a FL native's musings

Where the land, the sky, and the ocean meet. 

Approaching darkness.

Longleaf Pines

Black Mangroves (Avicennia germinans)

Black mangroves get their name from their dark heartwood and are easily recognized by their finger-like pneumatophores sticking up through the soil. These specialized roots allow the tree to breath even when submerged in water.

Emerson Point Preserve

Image credit: Erin Feinblatt | Text credit: AB Design Studio

“Sitting among the warehouse-type structures in the heart of Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, sits the Lucky Penny. Aptly named for the facade, which adorns over 15,000 pennies glued and grouted to the exterior walls, the Lucky Penny facade is the first of its kind in Santa Barbara and perhaps the western state. The inspiration for this project came from the collaborative effort of the ownership, the design team and the community. This small building was once the ICE BOX for the Castagnola Fish Company and we always referred to it as the Jewel Box. For months, the team discussed what could be done with this building. What should it be? How should it relate, or not? In the end, the restaurant purveyor suggested using Pennies. We all laughed and then queried about this possibility.”

Healing Waters by Fluidity Design

Pleated House Johnsen Schmaling Architects

This small house for a graphic designer and her husband sits on the heavily wooded eastern shore of Wisconsin’s Door County, a narrow peninsula on Lake Michigan. Embedded in a dense forest of deciduous and coniferous trees, the building’s unassuming volume is quietly nestled in a small clearing at the western edge of the gently sloping site, its low-slung silhouette virtually disappearing in the surrounding vegetation.

The building’s restrained exterior material palette is limited to charred cedar siding from Northern Wisconsin, its textured, somber blackness complemented by varnished clear cedar, dark-anodized aluminum, and glass. Echoing the visual depth and surface oscillations of bark covering the trunks of trees, the charred wood boards were installed over furring strips of varying depths to form a gently folding, undulating building skin, not unlike a pleated curtain – a meandering and highly faceted veil that wraps the house and replaces what could have been a conventional, sharply defined perimeter with a more ambiguous boundary, one that softens the building’s rigorous geometry and moderates the transition from artificial construct to natural context.