The Hinge Goes Where?!

Being a new hand on deck to the New Norris House team lasted all of five minutes. Immediately I was thrown into the thick of things building frames and doors for the house. I was quickly trained how to take lumber from a supplier, which is usually warped in some direction, and take it through the jointer and planer to make a square-edged truly straight member. These pieces were used on my first assignment - the crawl space door.

The crawl space door was only a warm-up for what proved to be one of the more challenging doors to fabricate in the New Norris House, the shutter door. The purpose of this door is to allow heat buildup to be pulled out of the house through stack ventilation. The shutter door itself is approximately 8" x 4', merely a small rectilinear punch through the upstairs loft space. The shutter is a culmination of manual, mechanical, and digital technologies. The challenge mostly came from the concealed, rotating pivot hinges. The hinges, made overseas, were in metric measurements and needed a jig that we were lacking to install. This is where years and years of architecture school come in very handy. Problem solving becomes our sharpest skill. So, many times we begin to use tools made for one purpose for a completely different purpose. Thankfully, and maybe luckily, the door hinges turned out spectacular.

The design of the shutter door handle itself was a collaboration with Jimmy Ryan and myself. We both wanted a hardware-free door handle, something simple but well designed. The final product is a void where hardware would typically be on the shutter. Overlapping this gentle void made with the CNC router is a cedar board, bringing the natural colors of the exterior of the house inside to the user. The overlap become a rounded edge for the users hand to slip into the void using the cedar overhang as a pull.

CNC Milling the void

After the CNC milling process we built the frame and installed our hard work. It fit like a glove and has already proven to be effective in pulling air out of the house. This I know because the dry-wallers were sanding down their mud while we were installing the door, causing particulate to fly out of the house and into my eyes while standing on the ladder installing it. It is now and place and now time to start on a new door...