My friend Steve and I are designing a “mountain village” – a cluster of attached homes and apartments with a sense of community, a center, a mix of uses and and a departure from the norm of single family suburbia found in the area around the site. We are also seeking to create an architectural approach for the project that connects the buildings to the land and is authentic to its time and place.

We have done a lot of cycling together so the other day we did our morning ride which functioned as the perfect setting for a meeting – watching the prairie roll by, a a great blue heron flies over, we pass the buffalo herd, and the metal clad barn, come upon a house with some interesting material and formal approaches that we have to stop and photograph. And explore the idea of the asymmetrical duplex to create diversity and identity.

Then past the old house to a large modern horizontal stucco house perched in the foothills, past the Greenbriar and the warehouse, with a discussion of management and schedule and culture and then back to Boulder. A sublime 1-1/2 hours that advanced the project in a way that may be impossible in the setting of our office. A context that allows the mind to roam, to merge the creative and the experiential, that connects the ideas of the project to our world around us. Now we have to draw it up!!