Donlyn lyndon biography samples
•
This article was published in the Sept/Oct 2014 issue of Sonoma Magazine.
Al and Diana Edgerton were tooling north to Mendocino for a July 4 getaway in 1964 when they were beckoned off Highway 1 by a “lots for sale” sign bearing a bold ram’s-horn logo.
The sales office had opened just that weekend for an intriguing new development dubbed “The Sea Ranch.” The deals were as seductive as the setting — thick hillside forests of redwood, fir and fern overlooking a tableland of meadows that meet the sea along a shore notched with nubbly cliffs and coves. Lots could be locked up for as little as $4,500 in the forest east of Highway 1, $8,500 in a meadow with at least a peek of the ocean.
“We stopped out of curiosity. We had never heard of The Sea Ranch,” Edgerton, a retired oral surgeon, remembered. “But we cut short our vacation in Elk and put a down betalning on a lot.”
It was a radical move for a ung couple with one baby and another on the way, who had yet to buy their first h
•
This collaboration between two distinguished architects and former colleagues is a celebration of admired places and a thoughtful consideration of the role that design has played in giving these places their memorable qualities. It is also an invitation to readers to inhabit the chambers of the book with their own imaginations, to join in the making of the "Memory Palace" proposed. The authors' informal and anecdotal style extends to the illustrations - the freehand travel sketches, line drawings, and water-colours of places they have remembered and enjoyed. The text consists of an exchange of letters in which one author recalls and the other responds to the elements considered essential to the art of successful place-making. Each of the book's chapters forms a chamber, and each chamber is inscribed with personal observations on the composition of places and the architectural elements central to each building, garden, court, monument, or open space described. The examples considered
•
Introduction
By Donlyn Lyndon
Whenever we are indoors, buildings are part of the climate we experience. Through openings in their walls and roofs they structure our experience of the sun and the light of day. Those same or filtered openings channel the way air moves through spaces. Walls and roofs condition the heat that enters living spaces. Transparent materials quickly transmit the heat of the sun and convey more slowly the temperature outside. When walls are thick and obscure, they absorb and delay the transmission of solar energy and ambient temperatures, slowly yielding warmth to the inside and releasing some of it back into the atmosphere as the day cools. Roofs offer shelter from all that comes from the sky: sun, moisture, rain, gusts of wind and falling debris.
When outdoors, trees and vegetation often offer similar but less radical modifications to the climate, but not always, depending on the climate zone. Deciduous trees are especi