When Form Takes Precedence Over Function
Shit starts to go sideways quickly
Ikuyo was a Japanese architect that had a second home near my house. She architected three houses right by me. All of the houses she helped architect, would have fallen down rather quickly had the homeowner not spent a small fortune to prop the houses back up. This house is one of them. The all-season room is full of glass skylights that were never sealed properly, letting water under the framing and rotting away the whole header board. Another house up the road needed an insane amount of structural work after the multiple skylights failed.
Ikuyo’s own home, a beautiful stone and timber house full of dramatic floor to ceiling windows and cedar shake shingles, was built on top of clay. There was no soil percolation test. The house has moved tremendously since it was built in the ‘70s. Did I mention there were no building codes out here 50 years ago? None whatsoever. Build what you want, where you want it. And that is what she did.
If you need to imagine what her house looks like, and I may go over there to snap a few shots and show you, just imagine a house with wooden shingles that were never treated. How that fares in our snowpocalypse winter conditions. Or maybe consider the fact that there was no foundation. No, the house just sat on a bunch of 6x6 studs on top of, get this, stones! No poured piers, nothing. The house is a complete teardown now. I have to show you how those 6x6 studs fared over the years.
This little 4’ 11” Japanese lady was brutally stoic. She never insulated, nor designed a heating system. The place was freezing in the winter, and she was OK with that. One little wood stove in one end of the extensive house was enough. Form over function, again. They don’t make them like her anymore. She was a silent age warrior, and now she is long gone, but her idea of just design and nothing else is coming back to bite the owners of the homes she made.
The house I am currently working on is one of her gems. Built on top of a giant ledge rock, the floors all slope everywhere, making it feel like a fun house. That, and it has moved significantly due to having no solid foundation. There are multiple issues with this house but the one I am focusing on is the all-season room. The window frames were custom built, on site, and are completely rotten.
I am sure the homeowner is more at fault than the builder, who cannot be blamed for the lack of upkeep. The whole room was covered with multiple tarps for years because the owner got a “fuck you” price from a builder to repair the room. It is a massive job, and I am only doing it because she is my neighbor. She is elderly, and her kids are trying to keep up with the house, but they live on the other side of the country. They took her to California to be nearer to them, as the house languishes from disuse.
Those custom skylights needed to be re-sealed every so often. To defer maintenance is one thing, but to ignore it completely for 50 years is entirely another. The video shows the front of the house, where there was a header board is now basically just dirt. I will try to surgically remove the rot, replace the header, and then slather a clear rubberized compound over everything. Then I will build a clear plastic roof over all the skylights to give them a few more years out of the room.
The rest of the house is in bad shape too, if the house was not covered under quite a bit of canopy, the asphalt shingles would be long gone too. The roof is old, shingles have flown away, and it has lightning rods! I spoke to some old-timers out here, and apparently they haven’t put lightning rods on roofs for over 50 years. This roof is from the 70’s, which is quite impressive. That’s 20 years past any kind of warranty period for asphalt shingles. The roof is just starting to leak now, so that is the next job here.
All this exists on a mountainside. Ikuyo’s home was at the top of the mountain, nearly ski-in ski-out, next to a no longer functioning ski resort. Her kids were championship-level skiers. They moved on with their lives, not even interested in saving her teardown of a home. The story of life really - if your children aren’t interested in maintaining some sort of legacy, who will be? Maybe grandchildren, if there is anything left to save?
They live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a beautiful townhouse near the park. They will not let that dwelling fall in, at least. To save the country house, full of memories of their youth, is not pressing at all. Oh well, not my rodeo, not my bull.