awards and news

“From site, client, and experience, Frank Harmon spins a highly specific, easy-living modernism.” - Vernon Mays, Residential Architect magazine

NC Architect Frank Harmon Featured In Dwell Magazine

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

November 27, 2007 (RALEIGH, NC) – Dwell, one of the nation’s leading monthly magazines covering modern architecture and design, has devoted its December-January “Conversation” section to Raleigh, NC-based architect Frank Harmon, FAIA.

Entitled “Let’s Be Frank,” the section is a Q&A-format discussion between writer Frances Anderton and Harmon. It addresses the architect’s decades-long work as a modern, “green” designer and how his approach to this sensibility is informed by regionalism: the vernacular specifics of site and climate.

“Harmon hews to the notion that a structure should be specific to its place in terms of materials and its relationships to geography and climate,” Anderton writes. The architect stresses, however, that “I am not interested in vernacular to be sentimental. I am interested in what it can teach us. All vernacular architecture is sustainable.”

Harmon answers questions about his influences (including the late Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA), professional evolution (from renowned architect Richard Meier’s New York office to his own firm, Frank Harmon Architect), and the “current green awareness,” as Anderton puts it.

Of the latter, Harmon offers: “I’ve been doing green stuff for 25 years, and over that time I’ve had to educate my clients, and that has been very difficult. Today they all come to me and want something sustainable.”

Projects featured with the “Conversation” include the Open-Air Classroom at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s Prairie Ridge Eco-station in Raleigh, the Strickland-Ferris house in Raleigh’s Laurel Hills subdivision, and the Taylor vacation house in the Bahamas.

The December-January edition of Dwell is available on newsstands now. For more information on the magazine, visit www.dwell.com.

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

Dwell & Residential Architect Magazines Invite Frank Harmon To Join Discussions at Conferences

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

September 1, 2007 (RALEIGH, NC) – Dwell magazine, one of the nation’s leading home design or “shelter,” magazines, and Residential Architect, a professional architectural journal based in Washington, D.C., have invited award-winning Raleigh architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, to participate in their annual national conferences this year.

“Building Community” is the theme for the  Dwell On Design Conference, to be held in San Francisco in September 14 and 15. As moderator and master of ceremonies, Dateline NBC’s John Hockenberry (Peabody and Emmy award winner and contributing editor for Wired and Metropolis magazines) will conduct conversations with a diverse group of influential thinkers including architects, artists, critics, urban planners, product designers, activists, etc. Frank Harmon will participate in a conversation about “how we want to live and the role design can play in shaping our world,” according to Michael Cannell, Dwell’s New York editor.

“We are looking at what community means and how it can be fostered at different scales,” Cannel said. “Our examination includes the built environment – from urban redevelopment projects through to public spaces and single-family dwellings. It will also address the diverse social and economic systems that define the world we live in – from farmers markets to public art programs. Within our theme of Building Community we will focus on questions of how, as a society, we can live collaboratively and sustainably in communities of choice.”

Residential Architect magazine’s annual “Reinvention” conference will be held in Charleston, SC, December 3-5, and will include many panel discussions. Harmon will join keynote speaker Peter Bohlin, among others, in a conversation entitled “From Bauhaus Modern to Our House Modern,” which will examine “how modernism has evolved into the more easy-going, user-friendly versions we find today,” according to conference planners. He will also participate in a session entitled “Strategies in Sustainable Design,” which will discuss “how architects can create timeless work while addressing the most pressing concern of our time.”

The overall theme of Residential Architect’s conference is “‘Looking Back Without Anger,’” said editor Claire Conroy. “Basically, it should explore the richness of architectural expression that comes of being open to all ideas, interpretations, and languages. I’m looking to mine that deep vein of beautiful residential architecture that taps familiar forms, materials, and human scale.”

Frank Harmon, founder and principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA, is a veteran design awards judge and speaker at regional and national design conferences. He has presented seminars for the American Institute of Architect’s past three national conferences and his writing on architectural issues has been published in numerous periodicals including the international Docomomo Journal.

As a practioner, Harmon’s work has become synonymous with sustainable, or “green,” architecture. In 2005, his firm was named Top Firm Of The Year by Residential Architect magazine.

For more information, visit www.frankharmon.com.

Modern House In Laurel Hills Featured In January Architectural Record

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

January 26, 2007 (RALEIGH, NC) – A modern house perched on a steep hillside in Raleigh, North Carolina’s Laurel Hills neighborhood is featured this month in Architectural Record, one of the profession’s most respected journal.

Raleigh architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, principal of Frank Harmon Architect PA, designed the 1800-square-foot house for Lynda Strickland when she relocated here from Washington, D.C. Her property is located within a 150-year-old beech and oak forest above Crabtree Creek.

“We knew we had to raise the house off the ground and let the water flow under it,” Harmon told Architectural Record’s Clifford Pearson, so he propped it on nine wood trusses sitting on concrete columns. “The strategy not only preserved the site’s hydrological patterns,” writes Pearson, “but allowed the architect to build without cutting down any major trees…”

In the article, entitled “Frank Harmon raised the Strickland-Ferris Residence off the ground, then let its roof take flight,” Pearson addresses the innovative “butterfly roof….floating above a band of windows wrapping around the top of the building,” which also helps collect rainwater for irrigating the forest floor.

Noting that Strickland told Harmon she wanted “to feel as if I were living in the trees,” Pearson writes: “A glass-and-steel wall running the length of the building and reaching as high as 27 feet creates an ethereal boundary between inside and out, between modern living and the great outdoors.”

Completed in 2004, the Strickland-Ferris residence has received design awards from the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute of Architect (AIA/NC), and the AIA/NC Triangle section. It was also featured in Dwell magazine’s December edition.

A portion of the feature in Architectural Record is available online at www.archrecord.construction.com/residential/quarterly/0801strickland-1.asp. Photographs and a description of the house are also available at www.frankharmon.com under “projects.”