when everyone's an emotional mess. It has to be a place of your own.

You don't necessarily need to use a whole room either. Try to get your spaces do double duty. Think about how much space you can make in a boat or a caravan -- often with things that easily hide away. That's the kind of thinking you might need to use.

Look for a spot you don't use -- an attic, behind a chimney space, part of a wide hallway or passage, large wardrobes ... there's more room available than you think, especially if you're thinking laterally.

You have to make the lighting work for you too.  No shadows across your work from lights or windows in the wrong place (so you'll have a totally different arrangement depending on whether you're right or left-handed). No high-reflective surfaces. Proper visual weight to the lighting arrangement. No looking directly into light fittings (see the effect of the light, not the light source). No glare on your screen from either lights or late-afternoon sun, enough light on your paperwork so you don't hurt your eyes.  In the right place so it supports your work rather than hinders it -- and makes you look good in online meetups too!

And remember: add delight. You are going to be here for many hours, possibly for many months. Make sure you have a view, or some art, or some plants -- or all three! Any place in which you spend this much time has to feed your soul just as much as you are busy feeding your out-box.

[Pic from Not So Big Remodelling: Tailoring Your Home For the Way You Really Live]

Some principles to think through...

Continued here at my Organon Architecture blog:
>>>>>> READ THE WHOLE POST: Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Tips for your home office
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Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Using tricks to deliver meaning

 

The human eye can be 'tricked' * -- something of which every decent artist and architect is aware.

Take this tricked-up meme currently doing the rounds,

an image of intersecting grey lines against a white background, with 12 black dots on the nodes where the grey lines meet.
    All 12 dots are really on the image, but most people are unable to see them all at the same time, making the dots seem like they appear and disappear with every blink. This occurs because the eye’s stimulated light receptors can sometimes influence the ones next to them, creating illusions.
    In this particular image, tweeted by game developer Will Kerslake on Sunday, the brain can see some black dots but guesses when it fills in the peripheral vision. Because mostly grey lines appear in the periphery, the black dots don’t appear…
    How many dots can you see at once?

So because we perceive in a certain way, artists and architects use this in their work.

Based on understanding how we perceive colour and colour contrasts, artists use it to create real spatial depth in paintings.

Based on understanding how we perceive light (strong contrast between light and shadow needed to see real contrast), artists use it to create life and excitement on a canvas, and architects to create it in spaces.

Based on understanding howwe perceive colour in light and shade, architects use it to select darker colours on a window wall to relieve glom inside and better connect us with nature outside.

Based on understanding how we perceive continuity and spatial enclosure, architects use it to 'break the box' and expand the sense of space.

Based on understanding how we perceive the visual field, architects use it to order space and to ‘capture a view alive.’

Yes, these are all visual tricks. But they work because they respond to the ways we perceive, and because they work they can and are used to create real meaning.

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* This does not mean the eye is unreliable - it simply means that (in the case of refraction, for example) it often shows us more context than we know, so while our perception is automatic what what we perceive sometimes needs interpretation.

[Hat tip Kaila Geary Halling. Cross-posted at the Organon Architecture Blog]

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Architectural Mini-Tutorial: More about windows

 

“So, what about our windows?” It’s usually a half-asked question at some early stage of a project, about the colour of windows generally – which are usually picked by someone who has a favourite colour they see in a brochure – or about how many windows in a space – just holes punched in a wall -- but the placement and colour of your windows is more important than you might think.

Consider it from the point of view of perception, as architect Richard Neutra used to. Former Neutra apprentice John Blanton explains the importance of size and placement:

Studies in neuroscience in architecture will continue to show the benefits of bright, daylight rooms..
    Lowering costs through simplicity was always a factor for [Neutra] so that the client could afford gracious social areas within a limited budget, which he took very seriously.
    A room with a single exposure, especially a bedroom or business office, is the hardest to work with. Neutra’s answer was wall-to-wall windows, but not necessarily floor-to-ceiling. Extending them to the corners created light onto, and gained reflection from, the side walls. This accomplishes brightness with lessening of glare. Some light from those walls reflects back onto the solid portion of the window wall, again decreasing glare. Thus, a feeling of a dark cave wall with a single overly bright opening was avoided.
    The effect of opening up the room is further enhanced because the eye flows to the nature beyond the glass, unhampered by the enclosure of dead corners. I have long believed that glare is caused by the eye’s rapid re-focusing between light and dark. This is stressful, which is why it is uncomfortable. Together with similar adjacent rooms, these wall-to-wall windows produced a long ribbon window on the exterior.

So it’s not enough just to punch a hole in your wall: to avoid the dark cave means more glass than you might have thought: and  glass especially going to the corners, so light can fully wash the internal walls.  (And feel free to even take the glass round onto the next wall plane itself to fully open up your corners!)

And bear this in mind when you’re hanging your curtains: make sure you have enough curtain rail to take all of your curtains well past their window when they’re open, and to draw them away from any adjacent wall lest they remain and cast the very shadow you’re trying to avoid.

Notice too that the exterior effect (the long ribbon window) is produced by the interior purpose, that purpose being to avoid glare and dark corners, and fully open up the space to nature outside the glass. This connection, Neutra believed and neuroscience has since confirmed, is essential for human health and well-being.

Bear in mind too, especially if fitting blinds, that because the brightest part of the ‘sky dome’ is directly above us, we will get most of our light through the window’s top-third, so unless you do want that dark cave you’d best avoid having your blinds bunch up at the top of your window.

So what about the colour of your windows, and the window walls? Does perception play a part in suggesting how to handle these? Sure does: to minimise the contrast between the outside brightness and the shadow unavoidably cast on the inside of your window joinery, Neutra always favoured the light-reflecting colour of silver. But for his window-walls themselves, something much richer:

The walls below Neutra’s continuous windows might have built-in cabinetry or in a colour different than the white side walls, perhaps the favorite colour of a child occupant. If white paint were to be used below the windows as on the side walls, that low band of paint would actually appear to look dirty because less light is being reflected there. However, because using a colour could detract from the view outdoors, which was his invariable goal because it promised the most actual health benefit, he did this on an individual basis. Ideally, his choice for this lower band was his chocolate “Neutra Brown.” This particular brown, it seems to me, is a “magic colour” in that the eye identifies it but does not attempt to focus on it, so its use is oddly comforting, as I have experienced.
    Any post in this extended bank of windows was usually painted silver, another “magic” colour. It created the least amount of contrast with the incoming light, and it almost made any post disappear to create openness. Again, expansiveness! Additionally, Neutra ensured that any vertical sliding door jamb would be hidden on the exterior side of a post or wall. Likewise, he concealed the horizontal head of such door so that it was hidden within or behind the roof framing. Again, openness, rather than a sliding door frame silhouetted within the structural frame, which would pose another obstruction to our view of the outdoors. It is an experience so subtle that it is not seen other than subliminally.
    All this gives us the “Neutra impact.” We do not look at his windows, we look through them.

That’s the reward of we get it all right: by starting from the inside out, letting the function dictate the form.

I hope this Mini-Tutorial has helped you see the placement and colour of your windows rather differently.

Feel free to check out all the other Architectural Mini-Tutorials for more fresh ways to see architecture.

* * *  Pics used show Richard Neutra’s Hailey House, pics by Angeleno Living. Text quoted from Barbara Lamprecht’s wonderful Neutra blog.

[Cross-posted to the Organon Architecture blog]

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Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Radiant Heat

 

“Let it snow!”
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Bachman-Wilson House.

 

Lots of homes new and old now have a system installed in their floors called “radiant heating,” sometimes just called “underfloor heating,” a system of heating coils in your concrete floor that (if used and installed properly) keeps it warm in winter even when it’s a winter wonderland outside.

Why is it so damn good when used properly, why is it often so widely misunderstood? (And who really invented it?)

To answer all that, we need to start by talking heat transfer.

Heat transfer

As anyone who’s ever tried to heat a draughty house will know, heat likes to transfer itself from warmer to colder. And as anyone who’s ever studied physics might remember, there only three main ways by which heat can be transferred:

1. by convection, i.e., by air
2. by radiation , i.e., by electromagnetic waves
3. by conduction, i.e., by touch

And as anyone who has ever sat in front of an open fire will know, even when hot air is going up a chimney, if you turn your face to the fire you will still feel the fire’s heat, even from some distance away.

That’s the power of radiant heat – the second of the three ways heat is transferred. You can feel this same form of heat transfer from the sun too – heat transferred across the vacuum of space simply by electromagnetic waves, making it warm enough some days to sunbathe even in winter, from a heat source millions of miles away.

How we lose heat to the environment

 

So radiant heat is really ‘the heat of the sun.’

Heat, and us

Now, transfer this knowledge to our own bodies, swaddled up on a winter’s night. Leaving aside sweating, i.e., evaporation (which is a nice-to-have on a hot summer’s day, but a bad way to lose heat on a cold winter’s night!) there are three ways our body loses heat.

1. by convection, to colder air
2. by radiation, to colder distant surfaces
3. by conduction, to colder surfaces we’re touching.

Now, it’s obviously nice to have a warm floor so we don’t lose heat by conduction through our feet. But as you can see above, losing heat through our body’ peripheral parts is not our biggest heating problem (depending of course on which peripheral parts we’re talking about!). Mostly, we need to avoid losing excessive heat from our body’s core. And it turns out that we lose just over a third of our body’s heat by convection, lost to cold air, yet we lose nearly two-thirds of our body heat by radiation to colder surfaces.

That’s important.

It means that heating people is not so much about keeping people warm, as stopping them cooling down – and, paradoxically, we arrive at the conclusion that the very best way to warm someone most directly is to warm the surfaces around them. (Yet, unfortunately, so many of the most common heat systems installed in our homes heat the latter, and ignore the former!)

Funny stuff, eh.

So, do that right, gently heat your surfaces to avoid major heat loss from our bodies, and we can create beautiful open spaces that feel perfectly comfortable to be inside in all weather, and we needn’t feel stuffy even in winter.

The greatest misunderstanding

Got that? You’re heating your surfaces to avoid losing heat from your body. You are not trying to heat the air. Yet this is the greatest misunderstanding that many people harbour about radiant heating: that you are trying to heat your floor in order to heat your air, so they turn up their underfloor heating until the air feels warm and the room suitable stuffy. That couldn’t be more wrong:  You are heating your floor to stop the people within losing their body heat to cold surfaces. Try using your floors to heat the air instead and you’ll still be as stuffy as buggery, and your power bills will start getting the extreme attention of your bank manager.

And your bank manager need not be concerned if your system is well installed (perhaps with a heat pump as heat source) and it’s intelligently used. Because, once you understand that all these systems need to do is to minimise the difference between the floor and our body temperature, you understand that these radiant heat systems don’t even need to be turned up high to do their main job.

Even a temperature of 18^oC or so can be enough to make a room feel comfortable and, if we have heating pipes on our terraces, they can even melt all that snow. And because exposing skin to warmer surfaces exposes us more directly to radiation, we might even enjoy the experience better by sitting around in our shirtsleeves!

It also, incidentally, makes a more comfortable temperature gradient for the human body (above), without the head copping the majority of our heat!

Who really wants a hot head in their house?

Some history

So, where did this really neat ‘new’ idea of radiant heating come from? Turns out it’s not so new.

In modern times, the idea came from that genius Frank Lloyd Wright, who had it installed in his first Jacobs House (below) in 1936, in the cold American Midwest climate of Wisconsin. (The pic at right shows the necessary under-floor heating pipes laid out all ready for the concrete pour in the very similar 1939 Pope-Leighey House).

The owner-builder of the Jacobs House (Herbert Jacobs) liked the experiment so much he installed it again in his second Frank Lloyd Wright house – in a place with even larger glass windows in an even less hospitable clime -- and Wright installed it in virtually every house and commercial building thereafter.

It not only liberated the buildings from awkward and unsightly heating appliances, it allowed large open spaces –and even open windows! – even on cold nights in frigid climates.

The application was new, but the idea itself was ancient. Wright ran hot water in galvanised steel pipes in the first Jacobs House, but centuries before that the Romans had built fires to heat hollow ducts, or hypocausts, in walls and ceilings in homes, pools and their sacred buildings.

But Wright didn’t get the idea from them, at least not directly. He first encountered it in Japan where, in his patron Baron Okura’s otherwise frigid Japanese house, there was a basement space they called “the Korean Room” to which everyone retreated of an evening. Wright’s account well describes the feeling of a good radiant heat system.

This room was about eleven by fifteen feet, ceiling seven feet [says Wright]. … We knelt there for conversation and Turkish coffee.
    The climate seemed to have changed [from the frigid rooms above]. No, it wasn’t the coffee, it was Spring. We were soon warm and happy again—kneeling there on the floor, and indescribable warmth. No heating was visible, nor was it felt directly as such. It was really a matter not of heating at all but an affair of climate.

The Baron’s interpreter explained that Spring was created by heating the floor in precisely the same way as the Roman hypocaust system. Wright immediately felt that it was such a natural way to heat a home, and almost immediately tried to incorporated what he called “gravity heat” into his new buildings. He enthused:

There are now as many different systems to choose from as there are misunderstandings about what the system is trying to do (even, I might even say especially, by many installers). But when you’re installing, or thinking of installing, a radiant heat system today, take comfort that you’re part of a legacy that goes back to the Romans and to ancient Korean sages, through Frank Lloyd Wright – and that by heating your concrete floor, you’re using the most efficient way to most directly heat a person’s body in open space.

You're installing heat superior even to that of the sun!  Even when it snows outside.

 

** Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve found this mini-tutorial a useful
way to see an important element of modern architecture.**

 

[Pics from New-Learn Info, NBM, Prairie Mod, www.earlybritishkingdoms.com, www.litbrix.com]

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Brandes house, enjoying the snow

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Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Organising our visual field

If we want to “break the box” instead of make a box when we build our houses, then we need to shake a few tricks up our sleeve.

A while back I talked about how ceiling decks are one of those tricks. Another is using “nested spaces” within a place.

Today I’m going to talk about how the way we perceive what’s called “the visual field” in front of us can be used to reduce the sense of enclosure.

It seems almost obvious to point out that we can never see all of a building at once. In The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Rudolph Arnheim discusses this, explaining that we perceive architectural space only “in pieces,” by eyes and head “roving back and forth over the edifice and by traversing around it,” and combining these in memory to build up a 3d model in our mind. And like coming to understand a painting, he says, we begin by examining the “visual field.”

In observing a painting, this perceptual process identifies the various elements and relations that constitute the work. A perceptual listing is prepared consisting of a description of shapes, an identification of each colour, and an examination of the relations of individual elements.¹

In a shorthand way, this means identifying all the main visual elements you see – shapes, lines, colours, relations between elements -- that visually organise the space. This doesn’t mean identifying the elements that hold a building up (although in many a good building the two things coincide) but the things in your visual field that constitute the main visual presence.

In a sense, the elements visually organising the space would be the main lines you would sketch if you had just, say, a minute to draw your point of view – or what you would see if your squinted your eyes.

Consider the 2d representation of the space below built a few years back in Hamilton:

So, what are the main shapes, lines and colours organising the visual field in this picture?

I’ll give you a moment while you squint your eyes, or scratch out a quick sketch. (Don’t worry if it’s a bit rough.)

Okay, here's my two-minute sketch, at the bottom of the page, below the fold.

The point being that the dominant elements organising the visual field for the observer, from this view, are primarily:

a) the vertical masonry piers,
b) the coloured vertical 'pier' at the end of the main space,
c) the vertical corner to the left, and
d) the floating ceiling deck overhead.

Why is that important to what I’m talking about here? Because, crucially, NONE OF THESE ELEMENTS CONTAIN THE SPACE.

Think about it. Look around the box you’re undoubtedly sitting in now. In a simple box, what defines the space visually – what defines each observer’s visual field within the space -- are the very things that contain the space, i.e., the walls and ceiling. So the visual field offers you a sense of containment.

But if you can define the space without reference to the things that contain it, then the 'container' starts to disappear, and space appears to flow more freely. The visual field offers you a sense of freedom.

In other words, by taking away the visual dominance of the things that contain your space, you allow the sense of space itself to dominate.

In other words, this is one way to begin BREAKING THE BOX.

There are two bonus features with this little trick.

1. As you can see in my sketch below the fold, the ceiling deck is a major element in organising the visual field. If we can then take this outside by means of pergolas, say, that will essentially take this same organisational motif outside, then we can really begin organising our perception of space both inside and out without reference to our “container,” and we can begin to realise “inside-outside flow” much more dramatically than by simply adding a few sliding doors.
2. If our organisation of the visual field is strong enough, then we can “clutter” our kitchen benches and tables as much as we like, because the organising elements will still be be organising the visual field for us; unlike in those stark bare boxes you see in magazines, that look untidy with a small coffee cup on a pristine bench.

In short, it’s a simple yet relatively sophisticated method by which to make a space for relaxed day-to-day living with a genuine sense of freedom.

Cool, huh.

Architectural Mini-Tutorial: Ceiling Decks

Open plan living is a vast improvement on life in a box -- or in a series of boxes, which is what describes most traditional houses, unfortunately.

But it’s not enough just to be “open plan.”  The biggest open plan space is just a field, right?  Good open-plan living still requires a delineation of spaces within the larger space – it’s just more difficult for the designer to ensure the right degree of separation between the sub-spaces, and the right amount of integration of each sub-space with the main space.

In a well-designed open space, each space will have its own character, and will flow easily and comfortably into other spaces – especially if the spaces are successfully “nested.” It should feel natural, not forced, with each space retaining its own character within the larger space, but still being a part of it.  Done properly, the “separation” or division of spaces gives the right feelings of liberation or enclosure appropriate to the space.

It’s important that the definition of each each space within the larger whole is done a subtle manner so as to avoid there simply being a space like 'one large barn.'  Some popular methods of achieving this separation are:

• different floor coverings in different space;
• changes in floor level between spaces;
• furnishing layouts;
• the use of sliding or folding 'screens';
• the use of room proportions and wall returns to break up a larger space into smaller sub-spaces;
• posts and the like between spaces;
• changes in window and door layouts, e.g., a french door layout in one part of a space, and perhaps clerestory windows in the other;

The method by which the separation is achieved is usually dependent on the extent and quality of the spatial separation required.

All these methods of suggesting separation of spaces, from subtle to obvious, can be used in virtually every open space. In fact, one of the best places to see these methods in action "out in the wild" is in some of the best-designed bars and pubs, which use virtually every method there is to make small sociable, friendly spaces within a much larger whole. And here's one of the most effective methods to do this job:

• changes in ceiling height, including the use of lowered ceilings and lowered ceiling decks, like this:

Which brings me to ceiling decks – a special kind of “overhead plane” that is among the very best ways to frame a space and begin making a home out of a house.

A ceiling deck is essentially a lowered “ceiling slab'” that you can see over, and in which you might have downlights, uplights and all your other services. (Great for future proofing because it's very easy to rewire!)

Your cunning designer can use ceiling decks to frame a space; to separate two spaces; to direct a view; and to give order and pleasurable contrast to a series of different-sized (or even same-sized) spaces.

If you've got them at the right heights, by playing off expected proportions with the unexpected proportions you build in, you can really begin to make a small space appear very much larger indeed.

And oddly enough, if the “decks” are done well and they become the primary ordering element of a space – the means by which all the space in your building is “read” – then your walls and all the home's other enclosures start to lose their importance.  You’ve started to “break the box”-- reducing the sense of enclosure without removing the sense of place a home should give you.

Which maybe explains why you see them so rarely. Most modern designers like boxes.  And they despise subtlety.

Ceiling decks offer a particularly subtle way both to 'frame a space' and to divide one space from another, but also – if you do them well -- lowered ceiling decks that 'frame' a space help to make that space and those around it appear larger than they are.

So basically, a lowered ceiling deck is simply a lowed or independent part of a ceiling, usually horizontal in the manner of an above-ground 'deck.'

Why do they work so well? Well, here's one reason--your "space bubble."  See:

Each of us has our own personal space bubble--and, if we're with friends or family, a social space bubble within which we feel our personal space is contained.

Ceiling decks help "frame" these larger bubbles to give real presence to a space. And with lower decks, they offer a very good way of "squeezing down" a space bubble over eating areas for example, or at an entrance, which can then be "released" into a larger space--the contrast between the two making the large space feel larger and the lower space cosier.

This is simply a three-dimensional use of the technique of “containment” and then “release” used for centuries by the designers of Japanese landscapes and courtyard gardens. The same technique built in and updated.

A ceiling deck, or a lowered ceiling, can be in any style and suit houses of any era. Here are some examples of lowered ceilings, ceiling decks, ceiling dividers and “picture rails” (used to suggest a lowered ceiling) using different styles, and from different eras, all of them successful. See if you can see all the designers are hoping to achieve in each case: