Lessons In Material

Today, as a studio, we traveled east to Biloxi, Ms to look at the work of the Gulf Coast Community Design Center to look at how other designers have dealt with some of the more challenging aspects of working in the region post Katrina.  While looking around we came across a recently finished project by Marlon Blackwell that was done for Architecture for Humanity.

The project is interesting because of the material usage.  The materials are all off the shelf, but used in ways that are out of the norm, something that Jim constantly talked about with us last year.

The siding on the building is that which is typically used on steel buildings everyday but with out much thought.  But my favorite detail on the whole building is on what is the back of the house.  The porch, which is an element of the region, is viewed as a key element of many of the homes here.  In this project, the porch is shaded by a screen which is hung on garage door tracks allowing them to drop down to a vertical plane and shade from the harsh western sun in the evening, but be put up on a horizontal plane to protect from the during the day when the porch is being used.