The symposium is sponsored by the UNCG Biology Department with financial support from Syngenta. The theme for the 2010 symposium is “Practical Steps Toward Sustainability.”

As a designer and educator, Frank Harmon has been a leader in “green,” or sustainable, architecture for decades – long before the concept entered the general lexicon. He has spent years educating the public through speaking engagements at conferences and conventions across the country, including Dwell Magazine’s annual “Dwell on Design” convention and several national conventions of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

He has also spent years educating his clients on the imperative for sustainable, regionally appropriate design and recently completed three thoroughly “green” projects: the NC Botanical Garden’s Visitor Education Center at UNC-Chapel Hill (slated to become the state’s first LEED Platinum building), the Walnut Creek Urban Wetlands Park Education Center in Raleigh, and the Merchants Millpond State Park Visitors Center in Gatesville, NC.

Among the current “green” projects Harmon’s firm is working on are the Oyster Research Hatchery at UNC-Wilmington, the UNC-Asheville Craft Campus, and AIA North Carolina’s Center for Architecture & Design in downtown Raleigh.

The other three speakers at the symposium are: Dr. Robert Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change who will discuss the problems of nitrogen pollution; Dr. Patricia Gober, co-director of the National Science Foundation’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who will discuss water resource sustainability; and Dr. Susan Smalley, director of the Michigan State University C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems, who will discuss community-based food systems.

UNCG’s Environmental Symposium 2010 is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.uncg.edu/bio/index.

For more information on Frank Harmon, go to www.frankharmon.com.

Ever since Frank Harmon won the competition for the AIANC Center for Architecture & Design in January 2008, not much had been made public about how the project was progressing. Even some of our sources close to the project seemed skeptical that the project would be built soon. Given the current state of the field and economy in general, it would have been understandable if the AIA had decided to put the project on hold. It might not have sent a positive message to its members, but understandable nevertheless.

Fortunately for us, that’s not the case. CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.

The new AIA Center for Architecture & Design will be just blocks from the Capitol in Raleigh. And its architect Frank Harmon wants legislators to use the LEED certified building as a resource center for building green structures in the future. Frank Harmon and the building’s contractor Scot Cutler join host Laura Leslie to discuss the details of designing and building a showcase green building that will belong to all North Carolinians and, they hope, define the future of architecture.

TO HEAR THE INTERVIEW:  frank harmon wunc 2010 mp3

Appetite 4 Architecture (A4A) is sponsored by Triangle Modernist Houses (TMH) as a way for the general public to dine with prominent members of the Triangle’s design community in an intimate, small group setting. Dinner guests will be able to discuss anything they want with the designers, from their dream home or renovation project, to the designers’ work or a house they’ve admired.

Frank Harmon is best known for his work in modern, innovative, environmentally sustainable and regionally appropriate architecture. Two houses he designed – one in Raleigh, the other in Charleston, SC — received the 2009 Custom Home Design Awards in the “less than 3000 square feet” category from Custom Home Magazine. His design of a vacation home in the Bahamas has been featured in numerous journals and books on green architecture and was included in a special exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. His residential work has also been featured in the Raleigh News & Observer’s “Home of the Month” series in association with the NC State University College of Design.

Currently, Harmon is working closely with David Crawford on the future AIA NC Center for Architecture & Design. Harmon won the commission in a professional design competition.

“A4A dinner events are rare opportunities to enjoy free-ranging discussions in an informal but upscale dining environment,” said TMH founder and director George Smart. “Participants will have access to some of the area’s best residential architects and professionals, many of whom are mentioned on TMH.  Explore architecture, homebuilding, the economy for design, furnishings, real estate – or anything else on your mind.”

Tickets to the Harmon/Crawford dinner are $59 per person. Dinner will begin at 6:30 p.m.

TMH is hosting nine A4A dinners. For information on the special guests for each dinner, the dates, and locations, go to www.trianglemodernisthouses.com/a4a.htm.

To reserve tickets for the Harmon/Crawford dinner or any of the others go to www.trianglemodernisthouses.com/a4a.htm.

I discovered Harwell Hamilton Harris’s work when I was a student: a black and white photograph of his Fellowship Park House stood out from thousands of other published houses because of the clarity of the design and the way the house seemed to belong to its Californian hillside.

Harris built the house for himself and his wife Jean in 1935. It was small, less than 500 square feet, consisting of one large room open on three sides to a lush ravine covered in ferns and live oak trees. Attached to the room was a tiny kitchen. The floors were covered in rush mats, unpainted redwood beams spanned the ceiling, and a beautiful oriental ginger jar was poised on the edge of the living room, hovering just above the trees.

The photograph of the room with the ginger jar was published worldwide. It presented a new image of Californian modernism, one that was forward-looking yet comfortable – a quality not associated in 1935 with the avant-garde.

I met Harris for the first time in 1982 at the School of Design at NC State University, where he was professor emeritus after leaving his native California. For 50 years his fame had been widespread, acclaimed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as an American genius. Yet in person he was quiet and modest. He told me that he had built his hillside house for less than a thousand dollars, using parts salvaged from an earlier project in Hollywood. It had jump-started his career.

A few years ago, I visited Fellowship Park to discover the house for myself, which was then unoccupied. What I found was totally unexpected. I had known Jean and Harwell Harris in the last decade of their lives as gentle folk: kind, polite, and Edwardian in their courtly manners. Never did I think they started their marriage as Bohemians. But at Fellowship Park I discovered that to reach their house, they walked through the backyards of four neighboring houses; that their house had no plumbing for years; and that they showered outdoors with a garden hose, one partner keeping watch while the other bathed! But how perfect, I thought, that this symbol of domestic serenity was built out of relative poverty. Harris’s contribution to the art of American residential design began with a one-room shack. I was reminded of another cabin built with salvaged materials at Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau.

The house at Fellowship Park is slowly falling to ruin. The ferns are gone now; the hillside is thick with wild nasturtiums. I believe Harwell would accept this as natural. He believed that architecture, like delight, is ephemeral, and that ideas often outlast buildings.

I am reminded of this practice with the Taylor House designed by architect Frank Harmon. This design was included in my top 10 homes list for the Wall Street Journal last year.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE POST

Harmon, a multi-award winning architect and frequent speaker at seminars and symposia on design, will again make his case for sustainable building and development at the Center for Design Innovation in Winston-Salem, NC, when he participates in the CDI’s Idea Exchange on Tuesday, February 16, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

CDI is a multi-campus research center for the statewide University of North Carolina. According to its website, the Idea Exchange is “a public forum for considering creative processes, digital techniques, business strategies, and other interests related to developing the knowledge economy of North Carolina’s Piedmont region.”

Frank Harmon is well known nationally for his firm’s modern, innovative, “green” and regionally appropriate architecture. From September to November 2009, he saw the completion of three high-performance, or “green,” projects in North Carolina, including the NC Botanical Gardens Visitor Education Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill that is slated to be the state’s first LEED Platinum building – the highest level of certification given by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building rating system.

“It seems natural to me to design green buildings,” he said, “to catch the sun, accept the breeze and grown naturally out of the earth.”

In lectures and seminars, and as a Professor in Practice at NC State University’s College of Design, Harmon frequently asserts the necessity for modern buildings to be regionally appropriate – to address the specific context, materials, textures, colors and forms of a special region, using both traditional and non-traditional methods.

“The most sustainable – and liberating – thing we can do is acknowledge the places we are in,” he told Dwell magazine in January of 2008 when he was featured in the magazine’s “Conversations” section.

The CDI’s Idea Exchange is held in the Winston Tower, Suite 2105 (21^st floor) at 301 North Main Street in downtown Winston-Salem.

Currently CDI’s constituent schools are the UNC School of the Arts and Winston-Salem State University, collaborating with Forsyth Technical Community College. Sessions are recorded and web-streamed for remote access. For more information, go to www.centerfordesigninnovation.org.

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

Sponsored by the College of Design and the Triangle section of the American Institute of Architects/North Carolina, the annual lecture is endowed by the estate of the renowned architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA (1903-1990) who served on the faculty of NC State’s College of Design from 1962 to 1975.

Frank Harmon is a fellow of the American Institute of Architecture and a Professor in Practice at the College of Design. He is the founder and principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA, a multi-award-winning, LEED AP, green architecture firm established in 1985. He was also a close friend of Harris for many years, and he credits Harris with steering his design sensibilities towards modern, innovative and regionally appropriate design.

In 2005, when Harmon’s firm was named Top Firm of the Year by Residential Architect magazine, he told writer Vernon Mays, “[Harwell Harris] taught me that every client and every situation is different and new. And it is the architect’s job to understand the needs of every situation and every client. He loved to say that the house is a portrait of the client.”

Harris also taught Harmon to infuse warmth and familiarity into modern architecture by embracing what Harris called the “sticks and stones” of the place:  the landscape, materials, climate and culture specific to the region in which a building will be built.

“What people thought was cold and threatening modernism, he made warm and approachable,” Harmon says.

Harmon’s lecture will focus on “why Harwell Hamilton Harris is important today,” he said. “His work embraces the whole of the environment – from the living room to the city – and all the particulars that go into making a building. He was also the first architect to write about the importance of regionalism in modern architecture.”

Harmon will discuss specific Harris projects – including his personal home and office on Cox Avenue in downtown Raleigh and St. Giles Presbyterian Church in North Raleigh – that strongly influenced Harmon’s own work.

Originally from California, Harwell Hamilton Harris was a sculptor who changed careers after he visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles. He worked with Richard Neutra from 1928 until 1932 then merged the ideals of modern and California regionalist architecture into his residential work of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He served as Dean for the University of Texas School of Architecture from 1952-1955 and practiced in Dallas until 1962 when he moved to Raleigh to teach at NC State. He retired from teaching in 1973 but continued to practice until shortly before his death. He was a professor emeritus at the university when he died at the age of 87.

The Harwell Hamilton Harris Lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Coliseum parking deck. Limited parking may also be found in the Riddick or Peele parking lots after 5 pm. Parking along campus streets is not permitted unless otherwise noted.

For more information on the lecture call 919.515.8350.

For more information on Frank Harmon, go to www.frankharmon.com.

The Havens House designed by Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA. Photo by Man Ray.

]]> http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/frank-harmon-to-deliver-special-lecture-at-nc-state-university/feed/ 0 http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/future-aia-nc-center-for-architecture-design-featured-on-architects-artisans/ http://blog.frankharmon.com/press-releases/future-aia-nc-center-for-architecture-design-featured-on-architects-artisans/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:31:10 +0000 kweiss http://blog.frankharmon.com/?p=615 January 26, 2010 (RALEIGH, NC) – Under the headline “David vs. Goliath in Downtown Raleigh,” the new design-oriented blog Architects+Artisans: Thoughtful Design for a Sustainable World looks at the future AIA NC Center for Architecture & Design in downtown Raleigh and its location near the state Government Complex.

The post includes a video of the building model as it transforms into a real structure in space via computer-generated imaging.

Writer and editor for the blog, J. Michael Welton, spoke with architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA, the firm that won the project through a professional design competition in 2008. Harmon explained how he approached the “pork chop” shaped site (his description) and the context, which includes the monolithic Archdale building overshadowing Peace Street along which the Center will be built.

“Ours is a horizontal statement,” Harmon told Welton. “The real face of the building is to the south, looking toward the State Capitol.” He also notes: “It’s on less than an acre, and we placed it parallel to Peace Street. It’s a long, thin building with a porch on the south side. You’ll find that all over the South – at Mount Vernon, for example – so we knew that was a good pattern to follow.”

The new building, a thoroughly “green” structure that will embrace all the high-tech as well as low-tech principles of sustainable design, will serve as headquarters for the North Carolina chapter of the American Institute of Architects. According to the AIA NC website, it is also intended to serve as “an architectural example for the entire state.”

To read the entire post and to see the video of the future building, go to architectsandartisans.com and click on “David vs. Goliath in Downtown Raleigh.”

For more information on Frank Harmon and to view more images of the AIA NC Center for Architecture and Design, visit www.frankharmon.com and click on “current” projects.

About Architects+Artisans:

Architects + Artisans is a sophisticated, well-informed provider of content, images, and knowledge concerning excellent architecture, artisanship and sustainability for the 21st century.  It is not just about designers – but about the people and products that make a well-designed place ring true. It is written and edited by J. Michael Welton, whose work on architecture, design and travel has appeared in The New York Times, Interior Design, Dwell, Green Source and Travel + Leisure. Visit http://architectsandartisans.com.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

Garden and green house. Project architect: Frank Harmon Architect PA

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