S H E A T H E D

sheathing complete. just in time for the holiday. i rather miss the light streaming through the rafters.

F R A M I N G . 3

with part of the exterior sheathing and the north elevation fascia backing up, a real house is starting to take form.

the interior walls and ceilings are framed giving us the first real sense of the space outside the 3d model. even

though the square footage was kept to a minimum, the organization of the program and the high ceilings help

to make the spaces feel much larger. 

D E L A Y

rain, wet wood, and mud. lots of it.

F R A M I N G . 2

coming together. we had some framing issues, but phil was great about fixing the errors so that the overall
roof form would maintain the design intent. having a 3d model of both the design and the structural framing
has been invaluable in being able to communicate and work through issues. as detailed as we make our
drawings, very few people understand three dimensional objects in two dimensional representation. an image
can make complexity clearer and zooming around a 3d model can sometimes perform magic.

F R A M I N G . 1

this week was the first week of framing. we are still working out our window order with metal window corp
since we had to adjust the height of all our windows by 6 inches due to our building height issue. seeing 
the basic outline of the house go up has helped reaffirm some of the rapid changes we had to make on the fly. 
overall, we struck a nice balance between cost and as much glazing as possible by maintaining relatively 
standard sizing and minimizing the operable elements of our large openings. metal window corp has been super 
helpful in working out the details for many of our mulled conditions and maintaining the thinnest profiles possible 
for our frames.

S L A B

the pex tubing for the radiant heat in the floor slab was tied to the rebar and then insulated before pouring the
interior footings and slab. the tracks for the sliding doors and drains in the bathroom are seamless, so we
integrated the recess into the pour to eliminate the need for cutting through the slab later. the footing reveal
turned out well.

C O N C R E T E . F O O T I N G S

fun day. like playing in the mud. pour. mix. smooth. repeat.

A D J U S T . A D A P T

during the design process, once we had settled on pursuing a formal investigation of 'home' as an iconic symbol,
we put a lot of effort into the proportioning of that representation. the study focused primarily on the hierarchical
relationship between the shed and the gable roofs (left and right) and the balance of what we saw as two stacked
volumes (the lower 'box' and the upper folded mass). all of this resulted in a roof ridge that peaked at 19' - one
foot above the 18' max for one-story construction - and a massive headache in dealing with the LA building 
department. to keep the height we added 6" to the side yard (which we had already padded with 6"), meeting the
requirements for a two-story construction.

everything seemed ok until an inspector showed up to inspect the formwork for the footings, didn't have enough
to do, and requested a survey. the lot lines in venice are nearly a hundred years old, fences have gone up and
come down over the years, vegetation tends to run wild, and the city doesn't maintain markers. in other words,
property lines are fuzzy. especially these particular lines which run at a variety of angles, none of which are
parallel to the existing house (which isn't even parallel to itself). despite the extra foot we added to the side yard
for our roof ridge in our one-story construction, the inspector determined that, due to the angle of the property
line, the back corner of the footings dug by the contractor was 3" too close to that line. for a one-story
construction like ours, that is still 9" of extra side yard.

but since logical reasoning is apparently absent in the LADBS, we are required to either redo the formwork 
(which the contractor doesn't want to do), get a variance from the neighbors and the city (which the client 
doesn't want to do), or re-proportion the structure and redo the entire drawing set and resubmit to my
favorite plan checker, sai, with a roof ridge at 18' by the end of next week (which i don't want to do). guess who
lost the straw draw.

we knew lowering the roof ridge to 18' would make the overall form feel squat, so we decided to decrease 
the height of the lower 'box' volume by 6" accordingly (meaning all of the windows would drop from 8' to 7'6"). 
the 1' drop also made it impossible to maintain a visual hierarchy between the gable and the shed, forcing us
to simplify the roof plane into a single folded sheet with 4 creases along two varied height edge lines (18' and 8'6).

F O R M W O R K

building the formwork for the footings. on the north elevation we have a reveal at the base that allows the addition
to hover above the ground plane. to maintain the flat uniformity of the fascia, it needed to be integrated into the 
poured footing.

1.