Architects about facades

This story began long ago. At first, ancient architects designed sculptural compositions — gods, palm trees, plants (ornament) — essentially acting as artists depicting nature in stone. Then the Greeks began to build stone temples that depicted wooden houses, the everyday work of carpenters.

If you look at the Doric order, it's an exaggerated depiction of a wooden porch with a canopy: posts (columns), the ends of the joists (triglyphs), the ends of the rafters (mutules), and even the nail heads (guttae). The real fragments and joints of the structure are masked, while others are merely depicted.

Creating something new is hard. The mind clings to patterns. A century ago, Le Corbusier advised treating the house as a machine — a revolutionary step, but still framed by reference to something else. Carriages and the first automobiles were built in the shape of baroque houses on wheels. Facade decor carefully depicts the houses and materials of bygone centuries.

The fear of being yourself is architecture's inherited trauma.

In new houses, window frames are like black eyes — they ruin any face. And people come to us too late to fix it.

I see websites that "sell" only the inside of a window, but for a private home the outside matters too and is always visible, because windows are the focal points. And outside, they often look really bad. There are no proper classic frames or good modern ones. They all look like some dull mush — as if the frame were molded from kids' sausage-shaped balloons. I won't even get into the bluish-white color, which is gradually becoming a thing of the past.

Don't be fooled. Choose frames that are beautiful inside and out. On the outside, a window should have finely detailed reveals, classically shaped or sharply defined, depending on the style. If you're thinking about facade design, think first about the expressiveness of the window frames.

One of the great glories of the classic style is still the divided-light window. Such windows are especially expressive and have just the right amount of depth. These days you can find modern double-frame windows with double glazing and muntins that look exactly like the finest classic windows.

It's striking that at no other time has the enlightened architect had the horizons available to us today — not even with the library of an empire or a university close at hand.

From the biographies of artists, we know what a creative burst and shift in consciousness a visit to a foreign exhibition or a trip could spark. Afterward came the choice: keep doing what you were used to, or dive into the new thing you had just seen.

The sheer amount that we and our clients have seen is vast — historical and fashionable styles, materials, approaches. Everyone has seen it all. So what do we do with it? Combine it? Choose from it? Create something new?