At first glance, Cirrus Logic Headquarters seems nothing like the Lake|Flato projects that I’ve been blogging about. It’s not a peaceful little house situated in streams and trees and hills. The colors don’t evoke rustic imagery or blend with the scenery. Heck, there’s a street light sticking out from one of the support beams! Still, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight the fact that while most of Lake|Flato’s buildings clearly share a design philosophy, the firm can still branch out. To be honest, the street light piece is just another way of intergrating this building into its environment.

Looking inside reveals some familiar wood patterns and neutral color schemes. Natural light shines through as well. But this area definitely has a different purpose than what we’ve seen before. It’s the first floor of an office building – a reception area. The space is made to be comfortable, but not lived in.

The rest of the building sees more of those tall windows marching along its sides. Its coloration is a dark blue, which fits somewhat with the sky’s hue. There are some unusual choices as to the shape of the building, what with the recesses and protrusions of certain parts of its exterior. Personally, I don’t find this structure as appealing as Lake|Flato’s other projects. It’s alright, and certainly better than a standard square office building, but it seems to stand alone more than most of the company’s other buildings, which integrate themselves very thoroughly into their environments.

Photo credits: Casey Dunn

The Hillside House overlooks the city of Austin, Texas from  a considerable distance, both horizontally and vertically. Lake|Flato designed the building to accomodate the owner’s desire for sustainable living and being in touch with the outdoors, two things the firm has ample experience with. This house caught my attention in part because of a simple but neat detail: The incline of the roof in the above photograph is almost the same as the incline of the hill.

Surprise surprise, the house has huge windows! Again, this seems to be a Lake|Flato staple, a recurring means of blurring the line between inside and outside. The left side of this picture features the Austin city skyline and a living space ideally suited for appreciating the view.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this house is the terraced area in the left side of the above photo. From this viewpoint, the green area continues backward and transitions seamlessly into the grass beside the structure. It’s hard to tell where natural ground ends and the man-made plateau begins! There’s even an entire tree planted in that area, which is super cool. Here’s another view from outside:

Photo credits: Aaron Leitz

In 2012 Indian Springs School, an independent day and boarding school for grades 8 through 12 near Birmingham, Alabama, contacted Lake|Flato about redesigning its campus. The now-completed first phase of the three-phase project includes three classroom buildings and an administrative building. Lake|Flato is shooting for a Silver-level LEED certification.

These buildings are made to connect students with their surroundings, in addition to serving as learning centers. The classrooms feature many more square feet of windows than what I’m used to at the University of Oklahoma or my high school in Kansas. The roof structure also serves to let in daylight – there is hardly any need for artificial lighting in the photo below (on clear days, at least).

The new buildings are also designed to acknowledge their surroundings. Porch ceilings and other overhangs are made from wood, and are not unlike the nearby tree branches. Neutral tones make the buildings visually at home with the natrual color scheme. It’s very easy for a school building to be blocky and unappealing, but instead Lake|Flato came up with designs that blend in like this:

Photo credits: Casey Dunn

Returning to San Antonio, The Alamo Beer Brewery is a collection of buildings centered around a community gathering place. This particular design is not located amidst trees and streams and greenery like the two Lake|Flato structures from my previous blogs, but it still makes itself part of its surroundings.

Rather than integrating into the natural environment, the Alamo Beer Brewery makes itself a valuable part of the San Antonio urban setting. The emphasis here is not quite as much on the the buildings themselves, though they do carry Lake|Flato hallmarks such as their high windows, rustic color scheme, and interspersed greens. It’s more about what the buildings are designed to have people do: come together. The structures all face the central area, which encourages people to eat drink, socialize, and have a good time outside. Employees have cause to walk from building to building as they go about their duties potentially mingling with customers. Even if people don’t go there to buy drinks, there is space out front for activities such as tossing a frisbee around (see the woman in the bottom-left of the above photo). In these ways, the buildings serve more than just the business, they serve the community.

Photo credits: Casey Dunn & Dror Baldinger

The Mill Springs Ranch is another brainchild of Lake|Flato’s architects. Located in Vanderbilt, Texas, this homestead sports two creeks that run together and a dam built in the 20th century. Looking at photographs of the site, I was particularly impressed with how the building as a whole looked like it belonged with the waters running right by it.

The ranch features Lake|Flato’s signature expansive windows and open areas, granting its residence a lovely view of the Texas Hill Country. I’ve been to that region a few times myself, so I would love to be able to wake up to scenery like that. I do hope that bedroom has some way to blind the windows, though. Some privacy would be nice!

This courtyard is super nice. Look at how all those green plants just make themselves at home in between the stones. This is a great example of a building that doesn’t feel like a building as much as an extension of nature.

And finally, we have my favorite photo of them all. I’m a huge fan of running water myself – I like how it sounds, and it helps me feel at peace when I want to relax. This porch overlooking one of the creeks (and probably the dam, though it’s hard to make out where the water drops) is integrated terrifically with the landscape. It’s a serene mixture of the natural and the man-made.

Photo credits: Casey Dunn & Bill Timmerman

This is the Olmos Park Residence, a building  designed by the Texas-based architectural firm Lake|Flato. The firm is named after two of its leading architects, Ted Flato and David Lake. It’s based out of San Antonio and Austin, and its buildings share many intriguing design themes and choices designed to make them sustainable.

Olmos Park is actually a city completely enclosed by the city of San Antonio, so it’s no surprise that Lake|Flato took up a job there. The residence is a wonderfully open space. Natural light floods nearly every corner of the house. It’s impossible not to be aware of the surrounding environment due to how many large-scale windows there are, so occupants are able to appreciate the most beautiful clear days and the fiercest southern thunderstorms in full. This building was crafted to “resonate with the inherent nature” of the site where it was built, and the bevy of close trees, neutral colors, and rustic shapes allow it to do just that.

Photo credits: Casey Dunn & Dror Baldinger

I’m from Overland Park, Kansas. It’s a suburb of Kansas City, and that means a lot of people I know enjoy watching the Kansas City Royals play baseball, including my dad. And when the team plays at home, Kauffman Stadium is where it happens.

Surprisingly, I had never actually been to a Royals game until this summer. My appetite for baseball was basically shut down in elementary school when I played on a team whose best game was an 8 to 4 loss.  But when my workplace set up a trip to a Royals home game late into the summer of 2016, I figured it would be nice to go with and get to know some of my coworkers better.

The stadium itself is pretty cool. It was renovated in 2009, and it’s kept in pretty good condition. There are even fountains and fireworks stations located near the scoreboard. But while the aerial view looks like this:

I spent a lot of time looking at this:

The line (or rather, the blob) to get in was super long, and it was a hot afternoon during peak sunshine hours. I had not come prepared – I should have brought a water bottle.

My experience inside the building was poor, too. It was nice talking to my coworkers for a little while, but they’re all a lot older than I am and eventually I ran out of engaging topics. The baseball game went poorly for the hometown heroes. On this particular day, the Royals scored zero runs while I was there, and the away team scored something like 7. I ended up standing under one of the overhangs instead of where our seats were because I wanted shade. Water bottles were expensive, so I trekked all the way to a drinking fountain, which was in high demand. It wasn’t a good day.

None of this is really the fault of the building, but I still associate it with those bad experiences, which kind of kills any excitement I would otherwise get out of looking at it. Structurally I understand it’s a very impressive construction that serves its function well, but I’ll probably continue to think of it poorly until there’s a reason to think otherwise. And who knows if I’ll even ever go to another Royals game.

The Olympic Tower is another building I encountered on a family road trip, many years ago. I can’t remember exactly how old I was – I had to have been in middle school or younger. We toured the Montreal area, visiting Niagra Falls and this monolithic, somewhat awkwardly curved structure.

At first I didn’t have a great time there. I tend to get nervous when faced with great heights, and at this stage in life even the taller diving board in the public pool was a real fear factor. So I was quite terrified when I learned that the elevator that we would ride up the tower was mounted on the outside, giving its passengers full awareness of just how high they were travelling. Looking down, the view is something like this:

I refused to look outside for the entire trip up the tower! In retrospect it’s quite funny, me as a little kid cowering in the corner while everyone else relaxed and enjoyed the journey (or at least, I think that’s what they did. I wasn’t looking at them, as that would require looking in the direction of the windows).

At the peak of the tower there’s a souvinier shop and, you guessed it, windows. Eventually I reasoned that since I was no longer on a moving machine it was safe enough to look around. My memory of what else I did up there eludes me, but by the time we boarded the elevator going down, I had mustered the courage to look outside.

It wasn’t necessarily a fun experience, going through the Olympic Tower, but it was one that helped me mature just a little bit. These days I’m much more likely to seize opportunities to appreciate great views that I won’t get to see often.

In my earlier post about the west side of the Bizzell Memorial Library, there was a shadow on the wall of that building. This is the source of that shadow! The University of Oklahoma Clock tower.

I appreciate it for a lot of the same reasons I appreciate the library – it has a nice color scheme, I pass by it regularly, it has that look of being made of large, carefully fitted pieces, and so on. But whereas I spend most of my library-related time inside the building (guess where I’m typing this blog from?), I get to spend time outside sitting by the clock tower.

See, there are rows of tiny fountains close by, and I quite enjoy the sound of running water. It’s a nice spot to sit down and think for a while. The overall experience of that spot is enhanced by not just the tower itself, but what surrounds it.

Some of you might have heard the legend that students who pass directly under the clock tower don’t graduate on time. Well, I have definitely biked underneath that building in the past, and I’m planning on taking an extra semester of classes. Think of that what you will…

Okay, so this blog post is a bit of a deviation from the norm. See, the building I want to talk about doesn’t physically exist – it’s from a video game. However unrealistic and impractical this structure may be, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about Alcamoth, the floating city from the video game Xenoblade Chronicles.

To give some context to those of who haven’t played this game (which I would highly recommend, by the way), this city is the capital of a technologically advanced empire, and I think the design of it communicates that quite well. The obvious focal point is a lofty, bright white tower, which looms over the group of smaller disk-like sections of the city. It’s a fitting metaphor for an empire dominating over other regions (though by this point in the game it’s clear that the empire is not nearly so powerful). Plus I just love the concept of a city floating above the rest of the world. It was worth taking a break from the in-game goal at hand just to look and wonder at Alcamoth.

Again, it’s not a real building, but it’s a real design and I think it’s a cool architectural example of what kind of aesthetic can be accomplished without real-world limits. Here are a few more images, without the main character standing in the way: