Code A Go Go

So Jeanette and I lost our house that was the last standing remanent

Go Go dancer surrounded by money

of the Carl Curtis Ranch. Quite possibly the last Board and Batt structure still totally Board and Batt and unmodified since the time they were written out of the code. A board and batt house is redwood boards with redwood cleats over them, at least in California. They were agricultural buildings and inexpensive housing. Louis B. Easton, the Architect who designed the buildings for the Curtis Ranch built the structurally highest quality of these buildings ever built. Thats how ours lasted to be 119 years old when the combined criminal negligence of the State of California, the County of Los Angeles and the Edison company together cause the conflagration that killed her.

I spent all my adult life as a Historic Preservationist as a worker, a contractor and a designer. I always had the conviction that if you couldn’t save a object, a portion of a building or the building itself, that you had a obligation both to the thing lost and to humanity to replace it with something of it’s kind, at least as good, preferably better. This did not necessarily mean a replica.

There is nothing I would love to do more dearly than build a exact replica of our Louis B. Easton single wall Board and Batt redwood house. It’s not just that she was our house for thirty-seven years eleven months and twenty-three days, it’s that she was the best remaining of her type. An exemplar of a long-lost California where even the poor could live in a well-built home made for the joy of living and to live a life that was itself a work of art, surrounded by art and Nature. I admit the floorplan was peculiar, but in every other way, she was modern. Light streamed into the house from windows in unexpected unconventional asymetrical locations that made you aware of every season and every weather condition. It was the first generation of homes equipped with gas heat. Inside one was comfortable, but always close to and aware of Nature.

If the Code Nazis would only allow me, once the lot was clear I could be housed again in two weeks rebuilding her by myself. Such expedience, such joy, such lightness on the land, such freedom of life is no longer legal in California. I understand the “reasons’ for all the regulations, I just disagree with them. However, I live in modern California and therefore I am not a free person. Mine is to do nothing but to comply.

Well, I thought really hard about a replacement house. I decided I would build something finely crafted and better. I came up with a hemicycle shaped building structurally made of Plywood box girder bents that John Lautner had designed in 1947 for Dr. Robert Mauer’s house . those bents had stuck in my imagination since 1988, so it kind of seemed like now was a good time to do something with the concept. So I designed a building that I could build two copies of, one to replace my studio and one to replace my house. They were identical. The back of the building is curved and turned against the fire. it’s exterior cladding on the back wall and roof is standing seam steel roofing. Its designed to encourage the fire to go around it in the wind.

I had planned on putting the studio at the back of the property at an angle and the house a bit north of where our house had been. the best fire resisting location could not be used because it was too close the oak tree trunk. Oak tree preservation ordiance. Grrrrr. The second-best location could not be used because that would cause all the windows to face west, violating the energy code that only allows 4% of your square footage measured as the usable floor space not from teh exterior framing as they measure for taxation, to be used for west facing glazing. 4% of your square footage as measured at the exterior framing is the code room minimum in the other sections of the code. thois meant in reality no west facing window, without of course a series of hearings and about 30K in BS. So that killed that idea.

Then I thought about doing a version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Carlson house made of 4”x4” posts and infill insulation boards. In 1956 Mr. Wright used Cemestro boards, those had asbestos and are no longer made, but I thought I could use Structural Insulated Panel System (SIPS) with the 4”x4” posts and have a fast cheap good-looking building. A quick check with SIPS manufacturers (three of them) ended with “I’m sorry in 49 states you could do that, but California’s energy code won’t allow it - Thermal bridging, California is intense on thermal bridging.” So I COULD do it in Wisconsin or North Dakota where they have serious winter, but not Southern California. Save the planet or something.

I’ve been really struggling to find a really good looking, honest, not exorbitant to build, modern building that will also include all the code demanded systems I don’t want and don’t need but am forced to spend money on (You know sprinklers, Air Conditioning, central heat, heat pumps solar all expensive and forced on me) and the problem is pretty much it’s really hard to do with the Oak tree there and the prohibition against west facing glass with my particular lot.

The reason all new houses are expensive, not too very good looking and full of imitation materials that quite frankly suck, is because that is the POLICY of the State of California. It’s policy to make having a house insanely difficult and if that house is to be INDIVIDUAL and perhaps also a work of art in some way something that is ONLY for the UBER Wealthy.

This policy needs to change. California doesn’t need more ugly unaffordable housing.