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The Challenge of the Ordinary: The Design of Virtual Histories

By Laurence Keith Loftin III.

Published by The Design Collection

This presentation illustrates an alternative design strategy to that of contemporary abstract formal manipulation, and provides a means for approaching contextual design in general. A design for a house in Creede Colorado will be presented. Creede is a lost silver mining town in Southwest Colorado, not on the road to anywhere. It is in a spectacular natural location (the caldera of an ancient volcano) with a built vernacular remarkable for its collection of shacks, sheds and shanties, with idiosyncratic combinations of details and materials. The problem was to design a new house that did not “stand out” but rather “stood in” the context of the place. The strategy was to produce a “timeful” design using local materials and forms rather than a “timeless” modern abstract object. In order to avoid problems of Disneyesque mimicry, a “virtual history” was developed for the house from simple cabin thru a series of additons to the final form. A distinction between the psychological and the nostalgic will be drawn as a conclusion.

Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, Volume 4, Issue 3, pp.307-320. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 1.950MB).

Mr. Laurence Keith Loftin III

Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, College of Architecture and Planning, The University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA