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Matt Taylor and Max Stormes
Design-Build-Use
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona - Outside of Lake Havasue City
Not Built
Max and I along with a couple form New York bought several hundred acres of land in Arizona. The idea was to build a community of artist designers. Business disagreements and the death of our partners in a car accident left the project forever on paper. The ultimate size of this project would have been large (several hundred “families”) even though the sense of scale was deliberately kept intimate. The project was designed so that much of it’s infrastructure was underground with only the “tops” of the interconnected buildings showing almost like eruptions out of the steep, rugged landscape. Parking was to be kept to a single place at the entry to the property and project.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Study
A By this time, I had worked on several subdivisions of hundreds of houses each for developers and architects in California and Arizona. The land use model never worked as far as I was concerned. The “lots” were too big or too small depending how you looked at them. The landscape had no chance. There was a built-in tragedy of the commons. The street grid was imposed on the site and, even if not strictly rectilinear, arbitrary in terms of preserving the features of the landscape. Individual attempts at landscaping the small strips of land around and between houses resulted in a hodgepodge of solutions. this is not effecient land use nor is it ecologically sound development. The idea of cluster housing is to create very small lots (all of which are totally buildable) and group then in clusters around a front commons with the lots opening onto commons areas that cannot be closed off or built upon. The character of the landscape is maintained, owners have less “land” to take care of and the same density (or even greater) is accomplished with a sense of greater open space. Some aspect s of these ideas became common in development like on Hilton Head Island but have never reflected the level of design that I had in mind.

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Phoenix Developer and Bank
Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Not Built
This was a case of a client coming for something different, getting what they asked for, then saying the could not build it because it was different.

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John and Wally Shamy
Design-Build
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Built
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Xxxx
Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Built
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Xxxx
Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Built Without Supervision
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Xxxx
Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Not Built
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Deign
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Study
This design came about as the result of a “challenge.” I was teaching a course in architectural design and had concluded the section on the use of connotation and denotation in the development of theme in the design process. The students wanted an example. I Gave them a half hour to come up with a project and told them that I would respond on the spot with a design. Naturally, they made the problem (in their mind) as difficult as they could. Difficult, in this case, by coming up with a building type - that on the surface of it - had no real intrinsic architectural value or opportunity: a gas station, rest stop, eating facility on the highway mid way between Phoenix and Tucson. Of course, it was easy - and - illustrated the utility of the technique of employing connotation as the translator between program and architectural concept.

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Xxxx
Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Not Built
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Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
Project
This began my thinking about separating the shell of the building from the interior elements - in other words, build a building within a building. The shell become the environment value much like the atmosphere is to the Earth and it’s inhabitants. Inside, one lives in a waterproofed temperate climate therefor allowing lightweight, adjustable inexpensive building components. An adaptable habitat that adjusts to the inhabitants not the other way around. The majority of my work, starting with this one and continuing through work # 63, takes a new turn. A set of issues came to the fore: energy and food self-sufficiency, new strategies for siting and building adaptability/mobility, new economic and collaborative use models. Cohousing is the term that is used today for a movement that has been strong in Europe since the 60s and has increasingly found support in the US since the 70s. I was unaware of all this when I started this investigation. The economics, as well as, the community aspect hit you in the face the minute a little thought is given too it. Or, another way of saying it is that the economics of the single family dwelling and suburban sprawl taken to the extreme are what hit you in the face. In the ecology of architectural types there certainly is a place for the single family dwelling but it is far from the best model for the “default” solution for general housing.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Phoenix, Arizona
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Project
Design-Facilitate
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Published
A project of great importance. The present adversarial process between city and state governments and individual builders, owners and users and community groups is netting out to the destruction of architecture and planet. There is no reason for this. A better METHOD is possible. The Kansas City Master Plan proposed a 11 mile pedestrian mall down what is now Main Street (red line). It connects all the major nodes (green/grey areas) from the old airport on the North to Ward Parkway Shopping Center on the South. Between these two poles are several places of economic and cultural interest - the main concentration is in the shaded (grey) areas of the map. And, all kinds of built environments and communities of many cultures and economic strata are contained in the one mile band on either side of Main Street, The Boulder Mall build later in the decade accomplished, on a much smaller scale, the character of environment I envisioned for the shaded area. Transportation would be provided by a (very) light rail trolley system with high density automobile parking garages a block off of Main Street about every half mile. The idea was that the Mall could be built as part of a World’s Fair celebration. The nodes that I speak of were, at the time, strong concentrations of educational, cultural, recreational commercial, retailing and residential districts. They have continued to develop over the the last three decades. Every kind of civic function and building-type can be found in this 12 square mile area. Main Street remains a major corridor but little still ties theses areas together. General developed has helped, however, the entire area still lacks an Armature. The paradox is, that one of these nodes is the famous multi-block Nichol’s PLAZA which is regarded as the world’s first shopping center. It is still viable today and a clear demonstration how urban development can be done. The truly radical aspect of this project, however, was the transparency of the method. It was this aspect that is missing from development and why development is limited to the scope that any one developer can control or “flips” to the huge government controlled mega-projects that tend to be dead on arrival. The interesting thing about this project, specifically, is that to a stranger moving to Kansas City, this “KC Strip” was trying to happen. It is still trying to happen. Yet, the social mechanism in place cannot facilitate it happening. When a “natural” like this cannot be brought about, in a city that has - by conventional standards - extremely good stewardship from prominent individuals and corporations, then imagine the plight of most American cities that grew up not blessed with any natural or (even simi) human-built Armature. All that is left is sprawl. It was my intention that the areas off the Mall be turned into mixed use developments and also employ the other design strategies I developed at the time: co-housing, Domiciles, movable buildings and alternative energy systems. See Works #35, #38, #42, #48, #50, #53,#58 and #61, #68. Because of the landscape and park system which could be extended and connected to each other and other parks, a couple of mega-structures would have fit in time (#70). the result of this approach - and it can be done today - would be a diverse, rich urban landscape that made PLACE and fit the requirements of all the people-types and work-life styles that make up a replacement city culture.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
A modern tent for a very simple and inexpensive lifestyle. Comfortable, fun, easy on the landscape. About a week to build and site - a couple of days to take away. Can we use land like animals and indigenous peoples? What is the actual value in cementing structures to the ground? Try living in a garden under a translucent roof protected by earth berms of flowering plants. This is not prestige housing. It is simple, affordable, organic and focussed on natural processes and systems. It is shelter that can be experienced as shelter not life removed from the world “outside.”

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Commonwealth Theaters, Inc.
Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Not Built
One of my first uses of suspension structures. The idea of the design was to promoted the easy reuse of land. If buildings can be easily moved, it is possible to better accommodate the economic cycles of real estate. In the early periods of land development, land is almost always “underdeveloped.” As land grows in value, buildings are torn down and replaced. This is expensive and ecologically unsound. The notion is to build, in these early stages, in a way that expects and facilitates cycling buildings designed to be moved as the land use requirements change. Work #48 explored this idea further. Commonwealth was building a drive-in theater on a piece of land that clearly would soon be used for a denser use. I thought the economics would be better served to create a solution that could be moved to another similar use and so on again. Employing suspension structures makes it possible to have large structures that rest on small footings. This makes moving easier with less resulting site work.

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Cycle Systems, Incorporated
Design-Build-Operate
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri - Kansas Suburb
Built
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Design-Research
Matt Taylor
Kansas City - any Ocean
Concept
A human made island floating in the Ocean as a way-point between land masses. Japan will do this some day. Properly done, ocean cities can be safer and have less negative ecological impact than building on the land. I am convinced that, within this century,

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Design
Matt Taylor
Concept
Kansas City, Missouri
This concept has one innovation embedded in it’s approach. This is that a cluster of domes built out, as illustrated by Works #35 and #58, can allow a much greater penetration into the ground while still bringing light and a sense of vista to those lower levels. This can greatly increase density and reduce overall visual impact of the structure, on a typical urban lot, and also take advantage of earth-sheltered virtues. Properly done, there should be little negative sense of being “underground.” Although presented as a single dome and a much smaller scale, Work #53 shows that this can be accomplished. In addition, selecting which functional areas are placed in both the lower and upper areas of the domes are important to the success of the scheme. The proposed scale of this project was on the order of several Domiciles (#58) and offered as a serious alternative to typical apartment housing and the several obvious drawbacks of this typical approach: low variety, usually dull geometry, poor energy strategies,oversized footprint and scale problems, poor utilization of commons and surrounding landscape. Many of these same sins could be committed while employing the dome-cluster approach, however, intrinsic to the basic configuration are more powerful means to avoid these results. The traditional boxws within boxwes approach of the typical apartment building simply does not have the inherent variety necessary to avoid them. On a much smaller scale, the difference between office cubicles and the AI WorkPod unit illustrates (on a two-dimensional plane) what this layout accomplished in the three-dimensional realm.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri - Any Ocean Front
Concept
There are many ecologically sensitive areas that are are also highly desirable as human habitats. Barrier island beaches rank high in this regard. However, conventional development is both subject to periodic destruction and is also highly destructive to the natural habitat itself. A reciprocal relationship of mutual destruction. This design addresses this situation head on. It proposes a few dense (volume) mega structures that carefully leaves the vast majority of the landscape able to shift and move around these structures. Barrier islands remain stable because they can move. To attempt to built ON this kind of landscape is foolish. This schema places a few buildings that rest on vertical shafts that go deep creating a strucural stability independent of surface conditions. Horizontal stability is accomplished by tying the structures together above the beaches themselves. Indigenous landscaping is encouraged between the structures and to the beach. Traffic is limited to the bearing capacity of this ecosystem. Transportation is monorail back to car parking areas removed from the beach areas. The buildings themselves are mixed use and self-contained to the maximum possible degree. Construction is prefabricated with components airlifted in order to reduce site disturbance.

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Xxxx
Design-Build-Setup Operations
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri - Kansas Suburb
Built
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Matt Taylor
St.
Built with alterations and without supervision
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Lee Wald Garment Company
Design and Construction Management
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Built
A most interesting project and my first large scale office landscape. I made extensive use of interior landscaping a feature unusual at the time and still rarely done on the scale of this project. The interiors read like work stations and office in a park.

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Matt Taylor
St.
Built
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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City
Study
With this project I got serious with exploring was that the building type and design can better facilitate fitting into the life cycle economics of land value and development. The idea is to make building that have utility and can be moved when the land value rises thus requiring a different kind of building or greater density of building. To be able to do this without great expenditures of time or money and to be able to reuse the building removed in a similar situation elsewhere. In this design, this is accomplished by manufacturing a very light weight structure that sits on a small core and cantilevers in all directions from that core. This makes for minimal footings and space for landscaping and parking beneath the structures.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Study
This concept married, retailing, computer technology, prefabricated building with the idea of a rule-based design process to provide a method capable of producing middle class housing in large numbers. I called it the “Sears” in recognition that Sears provided thousands of houses through it’s catalog in the 19th and early 20th century. A completely integrated service was designed: design, financing, field erection and maintenance service. This project took the swimming pool method, automated it and extended it to the entire country and, ultimately, the world.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
A return to the question: “What is the Minimum Living Unit that provides a sustainable, beautiful and satisfying life?” Affordable housing is not just scaling down the building to what can be “afforded” - it is about shedding things and costs that do not add value to a life. Where is the “contemplative” life? At what point does individual housing become both an individual and social cost far greater than the value received? As a society, we have not explored the “top end” of affluent housing - we have not adequately explored the intrinsic value of more modest approaches. I do not believe we know what true luxury is - we certainly do not know what is sustainable. Long term mortgages and the tactics of buying to sell for capital gains has destroyed the vast majority of domestic architecture. The home has become a commodity not a place of beauty and refuge.

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Matt Taylor
St.
Built and still in sevice
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Harold Steinmeyer
Design-Build
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri - Kansas suburb
Not Built
My first self contained house design for a client. The house is a “homestead” designed to be “worked” like a landscape. It rests on a different concept of lifestyle than conventional architecture. Structurally, the Steinmeyer Residence ’s system is a precursor to the Bay Area Studio project (# 96). Both the main house (to the right in the elevation) and the carport (to the left) are prefabricated wood sections suspended on steel cables that hang from the masonry core units.

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Richard S. Haitch
Design-Build
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Not Built
A large house in a traditional neighborhood that had been turning into a rooming house. How to expand it without compromising either the addition or the existing architecture? The answer was a berm protected geodesic dome connected to the house by a bridge.

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Project
Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
Multimedia educational Pods that can be set up anywhere (singly or in clusters). The base contains the energy pack and other necessary service technologies. A student gets a meter cube full of tools, books, multimedia and connectivity. Teachers have their own for one-on-one sessions and clusters of Pods make up commons for larger assembly. Instant school. Several cubes can be connected to form commons areas for group learning and social events. The land is not disturbed so schools can be built quickly and reconfigured as demographics change. The economy of scale can make the Pods economical. They can also be used for instant offices in fast growth situations. Once again demonstrating the utility of separating the building from the ground upon which it is (temporarily) placed. “Schools” built on these distributed learning principles can be useful when responding to poorer locations and Nations without traditional industrial infrastructure. Each student gets their own portal to their future universe. Remote teaching/learning, as well as, on site and peer-to-peer teaching/learning is facilitated.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Study
Iasiac Asomoff wrote a speculative nonfiction book in the 70s that looked at, among other subjects, space travel. He proposed “Spomes” - for “Space Homes” - as a means to head to the stars earlier not after greater drives were developed. His idea was to take a good sized asteroid, hollow it out, put a critical mass of people in it and boost it toward the nearest star system. No matter if it took several generations because people would live in it doing mostly what they do now living on the surface of “Space Ship Earth.” A great idea and much closer to present technology than proposed higher tech solutions. This is a great place by the way for nuclear energy. You just put the generating plant on the outside of the asteroid and let it do what it does. The inhabitants are separated from any radiation by a couple miles of rock.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
This model shows the real reason for building three dimensionally. Most skyscrapers are merely “stacks” of one floor many times - this fails to lever the intrinsic opportunities inherent in the Mega Structure. This schema also provides both mixed and single use zoning in harmony with one another - a spectacular AND instead of either-or. Each zone is a ribbon that crosses one another at intervals creating mixed-use intersections that also tie to other nodes vertically. A simple idea - a profound change in the character of the “city.”

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, MO - Concept
Concept
The idea of this project is to build a series of more-or-less self contained habitats each an order of magnitude larger than the one before. In this way technical, social and economic issues can be solved as the population increases as does self-sufficiency. In a number of discreet steps a space ready habit is formed - each project, however, is designed to be useful and profitable in it’s own right. The social and biological aspects of space habitats will prove to be far more complex than the strictly technical challenges as daunting as they appear now. This theme is revisited in the design for NASA in 2000 (#99) only it is the economic and business aspects of going into space that are the focus of the later work.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
This version of Domicile further developed the technical concepts raised by Work #32. The double shell construction is designed to provide a band of 56 degree air continuously circulating along the entire perimeter in winter and summer. Various heat-sinks will be utilized to further augment this natural air-conditioning. Members of the community will “rent” space by volume and “build” their habitat with whatever openness/privacy, individual tool-possession redundancy or commons use that they desire. Many expensive, low demand things are managed in commons. Double the lifestyle amenity at half the cost. Double the land use density with far more open spaces. CoHousing it would be called today and an idea I am sure will catch on for a number of social and economic reasons. A lage green house provides a basic diet and energy.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
The entire skin of this building is designed to metabolize. It is a semi-permeable membrane. The building automatically opens and closes to the outside, shields itself or exposes to the sun and transfers temperature differences from one part to another. This structure is to be built in a wilderness area with only monorail (or walking) access. It is designed to be a health city where people go to renew and reconnect with nature and themselves. The economic idea is that health professionals would build and own the retreat facility and then run it like a hotel. For a single charge a guest could stay and access a variety of physical and mental health services. Specially services and intensive treatment would be charged in addition to the basic fee. Here, one gets healthy by living in a healthy way. The main role of the health professional is to be healthy, teach health and to deal with acute issues as a last resort. The size of this structure is is large. It is 85 stories above ground and about 15 stories below it. The stalactites hanging down from the bowl-shape are living complexes equivalent to a 20 to 25 story apartment building.

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Design
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
Modern building are designed backwards - they start with a box and work in. This attenuates the natural variety that human life requires. Here is a building built of three prefabricated units that offers a huge variety of exposure, views and layout amenities. Perfect for a mixed use community development. A population of a few thousand can be accommodated in a structure of this type freeing up acres and acres of land for recreation, farming and natural animal habitat. The arrangement of zones can follow the schema of of the Organic City (Work #56). Because the basic structural components can be prefabricated, a project like this can be completed in a number of months - not years. A system of light weigh components would be provided so that tenants can rearrange their spaces as they desire. Following the Domicile idea, they would take over vertical and horizontal space and then build out what they desire within the armature of mega-structure. This is exactly how NavCenters and knOwhere Stores are now done only a project like this would be on recursion up in scale. This was, in the 1970s, and certainly is now (25 years later) a completely feasible concept.

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Renascence Project
Design - Build - Use
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Not Built
This project was for experiment and fun. A combination green house and hot tub - recreation facility for members of the Renascence Project. It is designed to be totally removed from the site with minimum expense and damage. The Renascence Library, at the time, had a commons house that, besides the Library itself, housed a kitchen that served diner nightly for any member who wished to attend. The idea was for the kitchen and dining facilities to be moved into this greenhouse. This would have provided a prototype opportunity for a restaurant concept that I have long harbored - and still do (Work #22). As can be seen from the section view, the entire facility rests on wood and gravel foundations. This is a structure that can be dismantled and moved to another site and the site returned to it’s original state. The gravel bed acts as a heat sink. Above the gravel bed, wood sectioned French intensive garden beds surround the full dome parameter. Entry is through a tube that is actually at grade level. The curve of the dome is continued inside with brick set in sand over the gravel bed. 6 wood poles support 5 levels of platforms inside the dome. A cistern functions as supply for plant watering and additional thermal mass. The cistern is fed from the entire dome surface and structure’s parameter. The Dome, itself, is to be fabricated out of wood members covered with a series of skin layers made of canvas, translucent and clear plastic and screening. These layers to be adjusted by a series of block and tackle like rigging on a traditional sail boat. This way the skin of the building can be easily adjusted to match external conditions with the desired interior climate. An excellent application of this design would be a summer cabin in a temperate climate. The entire environment could be run like a boat with the skin taken off and stored for the winter like sails. This design could also serve as temporary housing in some circumstances. Another application for this concept could be a school project - a great way for jr. high and high school students to learn HABITAT.

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Matt and Gail Taylor
Design - Build - Use
Matt Taylor
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
The modern version of the one-room school house. Two teachers and up to 60 students. Mixed grades. 21st Century Curriculum. The “what if” was what would be the minimum cost for the maximum educational experience. Units like these can out perform the existing system and educate balanced 21st Century citizens. The idea was to put students in an environment of learning and facilitate that process as they explore, teach each other and do projects. This would function much like the NavCenters and knOwhere Stores we built today two and a half decades later. The structure itself would have large group areas, small study niches, multimedia, a working greenhouse and library. The students would do much of the work necessary for keeping the environment. A wide age range would be attend. In education, perhaps more that any process, the physical environment sets the character of the learning modalities. This is true on the level of process and interaction styles. It is equally true on the level of individual learning styles and cognitive processes.

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Project
Design & Manufacture
Matt Taylor with Laura Starr
Kansas City, Missouri
Concept
About a hundred pieces arrive in a small truck. Excavate for the green house (using the dirt for earth berms), place the prefabricated sections on temporary wood footing and stay awhile. The “cabin” is self contained, grows a basic diet. When done, the land is returned to it’s original condition. EcoSphere was designed to sit on wood foundations a technique I used for the Instead Project (#72) which is doing fine 21 years later. The entire skin of this structure is conceived as a breathing membrane. Inside and outside layers of material are employed to deal with weather, light, sound, airflow. There is a vertical shaft that runs from the utility room pedestal to the top. This contains utilities, lines, wires, pipes and so on. It also supports the cantilevered platforms for sleeping and study. The Living Area is the bottom of the dome and the soft covered floor is level and sloped in different places to accommodate sitting, walking, lounging. The greenhouse holds the kitchen, hot tub and growing areas. It is also an active and passive solar system. It goes without saying that the users orientation to the site is very different in this work that the traditional building. The view in and out of the structure is not constrained. This creates an unique viewpoint on the world. The effect of the this is not trivial.