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Roadcut n. A cut through a hill or mountain for the purposes of building infrastructure through it, rather than over it. I'm not the only member of my family fascinated by roadcuts. On family car trips growing up, my father would stop at roadcuts to scour them for fossils. Sometimes he would successfully return to the car with multi-million year old sea urchins or shark teeth; other times only with disappointment that the formation he was seeking had disappeared under the asphalt at the preceding mile marker. I have always been enamored by the appearance and physical attributes of the roadcut...
Lake|Flato is fortunate to have work at amazing sites around the country (and beyond), and so our project teams often get to bring home wonderful new experiences and discoveries about places, whether visiting for the first time or revisiting them in greater depth. As one of those lucky traveling project teams, Matt Morris and I recently gained a fresh fondness for Louisville, the site of an independent school for which we developed a master plan over the past few months (we’ll blog about the actual design work in a future post—this post is for bourbon, bats, bridges and the derby!). To start...
I made a recent trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi to stay at the Shack Up Inn and listen to the Blues in the old juke joints in the famed Mississippi Delta. Nearby are the building remnants of Dockery Farms , where over four hundred african-american and sharecropper families worked in the cotton fields. After a hard days work, some would gather to give birth to the Delta Blues. The central figure at Dockery was Charlie Patton who influenced the legendary Robert Johnson, Chester "Howlin’ Wolf" Burnett, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards. The wood and corrugated metal buildings...
There were big rumblings in the San Antonio over the last few days as some severe weather moved through the area and for any budding meteorologists there has been plenty to see. The following images are from various hailstones that fell in the Alamo Heights Sunday evening area courtesy of Bailey and Lauren Raike who risked life and limb to retrieve them. As you can see in the attached images the hailstones come in many shapes and sizes from the typical spheroidal pellet to the almost snowflake like structure. Hail forms in strong thunderstorm clouds, particularly those with intense updrafts,...
Lake|Flato Architects is pleased to announce the start of design and documentation for Alamo Beer Company’s new 25,000 sf microbrewery east of downtown San Antonio. Longtime friends and associates Eugene Simor (Owner and Creator of Alamo Beer) and Greg Papay, FAIA, mark the happy occasion and defend the beer’s “fiercely independent spirit” by trading signatures in front of … the Alamo.
Last week Graham and I made the trek out to Big Bend National Park for our continuing work on the Fossil Discovery Trail . On the way back I stopped in Fort Stockton to take in some of the intriguing architecture and oil infrastructure that is in various states of decay. Nearly every conceivable form of desert related fading, cracking, and crumbling seems to be taking place. For more insight on West Texas check out Corey's post .
Architect and Visiting Professor at UTSA College of Architecture, Javier Sanchez, will present at the CoA's Spring Lecture Series tonight at the UTSA Downtown Campus. His lecture, "Building the City: Architectural Insertions in Mexico City," is based on his work as a founding partner and lead designer of the multidisciplinary Mexico City firm, JSa. According to the CoA's website, as Visiting Professor "Sanchez is leading a studio that examines Colonia Atlampa ("where the water divides" in nahuatl ), one of the last remaining underdeveloped portions in the center of Mexico City, which is near...
Can a bus shelter setting become an engaging public place beyond the purpose of waiting for the bus? UT San Antonio School of Architecture is hosting a 3-day charrette this week posing this question and taking the new Tobin Center for the Performing Arts as the site. Six teams of 2-3 UTSA graduate students will each be paired with a young professional mentor (from Lake|Flato and other local firms) to meet and work over the next three days. The goal of the charrette is to explore elements or programs that can be conceived of as integral parts of place-making through the lens of a bus patron or...
At the office we like to get hands-on with potential building materials for our projects. This desire manifests itself often, ranging from placing samples on the office roof for months to see how they weather in the Texas sun (and sometimes forgetting about them) to ordering lots and lots of samples which later become paperweights and odd pencil holders around the office. This week we tested a potential exterior LED light fixture for the Austin Central Library. For our first test (Test 1) we took the fixture on a fieldtrip to the Fullgoods Warehouse which has a perforated metal scrim with...
Last month Cameron and I traveled to Louisville Kentucky to attend the Cyclocross World Championships, which were taking place for the first time ever outside of Europe. It was an amazing and very cold time standing course-side in our muddy rubber boots watching the junior's, women's, and men's races. The experience was great to be so close to the athletes; so close in fact that Sven Nys, the newly crowned men's world champion, splashed mud on Cameron's jacket. She will never wash it.
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