awards and news

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

Frank Harmon Wins Two Custom Home Magazine Design Awards

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

February 9, 2009 (RALEIGH, NC) – Two houses designed by Frank Harmon Architect PA of Raleigh, NC, have received 2009 Custom Home Design Awards in the “less than 3000 square feet” category. The awards are presented by Custom Home Magazine.

The 1800-square-foot Strickland-Ferris house in Raleigh received the coveted Grand Award. Completed in 2004, the house perches on a steep, wooded hillside above Crabtree Creek on broad-shouldered wood trusses for minimal site disturbance. The northern elevation features a glass and steel façade from floor to ceiling. A butterfly-shaped roof seems to hover above it.

The house is entered at a balcony. The master bedroom suite is located on this level. From the balcony, an open staircase descends past the glass (in essence, through the trees) to the two-story-clear main living floor. Deep roof overhangs extend a visual link to the natural environment, which is visible throughout the house. Laminated wood columns and beams, plainly bracketed, impart warmth to the sleek, modern interior.

This is the third design award the Strickland-Ferris house has received.

A 2500-square-foot house Harmon designed in Charleston, South Carolina, won a Custom Home Merit Award. The Low Country house is based on a long, one-room-deep floor plan that gives each room windows and porches overlooking Shem Creek. Bedrooms are located on opposite ends of the central, loft-like living/dining/kitchen area, beneath a single shed roof. Carports are dramatically cantilevered.

To capitalize on the view, a large glass wall fronts the southwest side of the house. To protect that wall from harsh sun and hurricane debris, Harmon designed a series of hand-fabricated metal screens hinged above the porch. In their horizontal open position, they shade the house. Closed, they create a shaded porch that allows cooling breezes into the house and protects the glass from flying debris. An abundance of operable windows provide natural ventilation and lighting.

This Charleston house also has received three other design awards.

The 15th annual Custom Home Design Awards program received 513 entries in nine categories. Just 24 projects were singled out for accolades. Houses entered had to have been designed for a specific client and site.

Custom Home is a Hanley-Wood publication.

For more information on Frank Harmon’s winning houses and other projects, visit www.frankharmon.com.

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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.

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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.”

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