The local chapter of the American Institute of Architects schedules several events during its spring Architecture Week, the last of which is the Tour, in which several members get to show off some of what they’ve been up to. This is my sixth time on the Tour, and I was delighted to see that they were allowing an extra hour — noon to 6 pm — since there were nine exhibits this year instead of the usual eight, and they were all over the map, from east Edmond to downtown Norman. They decided to cancel that last hour due to Impending Dreadful Weather, but no matter: we were done before five. Some of what we saw:

1) 104 East Main Street, Norman



It wasn’t easy to get to downtown Norman today: tornadoes ripped through the town last night and several roads were closed due to downed power lines. Attorney Drew Nichols owns this former storefront, redesigned for maximum modern efficiency without sacrificing that turn-of-the-century (and that’s the last century, not this one) look: that aisle to the left is red brick on the outside, lovely wooden storage walls on the inside. A very nice place to conduct business. (Photo by Butzer Gardner Architects.)

2) 2116 Covell Lane, Edmond



This sixty-foot-long bridge starts at the deck of this rural residence, and finishes somewhere out in the woods: the ten-acre site features a fair-sized pond and more trees than you can possibly count. Still under construction — the SIPS exterior is done, the interior just begun — this is the sort of place that Trini aspires to: not far from anything, but far enough from everyone. I can appreciate her thinking. (Photo by me.)

3) 2801 Northeast 120th Street



George Seminoff (see the 2007 Tour) built this place for himself in the late 1960s; over the years, it had deteriorated to the point that extensive reconstruction was deemed necessary. This is what it’s supposed to look like:



(First photo by me; second courtesy of the Getty Foundation.)

4) 6614 North Pennsylvania Avenue, Nichols Hills



Nichols Hills is an enclave of old money and mostly old houses, and this one, on the town’s main drag (and at 25 mph all the way through, a drag it is), is getting a refresh from Brian Fitzsimmons (see the 2007 Tour). The old Colonial was lovely but outdated and seemingly light-resistant; the Fitzsimmons plan was to open up the place with more glass and to break up the perceived monotony with an off-center front porch. (The house used to look like this.) Lots of work still to do, but the result should be delightful. (Rendering by Fitzsimmons Architects; I took several shots, but none of them proved satisfactory.)

5) 1000 Northwest 37th Street



Marked for demolition by the city, this fourplex on the edge of Crown Heights was taken over by Brent Swift, the same Norman developer who worked with Drew Nichols on his law office (see #1 above), and Butzer Gardner were brought in for the design work. The late-1930s apartments will be updated with as much of the original floor plans intact as is feasible, and a similar structure with three units is going up on a side lot. (Rendering by Butzer Gardner Architects.)

6) 1228 Northwest 36th Street



This house, a 1916 Craftsman-turned-duplex owned by architect Kenneth Fitzsimmons (not connected to architect Brian Fitzsimmons), was on the 2010 tour; in the two years since, they’ve further spruced up the interior and turned a 1940s building on the back of a lot into a proper studio.



(Exterior photo by me; interior shot courtesy of TASK Design, Inc.)

7) 1300 North Broadway Drive



John Kirkpatrick — residents of OKC will say “Oh, that John Kirkpatrick” — ran his oil company from this vintage-1950 building between Broadway and the Santa Fe tracks. (George Seminoff — see #3 — had an office in the building at one time.) When the company moved north, the building was donated to the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, which rapidly outgrew it; Saxum, a public-relations firm headed by Renzi Stone, acquired it in 2010, and engaged HSEarchitects to open up the inside while preserving the exterior look. (It did not occur to me that “Saxum” is in fact the Latin word for, um, “Stone.”) (Photo by Nick Archer.)

8) 21 North Lincoln Boulevard



The last time I mentioned Fire Station #6, it was at 620 Northeast 8th, and um, it was on fire. Which is not why there’s a new Station #6 on the eastern edge of Bricktown, which was in the planning stages already. However, nobody seemed to like the original design — for a Bricktown structure, it was deemed deficient in brick — and a new proposal was submitted by Norman-based LWPB. The new station has individual dorm-type rooms and the latest support gear, and was built to LEED standards. (Rendering courtesy of Steve Lackmeyer; the history of Station 6 is worth a read.)

9) 824 Northwest 7th Street



If you’re paying attention, you might have noticed that this is the fourth house within one block of 7th and Francis in the last six years of the Tour. The availability of relatively cheap (for close to downtown) lots and the fabulousness of the views obtainable thereupon have made this section of the Cottage District relatively hot, architecture-wise. Randy Floyd, a major player in this district, came up with this nicely-stacked “urban cottage” that feels a lot larger than its stated 2230 square feet. (Photo courtesy of Leonard Sullivan.)

The first place I hit this afternoon was the Belle Isle Library, which is getting a new roof. I’m guessing that it was damaged in the same hailstorm that took out chunks of my roof last June, and they’re just now getting around to fixing it. (Metro Library, unlike too many others, is not hurting for money, but they don’t move with incredible speed either.) Various bits of equipment took up about half of the west-side parking lot, which meant that parking near the north door was at a premium.

The second place I hit this afternoon was the Homeland store at May and Britton, which is being remodeled, perhaps in response to the impending arrival of Whole Foods (four miles away) and Sunflower Farmers Market (two miles away). They’d already redone the produce section; today, much of the flooring had been de-tiled in preparation for whatever new stuff is to be put down. Truth be told, what I want most from them is a reduction in scanning sensitivity on the self-checkout machines: about once a month the robotic voice goes into a spaz about an unexpected item in the bagging area. I have occasionally cussed at the damn thing: “Well, I expected it. What the hell is wrong with you?”

From the Department of Having Seen Too Many Movie Romances: I pulled into traffic behind this Fabulous Babe on a red Vespa. (Actually, I couldn’t tell much from her face except what I could see in her rear-view mirrors, but being on a red Vespa garners Fabulous Babe points all by itself, and, well, nice legs were in evidence.) She had her purse stuffed into a saddlebag, but one of the two buckles on the saddlebag was not cinched down. I started conjuring up a story about how the purse went flying, and how I amazingly managed to retrieve it without causing a wreck, and from this highly-unlikely Meet Cute, we lived happily ever after.

And speaking of unbelievable stories, at 6 pm, to greet the end of the world, I took off my clothes — no sense littering the place — and went out back to meet the Heavenly Host. (Hey, I came into this world that way, I can jolly well leave it under those circumstances.) I got two visitors, both birds, but no other aerial activity was manifest, so I went back inside and started typing.

The Central Oklahoma Chapter of the American Institute of Architects holds Architecture Week every year about this time, and on Saturday of that week comes the Tour, wherein several recent projects by members are opened to the public. This is something I do not miss if I can help it, and at noon today, we were heading down to Norman for the first stop.

1) 530 Eufaula Street, Norman

Just outside downtown Norman — barely two blocks off West Main, in fact — this space used to be occupied by an indifferent duplex. The new place, not quite so large, has a series of garden walls which conceal a couple of dinosaurs (!) and allow for garden and/or courtyard views from nearly every room. (This picture was shot over the west wall.) The interior proportions were, to my thinking, just about perfect, and I said so to one of the owners. This part of Norman, except for the inevitable traffic, retains its small-town feel, which is a neat trick in a city of 110,000.

2) 204 North Robinson, 32nd Floor

Back in 2008, I mentioned that this old skyscraper — it’s just now turning 80 — was being refurbed, and the top floors were being turned into high-rise residences. The top two floors, in fact, were turned into one residence, about 5000 square feet, with a price tag in the general vicinity of $3 million. I figure $1 million of this was for the view, which is pretty much unparalleled anywhere else in town. The amenities are commensurate with the price tag, but there are unexpected bonuses from its bank-building days: the old drive-in is now the parking garage, and the vault has been converted to local storage. It was about this time that Trini started making noises about buying more lottery tickets.

3) 811 North Broadway

Packard, the motor car, passed from the scene in 1958. This particular building along Automobile Alley has had several uses since then, though always pretty much the same front. Last time I was there, it was the gallery of Individual Artists of Oklahoma, which has since moved to Film Row; it’s now the home of Accel Financial Staffing, owned by Meg Salyer. Office space in general I tend to judge by how closely it resembles Cubicle Hell. This one scores no points for devilishness. (And yes, that’s the same Meg Salyer who represents Ward 6 on City Council.)

3.5) 815 North Hudson Avenue
This technically wasn’t a Tour stop, but Elemental Coffee Roasters, which supplies several eateries in town, is opening its own coffeehouse at this location, and they offered a free sample to any Tour participant. I passed — damn diuretics — but Trini was delighted with her latte.

4) 825 Northwest 7th Street

I first visited the so-called Oklahoma Case Study House in November ’09 and took this shot. At the time, it seemed utterly out of place on its little hillock just west of Midtown, but it fascinated me just the same. It was not quite complete for the 2010 Tour; now that it’s done, it still seems like a work in progress. Architect Brian Fitzsimmons has plenty of photos to show you.

5) 834 Northwest 7th Street

Across the street and down one, this house in its larval stage was on the 2008 Tour; the photo dates from the fall of ’09. Architect Dennis Wells lives in this nifty concrete box, which sits on a small 50 x 70 lot. (The structure itself is a modest 40 x 40.) The living quarters are upstairs; there’s a guest suite downstairs. (“I want a guest suite,” said Trini.) The house sits about halfway between the Case Study House and the OKasian House at 719 North Francis, seen on the 2007 Tour. Wells’ own rendering looks something like this.

6) 5900 Mosteller Drive

If you just adore a penthouse view but aren’t inclined to buy downtown, this is the suburban choice, off May and Northwest Distressway. The old United Founders tower, once home to a now-deceased insurance company, has gone residential, as mentioned here in 2007. The advantage here is that almost every room has a view and full-height glass to maximize it. We saw a couple of single-bedroom units, which were a bit out of our price range, and a pair of two-bedroom units, which were more so. (See their Web site for floor plans.)

7) 7720 North Robinson Avenue
Design Resources has been doing window treatments for the trade for the better part of 60 years; they took over an old bulk warehouse in the Broadway Business Park, and Randy Floyd revised it into showroom, offices, and workroom. (We peeked into the samples area and were dazzled by the sheer variety.) No trace of Cubicle Hell here, either.

(Previous Tour reports: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Photo credits: #2 courtesy of AIACOC; #3 courtesy of Waymark; #6 courtesy of Founders Tower; others by me.)

The city has not issued a formal estimate of how much this double-play Snow Monster has drained its coffers, but I’m going ahead with a Scientific Wild-Assed Guess of $15 million, as follows:

• Overtime for sand truck and snowplow crews: $1,250,000.
• Sand: $1,362.
• Repairing 90 percent of the fresh potholes: $13,748,638.

I figure ten percent of the potholes will be missed entirely, or will have to be repaired yet again after a spring rain.

Speaking of snow, whoever first described something as “pure as the driven snow” had obviously never driven in any. Rather a lot of folks who found the stuff amazingly filthy were lined up at car washes today, which I didn’t find inexplicable, exactly, but it seemed like such a waste: you can’t go 500 yards without running into a puddle of something wet and splattery, and there goes the $2/$5/$40/whatever you paid for a few minutes of the pristine.

And then, having threaded my way through the running water at the supermarket parking lot, I began the day’s Shopping Adventure, which contained something perhaps a little more inexplicable: youngish couple (with smallish child) are positioned in the laundry-products aisle — no, not in the middle of it, thank heaven — and while she watches with what appears to be amused detachment, he opens up jugs of detergent at random and sniffs.

“There are times when I think they’re all pretty rancid,” I offered, to no discernible effect.

I didn’t hang around for an explanation — I grabbed a bottle of Era and moved on — but I’m guessing it’s something like this: family was visiting his mom and dad, they got stuck there when the snow came down, and now that they’re home, he wants that same smell he got when his mom did their wash for them.

This could easily be solved by a phone call (“Yeah, we were wondering what brand of detergent you use”), but guys don’t ask directions either.

With Bricktown more or less mature — in a marketing sense, anyway — and Midtown and Automobile Alley showing all sorts of growth, trendspotters are looking for residential rooftops in the general vicinity. Most of the activity seems to be west of Midtown, in the Cottage District/SoSA/Whatever. There are patches of infill available near I-235, though they have the disadvantage of, well, being near I-235.

So where’s the Next Big Thing? There were a couple dozen building permits listed in the Oklahoman this morning for an area south of NE 8th and west of Martin Luther King, east of the steadily-gentrifying John F. Kennedy neighborhood. Urban hipsters wouldn’t be caught dead over there, partly because of the emphasis on single-family homes, partly because of the Chris Rock Factor, but I suspect convenience — we’re talking 1.5 miles from the Oklahoma Health Center, three from the Capitol, two from downtown via NE 4th — and modest pricing will move these homes. I had some environmental concerns, since this was near an EPA Superfund site, but the site in question has been declared clean.

Coming back through downtown, I noticed a sign at the Block 42 development to the effect that there were only 10 units left. This might be impressive were it not for the fact that a year and a half ago there were 12 units left. Still, it’s not like much of anything is actually sold out these days.

The outdoor signage for the Dickinson theater in Penn Square Mall sadly informs us: SAW 2D ONLY. I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable when you stick “3D” in the title; people might be thinking they’re going to see Saw II, which was five Saw films ago.

(Title borrowed from Justin Hayward, in memory of someone who’s not here.)

Every year, the Central Oklahoma chapter of the American Institute of Architects celebrates Architecture Week, and it finishes off with a tour through a number of Notable Structures, one of the events I do my darnedest not to miss, and the more-or-less constant drizzle today managed not to cast a pallor over the proceedings. Mostly. The starting point was a tour stop last year in its larval stage, but now it’s a highly-contemporary butterfly.

1) 3940 East Wilshire Boulevard
What I said last year: “Worth Ross and Jim Roth are having their dream home built on the city’s heavily-forested northeast side, in an elevated location that provides for both excellent drainage (just in case) and a formidable view of the city. Roth, who served on the state Corporation Commission, called for maximum green wherever possible, and he got it: the walls are Insulating Concrete Forms — R-50, they estimated — the countertops are recycled glass, and the heating and air-conditioning are geothermal. The location allows for only minimal landscaping, which is just fine: what’s already there is lovely enough.”

Well, the bathroom countertops, anyway. The kitchen surfaces are done up in recycled concrete in an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Marble mode, and they’re impressive. And yes, so is the view from the far side of the pool.

2) 4224 North Lincoln Boulevard
The nonprofit Infant Crisis Services is a last resort for families with very young children “until they are back on their feet or until they become qualified for government programs.” The new facility was made possible by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. It’s lovely, but mostly it’s functional, and I admit I spent most of my time in the stockroom, surrounded by racks of clothing and diapers and formula and whatnot, where it dawned on me that I’d actually contributed to ICS before, in response to an emergency social-media campaign. (Imagine that.)

3) 1228 Northwest 36th Street
A 1916 modified-Craftsman house updated for the 21st century, this is the home of architect Kenneth Fitzsimmons. Perhaps surprisingly, little reconfiguration was required, though the kitchen was reoriented and the passage to the dining room was enlarged; to the maximum extent possible, the original woodwork and masonry has been preserved, so that there’s still a 100-year-old feel to the place, despite the presence of modern-day amenities. There’s a second building on the back of the lot, which is being converted into a work room/studio.

4) 1444 Northwest 28th Street
Originally built in 1911, this was a church for most of its existence, most recently the Temple of Faith; it’s now the home of United Way of Central Oklahoma, which has kept most of the exterior intact while dividing the sanctuary into office space and community rooms. Nothing fancy, but everything in its place, and a quiet place at that. Then again, you’d expect a moment of silence from a church, right?

6) 825 Northwest 7th Street
Last time I was here was mid-November, apparently before the house, designed by Brian Fitzsimmons, had been dubbed the Oklahoma Case Study Home, after the famed series of Case Study Houses built mostly in the Los Angeles area after World War II. “Modernism for the masses” was the idea, and this house, which scowls down over the rest of 7th — the lot slopes 16 feet back to front — is a high point (sorry) in the reclamation of this part of town. Since I took this shot last fall, progress has been made, and the channel that runs alongside that endless staircase is now packed with stones.

7) 125 Park Avenue #200
I remember that I was somewhat skeptical when this building opened as office condominiums a few years back; how many people will want to buy into a smallish (for downtown, anyway) five-story tower? Under the general heading of “Shows you how much I know” you’ll find Visual Image Advertising, which took two floors. Suite 200 actually is the Account Service area; the Creative Level is upstairs in 300, and it’s described as “a place of media consulting magic.” At the very least, it kicks the standard cubicle farm’s mass-produced behind.

You may have noticed the absence of 5), which was the center of the Wayne Coyne/Flaming Lips compound in the Classen-Ten-Penn area, but as Trini noted after about fifteen minutes of standing in the rain, the line just seemed to be getting longer, so with the expectation that Coyne’s not going anywhere and there’ll be another time eventually, we moved on to the next stop.

(Photographs by me except #4, from LoopNet, and #7, by Simon Hurst. Previous Tour reports: 2007, 2008, and 2009.)

Things seemed calculated today to rattle my brain in several unexpected ways, as distinguished from the expected brain-rattling experiences, such as driving down 23rd west of May, which also rattles one’s suspension parts.

At the supermarket, not only did I flub an item selection — Hunt’s really needs larger type on their tomato-sauce labels — but for the first time in over a year, I wound up writing a check instead of swiping the usual plastic. This sent up a storm flag at the store, especially when I gave off a dafter-than-usual expression when they handed the check back to me. Electronic processing, they’ve already got their money, they don’t need this, they explained. This modern world, I thought, and reminded myself to carry the damned debit card next time.

I was parked next to a newish Nissan Murano, and inasmuch as it was empty and it was after all a Nissan, I glanced into the interior, which was a bit fussy but still sort of neat. As I loaded up the trunk, the Murano started backing up, and lip readers in the vicinity of my face were treated to a very obvious WTF. Either I’m even less observant than I think, which is going some, or the Invisible Woman decided it might be a good idea to rematerialize before she pulled out of the lot.

South of 36th and May is an array of buy-here-pay-here used-car lots, and one of them was offering something different: a layaway plan. This seems contrary to the usual industry practice — get it now and pay a ton of money at high interest rates for as long as possible — but I suppose this could work if you’re not in a hurry. (Or maybe it’s in layaway for just long enough for you to come up with a down payment. You can’t ever tell about these things.)

And it is a measure of the way this winter has gone that this afternoon, with a high temperature still slightly below seasonal norms, seemed abnormally warm.

The Black Hole of Retail at 63rd and May seems to have been repopulated; last year a Half Price Books outlet took over the old Hollywood Video space — imagine that, books replacing video — and now Ballengers Furniture, a place where I have spent way too much money, is moving into the space vacated by CompUSA way back when. Praise be unto JAH.

Speaking of locations on May, my non-automatic car wash of choice, the old National Pride wash in the Village, has apparently swallowed its pride and closed its doors, except of course that it doesn’t have any doors. I have tentatively settled on the Extreme (!) Wash at 38th and Meridian as its replacement; it exceeds the usual cleanliness standard, the mechanicals are friendly — no coin changer, you just shove in bills as needed — and they have one of these on the premises, which suggests they might actually pay attention to water quality.

Snark of the day: at the meat counter, from a woman who was finicky about filet mignon. She found one she liked, and then pointed to a tray about two feet away for her second. Said the butcher, “Good stuff, but that’s the prime. It’s five dollars more per pound.”

“Oh, he’s not worth five dollars,” she said.

Yeah, we all laughed; comic timing, I decided, outweighed the appearance of misandry. And having bought nothing over four dollars a pound from their display case, I figured I probably wasn’t worth it either.

Later, sighted across a parking lot, this was chalked (shoe-polished, more likely, but you get the idea) on the windows of a van: “RIP,” a girl’s name, “We Love You,” and her dates.

Three months and three days apart.

The skies, already darkening, seemed to be so much more so all of a sudden.

I had gotten about three miles away when The Spy unexpectedly served up Kirsty MacColl’s unjustly-forgotten “Walking Down Madison.”

“From the sharks in the penthouse
To the rats in the basement
It’s not that far…”

This marked the transition from “somewhat weepy” to “totally lost it.”

Yours truly, about this time last fall:

I live in one of those districts with fairly strict [building and zoning] requirements; I’m thinking that it wouldn’t hurt this town, and might help it, to try a little experiment with Almost Anything Goes. I’ve visited the Okasian House — it was on the 2007 Architecture Tour — and I’d love to see other contemporary homes cheek by jowl with Craftsman houses, just for sheer jaw-dropping variety.

Here’s something you’ll see on the 2010 Architecture Tour:

By no particular coincidence, Brian Fitzsimmons, who designed the Okasian House, is responsible for this one as well, a block away at 7th and Francis. The Urban Planning Commission hashed over the plans for several sessions before finally giving design approval: the sticking point, apparently, was that cantilevered upper section, which played hell with the definition of “setback.” More interesting to me, though, is the construction technique for those concrete walls: instead of relying on the usual Styrofoam forms, they poured these directly in place. (Out back, in fact, there’s a test wall, used as proof of concept.) The view from that upper section is fabulous. For now, we’re calling this the Lovallo House, after owner Bill Lovallo.

Farther northwest, the tried-and-failed, tried-and-failed-again Windsor Hills moviehouse is being tried again, this time operated by B&B Theatres, the small Missouri-based chain that operates the Reno 8 cinema in El Reno. Ten screens are promised. This stretch of 23rd Street, west of Meridian, is becoming increasingly Latino, which makes me wonder if maybe they’ll run some Mexican films now and then; the young ladies handing out flyers couldn’t say.

Construction on the Northwest Distressway between Blackwelder and Pennsylvania continues, and not being sure exactly what they’re doing, I can’t tell you whether they’ll be done in time for the Black Friday debacle that usually takes place on the way to Penn Square. They’ve added a second left-turn lane into the mall, opposite the 50 Penn Place entrance eastbound, and at the moment they seem to be widening the westbound roadway for the benefit of traffic entering I-44 west. Traffic exiting I-44 at the Distressway, however, is facing the same set of hurdles as always: there’s apparently nothing that can be done about that other than what I do already, which is (1) exit at Classen and (2) pray.

I should probably go to this Lowe’s (3801 North May) more often; the place was absolutely awash in Major Babes today, all the way from Plumbing Supplies to Lumber. (I needed light bulbs and furnace filters, if you’re curious.) I’m not sure if this was an anomaly due to the impending holiday or what, but I bought half my usual quantities, with the intention of following up on this matter.

The gripe at Mayfair Village has been that the new out-of-state ownership has been cranking up the rents something fierce; a couple of fairly unique stores — Two Sisters and Blue 7 — have fled for points north, and there are more empty spots than I’d like. Unfortunately, one of them has now been filled with one of those payday-loan joints, which inevitably generate mixed emotions for me: I defend their existence, generally, as part and parcel of a free market, but I can’t deny the considerable Ick Factor they generate for me. (Possible future project: Actually visit one of these places and see how justified said Ick Factor really is.)

A few months back, it looked like they were actually going to repave NW 23rd west of May. They dug out the old roadbed on the eastbound lanes and hauled away a mixture of paving material and potholes — I’d guess about a 50-50 ratio — but that’s as far as they’ve gotten. I’m hoping that City Hall has finally gotten fed up with the halfassed paving jobs they’ve been getting out of contractors and have now started demanding something that won’t wear out in a year and a half, but at this point it’s impossible to tell, because nothing’s happening.

Oh, and apparently nobody got the white pages from AT&T this time around, so evidently it wasn’t just me and a passel of Georgians. I think, for the moment, I’ll just borrow Steve Lackmeyer’s copy.

File this under “You’ve had better ideas”: for some reason I power-walked my way through the supermarket today, maintaining a heady pace all the way from the produce to the frozen foods, albeit not nonstop — it’s hard to scoop stuff off the counter while moving — and sixty dollars later I was just about flattened. Then came the drive home, and yes, Gwendolyn’s A/C was working just fine, but I have an actual physical Driving Mode, in which the alertness is dialed up as close to 11 as I can manage and all systems are on hair-trigger alert. (If I’m drowsy when I’m driving, something is terribly wrong somewhere.) Once I got home, it took about ten minutes of decompression in a dark room before I was able to put away the groceries.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for getting the heart rate up this far for extended minutes — maximum is, according to the standard formula, 165, and I hit somewhere around 115-120 — and since it didn’t actually kill me, I’m going to assume that it did me some good.

I wheeled into a Circle K store this afternoon for a tankful of premium, and in the process of not looking at the young lady with the Jeep on the other side of the pump — what is it with women and Jeeps, anyway? — I noticed a reference to a petition, which I duly went into the store to read. What they want, it seems, is some sort of reform of the interchange-fee system that cuts into their margins. Now I know how this stuff works: we run 1000-2000 credit card transactions every week, and they cost us a ton, or at least several dozen kilograms, of money. But we don’t work on quite so thin a margin as they do. (Yes, I signed; the clerk seemed pleased that she didn’t have to ask me if I wanted to.)

Before the Great Power Walk began, I was standing at the meat/seafood counter as one of the underlings was explaining how tenderloins are cut, inasmuch as a customer was wanting to buy a dozen or so filets in the 8-10 ounce range, which was, said the underling, three-quarters of a pound. Mrs Customer (I presume) did a world-class eyeroll at that one. This was not, incidentally, the same underling who rang up $8.99 a pound for the $6.99/lb steak I had had wrapped at that counter five minutes before.

The Central Oklahoma chapter of the American Institute of Architects presents an Architecture Week each spring, which is capped off by the Architecture Tour, in which local AIA members get to strut their stuff for the general public, an open house at several different projects at varying degrees of completion. This is the third year I’ve taken the tour (previous tour reports here and here), and it’s always worth the trip. This year’s eight stops, in the order of visitation:

1) 1730 Center Drive, Midwest City
ArtzPlace Oklahoma, just west of Midwest City’s Rose State College, is a full-service arts center for eastern Oklahoma County, offering all manner of arts classes to the community. The brickwork, in three different shades, is just this side of festive, and the 7600-square-foot interior is designed for maximum reconfigurability: bigger rooms can become smaller ones, or vice versa, as needed with minimal effort. The south end, which currently goes nowhere in particular, will eventually incorporate a sculpture garden. (Picture courtesy of ArtzPlace Oklahoma.)

2) 3940 East Wilshire Boulevard
Worth Ross and Jim Roth are having their dream home built on the city’s heavily-forested northeast side, in an elevated location that provides for both excellent drainage (just in case) and a formidable view of the city. Roth, who served on the state Corporation Commission, called for maximum green wherever possible, and he got it: the walls are Insulating Concrete Forms — R-50, they estimated — the countertops are recycled glass, and the heating and air-conditioning are geothermal. The location allows for only minimal landscaping, which is just fine: what’s already there is lovely enough. This house is well short of completion, and should be finished by this time next year, when I expect it will be on the Tour once more. (Photo by me; also on Flickr.)

3) 609 Northwest 42nd Street
The Robertson House in Crown Heights dates back to 1940; a section was added on in 1980, but it never quite fit in with the rest of the house. The objective here was to renovate the home as a unit, opening it up to greater functionality while retaining as much period flavor as possible. Local artists were involved in the production: for instance, fused glass art is incorporated into the bathroom tile. Neat stuff: a ceiling-mounted bicycle rack just inside the entrance, and carpeting replaced with recycled rubber. (Ross and Roth are using similar stuff on their deck.) On a block otherwise full of Tudor Revival houses, this is the house you’ll notice.

4. 3101 North Harvey Parkway
What do you do with the last vacant lot in an entire Historic District? The Hooks took a look around Edgemere Park, a hodgepodge of styles from the 1920s to the 1950s, and decided on a house with mid-century looks and contemporary amenities. And it works: the 1950s are so strong in this house I was ready to put on Sinatra and start to cry. The house is L-shaped, with a single story to the south and a two-story wing to the north, cleverly matching the adjacent homes without particularly looking like either. If you have to have infill development, and I’ve always assumed that you do, this is one of the most appealing ways to do it.
(Photo by me; also on Flickr.)

5. 1305 North Hudson Avenue
The Sieber was a combination motor hotel — there’s still signage to that effect on the south wall — and grocery store, both opened in the late 1920s. The Sieber family kept things going through the 1960s, but eventually things shut down, and a revitalization attempt in the 1980s fell through after the Great Oil Bust. In 1997, Marva Ellard acquired the property and vowed to do something about it. The old 80-room hotel now contains 38 apartments and space for retail on the ground floor. The Art Deco look was preserved as much as possible, partly because it’s enjoying renewed popularity, partly because retaining the period look was essential for securing tax credits. The lobby is still more or less intact, with a lovely mosaic-tile floor. The north building, where the grocery was located, contains two-story townhouses; the south building, the original hotel, contains one- and two-bedroom flats. This being MidTown, some of the views are superb. (Further details here.)

6. 444 North Central Avenue
The Central Avenue Villas at NE 4th and Central are new condos with a strongly-contemporary feel and a markedly-lower price point than some of the townhouses in the neighborhood: the vast majority of the units run $300k or less, and the smallest (around 750 square feet) are around half that. ICF forms were used in exterior construction; a geo-exchange system provides HVAC for the entire building. Floor plans are simple but functional, and there’s a communal outdoor roof terrace. There’s a small surface parking lot for visitors, but residents park underground in a restricted-access area. The exterior design, says the architect, was inspired by a Charlie Christian guitar riff, which makes sense given the project’s Deep Deuce location. (Further details here.)

7. 1 Northeast 2nd Street
Last year I looked at the Brownstones at Maywood Park, a high-end townhouse cluster; the Lofts at Maywood Park, down the street, are aimed at a different audience. There’s something contradictory in the premise here: you think “lofts,” you think repurposing of old construction, and what you have here is new construction trying to look like old construction. This isn’t a problem, though: the target audience is less interested in architectural detail than in accessibility, and this location has scads of it. What’s more, the ground floor is reserved for retail space, meaning that, as Trini remarked on the way out, “you could live here and never have to leave the building.” I know lots of people for whom that would be a major draw. The smallest units start around $130k, though you can spend three times as much for three times the space. (Further details here.)

8. 1711 North Blackwelder Avenue
Despite the different address, this was on last year’s Tour: it’s the warehouse end of the one-time New State Ice Company, which is midway through its conversion. The storefront, still under construction, will be a new location for the Velvet Monkey Salon; the warehouse has been turned into a residence for owner Estrella Evans. I am loath to describe anything not involving James Brown as “funky,” but the term seems to fit here: it’s a riot of colors and forms and shapes. It couldn’t happen to a nicer neighborhood eyesore. The salon, I expect, will be done by next year.

Once in a while I wander up to the Homeland store that displaced my old favorite Albertson’s, despite swearing that I wouldn’t; they still fill one of my prescriptions, and once in a while they have something I need on sale. My rule, generally, is to drop off the old pill bottle, kill 15 minutes hunting for bargains, check out, and then return to the pharmacy to pick up the new bottle. One thing I needed today was shaving cream, and to my amazement, more than a year after the changeover, they still had some of Albertson’s house-brand gel, at half a buck less than Edge. Inasmuch as I’m currently using Target’s house-brand gel, which is probably identical under the label, I figure I’m not giving up much.

Besides which, they had cheap gas: premium today was $2.499, and regular was twenty cents less than that. (I did see $2.279 for regular at a 7-Eleven; a few stations are reported to be even lower.) The twenty-cent price differential is more honored in the breach these days — my Circle K/Shell stations of choice have gone to 24 cents — but stations that sell hardly any premium charge a lot more for it: there’s a little independent market on US 62 that as of yesterday had posted prices of $2.399 for regular and $3.399 for premium. I avoid this station on principle, inasmuch as one of the staff at 42nd and Treadmill once reported being held up there, and she didn’t mean “delayed.”

South of 39th along May, there is an abundance of “buy here/pay here” auto dealers, the bottom of the retail market, generally dispiriting-looking joints with a whole lot of colored fabric flapping in the breeze. I am of two minds about these places: you can argue that yes, they provide a service to people who presumably might otherwise not be able to buy cars, but they charge a scarily high price for that service. (Also in this phylum: “cash advance” places and “rent-to-own” operations. I once rented an apartment full of furniture; I would have been better served had I hung around thrift shops for a month or so.) The one that had crept north of 39th has now relocated a couple of miles west; I have no idea what, if anything, will fill that space.

Among the customers of one of these joints was a fellow I spied in a Wal-Mart parking lot with a ragged ’79 Dodge D-50 he’d just acquired. (How ragged? Both the backup-light lenses were gone, except for a couple of small plastic shards, the trim strips were down to random coverage, and the top of the once-black dash was now cheese-mold grey.) “Just acquired” was indicated by the standard temporary tag filled out by dealers; I can’t help but wonder if the new owner was sitting there because he couldn’t get it started again. Normally this is where I volunteer my assistance, but the guy looked every bit as scary as his truck, and I backed away slowly, though not very slowly.

Regular unleaded gasoline, mirabile dictu, has now touched the $3.15 price point, with lots of stations under $3.20. (There’s one report of a single station bravely pumping for $3.079; I monitor such things here.) From my point of view, there’s a slight downside to this: the old twenty-cent gap between regular and premium has widened to twenty-five, even thirty cents. (It was 27 cents at the Circle K/Shell at 63rd and May, where regular was $3.199.)

I am a driver, generally, but there are times when I have to do some walking — Neighborhood Association stuff, generally — so I keep harping on the fact that the city has promised us some sidewalks here in the Near-Core. They couldn’t come too soon for the sk8erboi I saw today east of Meridian on 36th, gliding in and out of driveways while trying to avoid oncoming traffic, which fortunately was fairly light. Yes, sidewalks have these horizontal gaps at regular intervals, presumably inimical to skate wheels; but most of our streets have gaps at irregular intervals, which are not so much of an improvement, I suspect.

It’s been my conviction that 80 percent of white shoe polish never gets applied to an actual shoe: instead, it’s used to scrawl messages on motor-vehicle glass. I saw this today on a Ford Explorer, and you know there’s got to be a story behind it:

Me — 1
Kid who fought — 0

Another unsolved mystery, I suppose. Then again, they don’t always stay unsolved. Remember this?

It’s not every day I get a notice from the Postal Service that I have a certified letter waiting, especially not one from the Oklahoma Tax Commission.

But wait! This isn’t for me at all: according to the notice, the letter is for someone named Sloan. I don’t believe anyone named Sloan has ever lived here; certainly no one named Sloan has lived here in the last four years.

We’ve had no visits from Mr Sloan, but he did get another letter today, which I opened before I noticed his name, and which reveals a little more of the story. The OTC, as part of their Clean Slate ’08 program, is offering this fellow (I’m not mentioning his first name) a chance to pay up on his back taxes without the usual penalties and interest — before the 14th of November, when the boom will presumably be lowered. I dashed off a note to OTC telling them that I don’t know this guy or where to find him, which is, I think, all I can do at this point.

Finally, I’m keeping my trash day. The city is changing the collection pattern to save time and fuel, but my neighborhood will still be picked up on Tuesdays. (The city picks up only about half the homes in city limits; trash service in other parts of town is outsourced and presumably won’t be affected. Map here.) One more habit I don’t have to break, thank heaven.

Earlier this week I spied diesel at $3.999, the first time it had been below $4, if you call that “below $4,” in ages. At the time I assumed it was an outlier, and filed away their premium-unleaded price ($3.639) for the weekend fill. But apparently it’s a trend: at one corner (36th and Portland) I caught a brand-name station at $3.999 and a no-name station across the street at $3.979. Somewhere a trucker is smiling.

I was parking my grocery basket in the collector at the lot, and hung back for a moment while the woman parked next to it unloaded hers. She finished; I took it off her hands “since I’ve been standing here like a goof anyway,” and she gave me the “Do people actually do this?” look I’ve seen before. She did blurt out a “Thank you,” but I got the distinct impression that in her world, anyway, chivalry is dead, or at least coughing rather a lot.

On the other hand, the guy I saw trying to pick up a female pharmacy tech still seemed to believe in the concept. I didn’t hang around to hear all the dialogue, but when I rounded that corner again, it appeared that he’d succeeded.

Note to City Hall: When you get through congratulating yourselves for the good fortune of having a local corporate citizen who’s going to reshape your skyline, you might take a look at 23rd Street one more time; even [insert name of reputed Third World hellhole] would consider that road substandard.

I was westbound on Britton, heading toward Lake Hefner, and I was behind some sort of ultra-low-slung sports car, which makes sense: any reasonable sports car would inevitably be in front of me and pulling away. I never did see any badging on this thing, which bore a state vanity plate and Ferrari-esque taillights. A kit car, maybe? Perhaps. At least it moved out with Ferrari-esque alacrity.

Which was nothing compared to the shock I got at the grocery store, where I spied a swoopy grey coupe with a badge that said, I thought, Tuscan. Holy ironmongery, a TVR? It can’t be. TVR has somewhere around zero dealers in the States. Somebody, I decided, had spent money for TVR indicia and pasted them on a Hyundai or something. When I got home, I determined that I was half-right: the badge in fact read Tuscani, which is the Korean domestic-market version of the workaday Hyundai Tiburon. There is also, apparently, a Tuscani package for the Tiburon in Canada. Now I’m starting to wonder about that quasi-Ferrari.

(Speaking of badge-engineering, this is not a Hyundai.)

One gas station I occasionally visit for reasons of cheapness has had for several years a sticker on its pumps to the effect that they’d added the infamous petroleum derivative MTBE to the go-juice, acknowledging that yes, it’s a groundwater hazard if it leaks. Several states have moved to ban or limit MTBE use; Oklahoma is not one of them. I dropped by this station today for one specific reason: as of the first of July, stations that sell gasoline blended with ethanol are required to have statements to that effect at the pump. (Stations that don’t have ethanol blends tend to shout it from the housetops.) So I was curious to see if an ethanol sticker had replaced the MTBE sticker. Nope: MTBE sticker is where it’s always been, and an ethanol sticker is right above it. I filled up anyway, since this was the first time in a while I’d seen anything resembling premium at under $4, if you consider $3.999 to be “under $4.” Truth be told, I think I’d rather have the MTBE, and save the ethanol for some more worthwhile purpose.

Today is the day that downtown loses some one-way streets: Robinson, Harvey and Hudson are now two-way between 6th and 13th, 5th is two-way from Walker to Western, and 6th is two-way from Oklahoma to Western. On the sensible basis that I didn’t want to witness the carnage caused by the inevitable confusion, I stayed the hell out of there.

Last year’s Architecture Tour was all over the map, mixing urban and suburban designs. This year, the title “Urban Life” was affixed to it, with the emphasis you might expect; in addition to the salutary effects of infill development, this saved a lot of gas, since I didn’t have to trek all the way out past Memorial Road. In the order viewed:

1) 1712 NW 16th Street
The first of two projects in the Plaza District, the Struble Studios building is a reclamation of a 1924 commercial structure, now in the process of getting an interior built. The exterior has a brick façade that had been painted over; to restore it, they simply turned the bricks around to present a fresh face. Ingenious. The renovation extends to two adjacent storefronts, though only this one was open for the tour. Contractor Jeff Struble, who owns this block, has been doing home renovations in the adjacent Gatewood area, so working in the Plaza District seemed like the logical thing to do. Next Big Thing status? We’ll see.

2) 1701 NW 16th Street
In the 1920s, this was the New State Ice Company, and when’s the last time you had ice delivered? Exactly. New State, once owned by Anheuser-Busch, exists now only in old Supreme Court records: in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, the company sought to enforce a de facto monopoly it enjoyed as a result of Oklahoma’s 1925 Ice Act, which declared the manufacture of ice to be a public utility and therefore to fall under the jurisdiction of the Corporation Commission, which had decided that there were enough ice makers in the city. In 1932, the Court ruled 6-2 against New State and overturned the Ice Act. The new owners of the building, Estrella and Mike Elliott, aren’t involved with ice, but they do have something cool in mind: they’re going to turn the storefront into the new Velvet Monkey Salon, replacing a smaller location at 1915 NW 23rd. (There are two other locations.) And the warehouse will be rebuilt as the Elliotts’ new home. Given its industrial past, you’d figure this would be a wide-open, expansive sort of place, and indeed it is; Brian Fitzsimmons (you’ll remember him from Okasian House on last year’s Tour) is thinking “sustainable,” reusing as much of the old stuff as possible. I asked him if the two big metal stars I found in the storefront area were from the old Plaza Theater, just up the street; he was surprised to find that they were there. (I am nothing if not a busybody at times.) Given Fitzsimmons’ knack for reconstruction, I expect this to be fabulous when it’s done.

3) 834 NW 7th Street
This got some coverage in the paper [link goes to PDF file] last week. Dennis Wells is building this house for himself and his wife Shellee; it’s basically a big concrete cube, which won’t even clash with the neighborhood. (The Okasian House is across Francis, halfway down the block.) The box is 40 feet square, so as to fit on to the 50×70 corner lot with appropriate setbacks. Two-thirds of the living space is upstairs; the entrance and a two-car garage are downstairs. “It’s going to be the architect’s ghetto,” quipped Shellee Wells about the neighborhood, which sounds about right to me.

4) 2200 Classen Blvd.
The Classen is the one-time Citizens Tower, south of the Gold Dome at 23rd and Classen; Robert Roloff designed it in the mid-1960s with an eye toward Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville. Richard Tanenbaum bought it in 2004, and after first planning about 100 condos, has turned the tower into 66 of what the Jeffersons might call “deluxe apartments in the sky.” Certainly the views are fabulous. We were granted admission to a tenth-floor unit, relatively modest but still decidedly upscale, and to one of the penthouses, which looks pretty much like you’d expect a penthouse to look. Amenities are everywhere and consistent with what you’d expect from a high-zoot hotel; rents are, well, not for the squeamish.

5) 1007 NW 14th Street
Actually, this is in the back of 1007; it started out as a detached garage behind Steve and Annette Jacobi’s house in Heritage Hills. It was in bad shape; the new garage looks much like the old one, except that it’s two stories now, and above it is a small studio apartment, about 600 square feet. The city’s Historic District mavens had to pass judgment on this rebuild; it made it through on the first try. I was most impressed by the cantilevered stairway on the building’s west side, which somehow looks like it was part of the original design, which of course it wasn’t. The interior on this one is still on the drawing board, but I expect it will be cozy and neat.

6) 111 Harrison Avenue
This long building in the Flatirons District, northeast of downtown, was the original headquarters of Mistletoe Express, OPUBCO’s erstwhile delivery service. The reconstruction, on behalf of developers Momentum Partners, was completed in 2006; the tour stop was just for the conference room near the entrance, which was created by Stan Carroll from salvaged steel and tempered glass, which isn’t anywhere near as easy as it sounds since you can’t alter tempered glass worth a darn. Still: sustainable, and attractive in an industrial sort of way.

7) The Brownstones at Maywood Park, NE 3rd and Oklahoma
I mentioned this high-end townhouse cluster once before, remarking on its use of insulated concrete forms, a greener sort of building technology. I hadn’t visited any of the units at the time, though; now that sales are going on, models were open. (Floorplans here.) These are big and pricey, and did I mention big? The smallest unit is 2½ floors, which from the standpoint of stair-climbing might as well be three; the top model is 3½ floors, which we’ll call four. The taller unit was fitted with an elevator, which none of us seemed to be able to figure out. I liked the looks of these; I’d have liked them even more had I much better knees and/or much more money.

8) Block 42, 301 NE 4th Street
I visited Block 42 on last year’s Tour, when it was still big boxes full of nothing yet already half presold. Now they’re expecting the last buyers to come on board this spring. The fountain out front was greatly appreciated on a hotter-than-expected April day, and the two units visited (both three stories tall) were nicely equipped, though after more rounds of stairs I was grateful to be finished with the tour and grateful that I live in a ranch house.

Elapsed time: just about three hours. Price was the same as last year: $12, a fraction of which goes to Calm Waters. Time, and money, well spent.

I mean, it’s everywhere: purple molehill majesties, strutting their stuff before the serious greening starts in. After a year and a half of obsessive (and none too inexpensive) weed treatments, I managed not to have any of it this year, although the clover might be preferable to the occasional bare spots.

Seen at 38th and May: an actual lemonade stand, manned by a couple of kids, with adults watching from the wings. I caught a glimpse of it only in passing, but I’m guessing it was some sort of charity fundraiser, perhaps sponsored by the state Baptists, who own the building on that corner.

I’m trying to get a fix on one aspect of grocery-shopper behavior. For most things, I go to the Crest store at 23rd and Meridian; some items it doesn’t carry I find at the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market at 23rd and Pennsylvania. These stores are about three miles apart, and their demographics are roughly similar, with the Wal-Mart having a few more Asians, the Crest a few more Latinos. Ethnicity, however, likely doesn’t explain this: at Crest, just about every last shopping cart is returned to the racks in the parking lot, while at Wal-Mart about a third of them are strewn about the lot, seemingly randomly. For now, I’m thinking that it’s simply a matter of staff attention: I almost always see someone rounding up the baskets at Crest, and if I see him, someone else does too, and maybe that someone else is thus motivated to leave his cart in the proper place to be picked up. I seldom see anyone policing up the Wal-Mart lot. If you have a better explanation, I’d like to hear it.

Note to Casual Male XL: You cater to, well, XL guys. Is it really wise to push the racks so close together that we can’t get between them without knocking something off a hanger?

Hummer H2 and H3 models have largely supplanted the original H1 bruiser, which is no longer being sold at retail. Still, almost 12,000 H1s were built, and one of them today turned up at Circuit City, its driver deftly managing to squeeze its 86.5-inch width into a suddenly-undersized parking space while I watched from the next row. (My own car, which strikes me occasionally as Too Darn Big, is a mere 70.2 inches across.) Nicely done, although the image of a Disneyfied dancing elephant stayed with me all the way across the Northwest Distressway.

They’re clearing off the lot on the northwest corner of 39th and May, which means that there will probably never be another Dodge dealership at that location.

In the 1990s, Lynn Hickey Dodge had grown to be the largest Dodge store in the world, mostly by changing the Standard Rules for Dealerships:

Recognizing that car buying was one of the two most important decisions that a consumer makes, he disabled the PA system on the lot and gave all the salespeople pagers. He recognized that the constant interference from loud speakers and nonessential announcements interrupted the concentration of the customer at a time when concentration and focusing was upon a critical task. He also was one of the first automobile dealers to discontinue classified advertising in the newspaper, since in the automobile business this is another cause of clutter and confusion for the car buyer.

[From Marketing to the Mind: Right Brain Strategies for Advertising and Marketing, by Richard C. Maddock and Richard L. Fulton (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1996).]

This is not to say that Hickey was above wacko promotions: his TV ads were legendarily weird, if not in the Cal Worthington league, and he had folks like Evel Knievel come to the lot. Stories swirled around Hickey, not all of them favorable, and in 1996 he sold out. The new guys promptly reinstated the PA system. (In fact, as late as 2004 folks in the southern section of my neighborhood, which is not so far from the lot, were complaining about the noise from the speakers.) Bob Moore, the last owner of the franchise, moved the Dodges to the Chrysler-Jeep lot on the Distressway, and the place has been vacant ever since, though Tom Park, Hickey’s TV mouthpiece for about a decade, has had no trouble finding work.

Now the ‘dozers have come, and the For Sale signs are up, and I have no idea what’s coming. My guess: a retail strip mall, since there isn’t one of those to be found on May Avenue for, oh, almost half a mile in either direction.

Or nothing at all may be coming. The last bits of Harper’s Sinclair at 63rd and May were removed almost a year and a half ago and nothing’s happened on that corner yet.

The Oak Park addition to Oklahoma City, more or less 6th to 8th, Lincoln to Kelley, has been around for awhile; the older homes in the area date to the 1920s. In recent years, Oak Park was also the location of the infamous Bradford Commons apartments, which have since been scraped away. You can’t get to it from Lincoln — both 5th and 6th dead-end before they ever reach Lincoln — but if you’ve driven northbound on Lincoln in the past couple of years you’ve probably seen this:

This is 614 NE 6th Street, built in 2005 and, to me at least, somewhat reminiscent of Stage Center, which was being constructed (and hotly debated) when I was the new kid on an OKC city block. Think modular: each section has its own distinct purpose. It’s up for sale at this writing, and here’s some of the pitch:

The location allows the owner to enjoy the expansive landscaping and urban feel of Presbyterian and the OU Medical Corridor, while the surrounding commercial structures allow for the rhythmic architecture of the home. This great site location also allows the home owner amazing surreal views of the downtown OKC skyline.

If you’re down in the yard, as I was, you get some very real, if not so amazing, views of the Presbyterian Research Park. And to your east are some of those aforementioned older homes.

Still, I admit to being swept up in the sheer effrontery of the place: there’s a lot to be said for having the most distinctive house on the block. And there are genuine selling points:

Modern design aspects incorporated aesthetics that are pleasing to the eye with some real visual punch. Block glass in the garage arranged in a design gives I-235 North travelers an artistic show of lights from the freeway. The backlit wall glows at nighttime, but remains nice and cool during the day due to the use of concrete and stucco. Urban living with a double car garage and storage is almost unheard of. The simple symmetry of the home runs true throughout. A solid rectangular stucco wall slices across the entire expanse of the home. Rectangular shapes and thickness of materials are also uniform throughout the home. A “floating” l-shaped glossy black staircase and few walls keep the home open and airy. Rectangular bronzed steel windows placed higher up on many of the exterior walls allow billows of light to stream in at any hour of the day. The dramatic elevation very carefully frames the sky with the windows which is most apparent in the upstairs master bedroom where one really does get the feeling they’re sleeping in a tree house. All the windows are casement allowing you to open up and enjoy cool north/south breezes.

(If you’re interested: view from the southwest corner and the garage on the north end.)

I think what I like about this general sort of design is that it’s unabashedly utilitarian without even the slightest nod to the Socialist Realism sort of stuff that got passed off as urban architecture a generation or two ago, the interchangeable proletarian barracks that were functional only because they wouldn’t dare be anything else. It’s probably not “beautiful” in the traditional sense, but it certainly draws the eye. (For comparison, you might want to see what I said about 715 North Francis and 33 NE 7th.)

I was squiring an author around town a couple of years ago, and part of the trip went up Classen, past the missile gantry of The Classen (at 22nd), the Golden Dome (at 23rd), and the Ginormous Milk Bottle (at 24th). She gave me a look which translated into “What sort of creatures are you, anyway?” Obviously, we’re the sort that like cool stuff, which makes sense considering that we started out in 1889 huddled together in a bunch of tents; and after a couple of decades of blanded-out suburban châteaux, I’m positively delighted with the idea that we’re building cool stuff again.