Walker-Pope residence18. Aug2012
"I can't find anything in the senior realm that I'd consider dying in, let alone living in," says Seattle architect Gordon Walker. So he built his own residence for him and his wife. More exactly, a 'retirement home' which is a better choice than to live in a high-rise building. Walker calls most high-rises "parking garages for old people."
Based on an article appeared in The Seattle Times and via BUILDblog
Photo credit: BUILD LLC
Located on Lopez Island, Washington "The Walker-Pope home is modular and prefabricated, based on a 16-foot grid sized to fit on a flatbed truck. It sits on steel legs perched over the land, not scraped into it. It is made of stock materials: six-lam plywood for countertops, high-density fiberboard and vertical-grain fir doors on the walls. And contemporary; walls of glass, steel beams exposed, free of trim and molding, concrete floors. The living room is on one end, the bedroom on the other, glass walls at both ends. In between are kitchen, prep kitchen, office/guest room, bathrooms and master. Forest on one end, meadow on the other." - The Seattle Times---
It's a cost-effective building, that can be moved away if needed due to its modular plan that fits on a truck, and it is build in respect for the environment being placed on steel pilars and allowing the landscape to pass beneath.---
Photo by Michael Burns 
This house is more than design and architecture; it conveys culture, humanness and heart.---
Additional to the house, far back in the woods behind the Walker-Pope House there is a permanent tent structure buildt for guests. An open light structure, perfect integrated in the forest, that offers shelter from the rain and sun.---
The structure hovers above the forest floor and its openess lets in the sounds of surrounding nature. --- Walker has been a practicing architect since 1962. He worked for Ralph Anderson, cofounded Olson Walker Architects and was a principal at NBBJ. In 1992 he founded Walker Architects and is now a consulting principal at Mithun. Last year at the University of Washington he taught a design studio on modular student housing. He sees a void in senior housing for the design-minded.
"We've got to quit building the memory of what was."
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