February 2, 2012 (Raleigh, NC) –  Frank Harmon, FAIA, principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA in Raleigh, NC, recently served as chairman of the 2011 Boston Society of Architects/AIA design awards program and presented the awards to the winners during a gala ceremony held January 26 at the Marriott Copley Place.

The sole judging criterion for the Boston program was design excellence. The jury was empowered to determine the extent to which design excellence is defined by aesthetic, functional, contextual, sustainable, social or other characteristics. The jury could also elect to honor all or part of a project, in any category they choose. The categories included: Accessible Design; Education Facilities Design, John M. Clancy Award for Socially Responsible Housing, Sustainable Design, Unbuilt, Honor Awards for Design Excellence, and the Harleston Parker Medal award.

“The work of the Boston Society of Architects is quite simply exceptional, some of the best in the country,” Harmon said. “It was a pleasure to review their work.”

This year’s Boston jury was composed of members of the Triangle Architecture and Design Society (TADS), a group of architects from Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, NC, that fosters collaboration among competing area practitioners and encourages greater public understanding of architectural design. TADS has proven so successful that it has garnered national AIA attention.

TADS members participating with Harmon on the Boston jury were: Roger Clark FAIA, Distinguished Professor at the College of Design NCSU, and David Hill, AIA, Associate professor at the College of Design; Dennis Stallings, AIA, and Irv Pearce, AIA, of Pearce, Brinkley, Cease + Lee; Ellen Weinstein, AIA; Phil Szostak, FAIA; Bryan Bell, AIA; and Victoria Bell as an alternate juror.

Frank Harmon is a sought-after jury member and jury chairman for professional design competitions across the nation. For more information, visit www.frankharmon.com.

For more information on the Boston Society/AIA, visit www.architects.org.

If you’ve seen the new building along Peace Street in downtown Raleigh, across from William Peace University, you may be wondering why it looks so, well, so different.

It’s the new headquarters of AIA North Carolina , the statewide trade group for architects, and one reason for the design was to assure that such a relatively small building made a statement and didn’t get lost in the shadows of much larger buildings…  READ MORE

Frank Harmon, FAIA

January 18, 2012 (Raleigh, NC) – Frank Harmon FAIA, founder and principal of the award-winning firm Frank Harmon Architect PA in Raleigh, will be a featured guest at the first 2012 “Appetite4Architecture” dinner on Tuesday, January 31, beginning at 6:30 p.m. in 18 Seaboard restaurant in Raleigh.

Now in its third year, “Appetite4Architecture” dinners are sponsored by Triangle Modernist Houses (TMH), an award-winning, non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting Modernist residential design. The purpose of the dinners is to give the general public a chance to dine with, and talk with, some of the Triangle area’s finest architects in a relaxed, informal setting.

Frank Harmon is well known for modern, innovative, sustainable and regionally appropriate architecture of all types, including houses. Among his best known, award-winning residential designs are:

• The Taylor Vacation House in the Bahamas, which is included in the book Tropical Modernism and was featured in an exhibit in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., among many other accolades.
• The Strickland-Ferris Residence in Raleigh, which has been featured in a number of architectural magazines and received both Custom Home and Wood Design awards.
• The Low Country Residence in Mount Pleasant, SC, which also received a Custom Home Design Award and a national AIA Housing Award.
• And his own modern home and gardens that he shares with his wife, landscape architect Judy Harmon, in Raleigh, which were featured in Sarah Susanka’s book Outside The Not-So-Big House.

In 2011, Frank Harmon was included in Residential Architect magazine’s “RA 50: A Short List of Architects We Love,” and in 2005 his firm received the magazine’s “Top Firm of the Year” honor. He has been profiled in Dwell magazine and Architectural Record, and he has been a featured guest on American Public Media’s “The Story” with Dick Gordon.

Joining Harmon for TMH’s inaugural 2012 “A4A” dinner will be Durham architect Ellen Cassilly, AIA, who worked in Harmon’s firm before founding her own firm Ellen Cassilly Architect Inc., and Randy Lanou, president of BuildSense/Studio B Architecture, also in Durham. Dona Aguayo of Go Realty is co-sponsoring the January 31 dinner.

The TMH “A4A” dinners are all held at 18 Seaboard, 18 Seaboard Avenue, No. 100, Raleigh, NC 27604. The dinners include three courses from a preselected menu (vegetarian options are available) plus coffee, water, tea, tax, and gratuity. Price per person is $53. Tickets are available at www.trianglemodernisthouses.com/a4a. Payments are nonrefundable except for event cancellation. All proceeds benefit TMH’s ongoing documentation, preservation, and house tours programs. For more information on TMH call George Smart, 919-740-8407 or visit www.trianglemodernisthouses.com.

For more information on Frank Harmon, visit www.frankharmon.com.

January 2, 2012

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once said, and perhaps no place has the power to shape us like the place where we grow up…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

by Richard Stradling

RALEIGH — Anyone who has ever renovated an old building knows your bound to find surprises

Rendering of the completed project.

when you start tearing out sheet rock and taking down drop ceilings.

Fortunately, for the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Raleigh, most of those surprises have been pleasant ones.

The church is about midway through a project to restore and modernize its 111-year old sanctuary building and add a new building to its campus at the corner of Morgan and Salisbury streets, where the church has faced Union Square since before the Capitol was built…

…The church hired Raleigh architect Frank Harmon to design a new education and office building with a glass front that will give the church a more public face…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.

• AIA NC Center for Architecture and Design, Raleigh, NC, 2011 — Platinum (pending as of Dec. 2011)

• Merchants Millpond Visitors Center, Gates County, NC, 2009 — Gold

• Ocean Conservation Center, Beaufort, NC, 2010 — Platinum

• North Carolina Botanical Gardens Education Center, Chapel Hill, NC, 2009 — Platinum

• Duke University Smart House, Durham, NC, 2007 — Platinum

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill said, and perhaps no place has the power to shape us like the place where we grow up.

Lyndon Johnson was born in the hardscrabble and desperately poor Hill Country of Texas. His life and political legacy were shaped by the threadbare surroundings of his childhood.

Steve Jobs grew up in a small, modern house in Mountain View, California. So important was the

Jobs grew up in an Eichler house very much like this one.

house that he took his biographer, Walter Isaacson, there to show him the many ingenious details of its design — like the radiant floor and the open plan and windows that brought the outdoors in. It’s nice to think that the man many call a genius grew up in a house with ingenious details.

Joseph Eichler, a California developer noted for bringing good design to the mass housing market, built Jobs’ childhood home. Eichler homes were airy and modern in comparison to most of the mass-produced, middle-class, postwar homes being built in the 1950s. Eichler believed that people of modest means could have beautiful things.

Including the modest family who adopted Steve Jobs.

The clean elegance of the Eichler home, available to everyone, was the original vision for Apple, according to Jobs. “That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac,” he recalled. “That’s what we did with the iPod.”

Paul Jobs made a place on his garage workbench so his young son could work beside him. Outside he built a fence around their Eichler home, crafting the back of the fence to look as good as the front. Steve Jobs never forgot that lesson, and would insist that every element of his Apple products should be beautiful, not just on the outside but even on the inside. “But no one will see it,” his engineers groaned when he insisted on a beautiful hidden circuit board. “But I will!” Jobs replied.

Apple stores were conceived of and meticulously supervised by Steve Jobs. From the open plan to the glass stairs, no detail was unimportant. They are the 21st century embodiment of Paul Jobs’ workbench in Mountain View. We are used to thinking that the digital world is placeless, but in the digital world of Jobs, place mattered.

A student of Zen, Jobs absorbed the belief of Dogen Zenji, a Zen master who wrote, “Whoever told people that ‘mind’ means thoughts opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses.” And, we might add, IPods, workbenches, and Eichler homes.

Like Eichler, Jobs brought beauty to ordinary things. He shaped the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Now they shape us.

December 6, 2011 (Raleigh, NC) — Architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, of Frank Harmon Architect PA, recently posted a new video on his website (www.frankharmon.com) in which he and landscape architect Gregg Bleam discuss the design process behind the soon-to-be-completed AIA NC Center for Architecture and Design in downtown Raleigh.

Segments of the video will be updated as AIA NC (the American Institute of Architects North Carolina chapter) moves in and the landscape matures.

Harmon explains at the beginning of the video that the project is the result of his firm winning a professional design competition. One of the reasons Harmon won, according to the judges, was that his concept for a modern, thoroughly sustainable, and regionally appropriate Center embraced building and landscape as a single interdependent, interlocking whole.

“We knew this was a landscape problem,” Harmon says, because of the oddly shaped, triangular site and the parking requirements. As a result, he enlisted Bleam “before we drew a single line” and felt including Bleam in the video on the building was imperative.

Directed and shot by Allen Weiss of Allen Weiss: Works on Film and Paper in Raleigh, the video features Harmon in his warehouse-turned-office in Raleigh’s Boylan Heights neighborhood and Bleam in his office in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. It also includes a variety of footage of the building under construction; of Harmon and Bleam walking the site, looking over plans and laughing together; and behind-the-scenes moments in the construction trailer.

Frank Harmon, FAIA

This is the first video that Frank Harmon, a multi-awarding winning architect and Professor in Practice at NC State University’s College of Design, has done for his website. Why did he choose this particular project?

“Because of its design, the AIA NC Center for Architecture and Design is destined to be an icon in downtown Raleigh,” said Kim Weiss, Harmon’s public relations coordinator. “It’s also the first from-the-ground-up, ‘green’ AIA headquarters in the nation.

“But equally important,” she continued, “is that the general public rarely gets to hear an architect talk about the process that lead to the design of a building, especially one as iconic as this one. Through the video, Frank is creating a rapport with his audience, whether that means students, clients, future clients, or folks just interested in architecture. Together, he and Gregg are communicating more than a written description could.”

She also pointed out that “videos are entertaining. It’s simply a fact that people today are more likely to click on a video than to read a written description.”

The man behind the camera, Allen Weiss, noted how comfortable Harmon and Bleam were in front of the camera. “There was no script,” he said. “They just started talking and were of such a similar mindset that I could easily cut from one to the other as they discussed the design process. I was impressed.”

The video opens and closes with audible off-camera voices. Weiss said he purposefully left the “chatter” in during the edit to give the piece a casual, relaxed feel, “unlike the garden-variety, industrial, talking-head videos that are dry and offer no clues into the personalities behind them. I don’t believe you can separate the product from the dynamic and interesting personalities that lead to its creation. My intention was not only to showcase this important structure, but to allow viewers to get to know Frank and Gregg in a simply, personal, human way.”

To hear Frank Harmon and Gregg Bleam discuss the design process behind the AIA NC Center for Architecture and Design, visit www.frankharmon.com and click on AIA North Carolina Center for Architecture Design – Video.” To read more about the project, click on “current” projects.

For more information on Gregg Bleam Landscape Architect, go to www.gbla.net.

For more information on Allen Weiss, visit www.allen-weiss.com.

(Photo by Gilbertson Photography)

By Mike Welton

The American Institute of Architects North Carolina Chapter’s (AIA NC) new Center for Architecture and Design opens this month at the intersection of Wilmington and Peace streets in downtown Raleigh. The 12,000-square-foot building, clad in native Carolina cypress harvested from the Great Dismal Swamp, with roof and siding of rose-colored zinc, was designed by Frank Harmon Architect PA.

The $5.4 million project brings new meaning to the concept of teamwork. AIA NC and Harmon worked closely with Clancy & Theys Construction, John Moore with 4SE Structural Engineers, Carl Simmons of CMS Engineering, RMF Engineering, and landscape architect Gregg Bleam to make the headquarters building — one that serves all seven AIA sections across North Carolina — a reality less than a year from groundbreaking. AIA NC’s David Crawford was responsible for hunting down and securing a $3 million bond through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Of the $3.2 million in construction costs, $1.15 million was delivered in pledges through a fundraising campaign — much of it from architects themselves — with another $600,000 coming from in-kind donations from state and national suppliers…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

10-18-11

I mentioned the Playhouse Parade at Cameron Village in Raleigh in my weekend activity round-ups these past couple of weeks.

The fundraiser features a dozen outdoor structures – some for kids and some for adults. It supports Sassafras All Children’s Playground,  a project that will replace the aging play equipment at Laurel Hills Park on Edwards Mill Road in north Raleigh with a new one designed for children of all abilities. Leaders of the ambitious project need to raise about another $1.5 million to reach a $2 million goal.

I finally got over there with my own family on Sunday. The buildings are amazing. There are six for kids, including a pirate ship, castle and fire station. Another six are geared toward adults and include a potting shed, tiki hut and a Gothic church chicken coop. The structures come furnished and some even have electric and water hook-ups.

My favorite (though I’d be happy with the tiki hut too) was the contemporary play house designed by award-winning architect Frank Harmon. I loved the clear roof, colors and chalkboard walls… READ MORE