The firm of NRAP recently did the first commercial project in the country to achieve the passive house standard, says Reynolds, for an office addition at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. Bassler is a certified passive house designer.
“The passion there is that we construct new buildings, and we recognize that every one we build is a consumer of energy,” says Bassler. “There are ways that we can make a real difference in how they’re built, and how people use them and live in them, which are quantifiable and can address the environmental issues that are evident right now. It’s a small thing from house to house, but it’s a critical mass effort.” Figurative transition
New Paltz-based David Daub is a third-generation architect following in the footsteps of his father, Gerald, and grandfather, Sidney, who founded Daub Architecture in 1917. David joined the firm in 1982. Like Paplin, Daub says he finds a challenge in working with an existing structure to adapt it to the way we live now.
“My passion is in working with the rich history of buildings,” says Daub, “respecting the continuity to the past. There’s a spirit in the old buildings, unlike creating something new from scratch.” Peeling back the layers and seeing what’s underneath is always “surprising and informative.”
Doing historic preservation always brings up the topic of what actually is historical and original, says Daub. “There could be layers and layers of changes in an old house, and some of them might not have been done so well. Understanding the period of the house and the design of that era, one can actually deconstruct some of the areas that weren’t done very well and bring it into more of a piece; bring unity to it.”
Several years back, Daub worked on a residential project in Kerhonkson that involved building a new, freestanding structure that had to relate to a small cabin already on the property. The two buildings were to function together but remain separate. Nothing was to be done to the original cabin, but the new structure had to connect to it in such a way that one could open the door of the old building and walk into the new. With overhanging roof on one side of the cabin, says Daub, “the idea was to set the new building so that the two roof eaves were just inches apart from each other.”
Why would a client want such an eccentric arrangement when it would seem more feasible to integrate the new and the old into a single renovated building? “The owner was a filmmaker,” says Daub, “and I think it was like a marker in time for him. He could [figuratively] step out of the past into a new era, and make that transition from the old into the new. He was also a Buddhist practitioner, and I think when he looked at this cabin, it helped to remind him of impermanence.”
The original cabin was covered in asphalt shingles; the new building in cedar-stained clapboard siding. The new design was zen-like, says Daub, without radiators or baseboards and using wood as a strong visual element. It’s built on a tinted concrete slab with radiant heat, and is a passive solar design home, south-facing to gather the light and with a less permeable surface on the north side, with fewer windows to provide more of a barrier to heat loss.
Daub grew up within the business. While the fundamentals of architecture are the same as they’ve always been, he says, in terms of bringing together physical phenomenon with the personal human qualities of living, he does think that there have been changes over the years in the level of design knowledge that clients have now and in their level of expectations. “People were more manually experienced in the past, so I think they had more of an appreciation for the work itself,” says Daub. “But I think the possibilities are broader now.”
People are more familiar today with design principles, he says, thanks to the Internet. “People were more conservative visually [in the past]. Now you can bring in images you want by searching around for them, whereas before it was a more localized situation, where the inspiration was already-built objects that you would see in the field rather than as images on the screen.”
