The Pottery House
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The Pottery House project is a restoration of a house built in the mid-1980s in suburban Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Pottery House was initially designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s to be built on the westside of El Paso. However, the project was interrupted by World War II and never built in El Paso. In the 1980s, a Santa Fe developer commissioned the Taliesin Architects to adapt Wright's Pottery House concept posthumously for a site on the top of a ridge overlooking downtown Santa Fe. The house design was site adapted, scaled up to fit the owners' needs, and altered for the Santa Fe climate. The adobe house is approximately 5,000 SF — featuring curves in every direction with rich wood interiors crafted from a naturally finished vertical grain Douglas Fir.
Over a number of years, the house suffered from neglect and lack of maintenance which took its toll before an El Paso - based entrepreneur bought the property. In*Situ worked with the new owner to restore this beautiful house to its original beauty and modernize its building systems. At the client's request, two new amenities for the house were carefully designed and inserted into Wright's original design. Both insertions were intentionally sited in ways that their structure was independent of the Wright house and could be removed in the future without causing damage. The first insertion was an outdoor shower in the master bedroom courtyard. The second insertion is tripartite of steel trellises organized by the radial grid of the great room and west facing patio to solve a harsh afternoon solar exposure for the patio and great room beyond. Because no as-built drawings were available when work began, In*Situ started documenting the house with 3D Laser-Scanning. Using this method was a critical step because every wall of the house is curved in two directions – making it very difficult to document in drawing form. The 3D data cloud generated by the laser scanning was modeled in Revit, from which the construction documents for the project were generated. |
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