Gimme Shelter

If you need to end a drought in Colorado, take the gutters or the roof off a house. Deconstruction always brings on a downpour. Our May weather highlights the need for proper gutters, downspouts, grading, and sub-surface drainage. Mother nature constantly reminds us that the primary function of architecture is SHELTER.

Modern history

Once upon a time there were empty residential lots in Boulder, Colorado. In 1953, professor and herpetologist T. Paul Maslin with his wife, Mary, hired architect Hoby Wagener to design a functional modern family house on a large lot. Their property on 14^th Street lay nestled among Tudors, Foursquares, and Colonials in an old neighborhood that would later become the University Place Historic District.

In Colorado since 1950, Wagener had come from working for the notable modernist Pietro Belluschi in Oregon, an experience that influenced his whole career. We can imagine young Hoby building the model for Belluschi’s 1947 Life Magazine’s idea house and carefully lettering the drawings by hand.  That building’s spatial clarity and the way it presents its shallow gable end to the street became evident, six years later, in Hoby’s design for the Maslins. Paul and Mary lived there happily for many decades.