One of my favorite Matisse paintings has always been his “interior with violin”. Sure, there’s a lot of black in that painting, but the black reminds me of childhood summers spent shuttered away in the cool of my grandmother’s house in the south of France, where we would take refuge from the afternoon heat. The thick stone walls had not completely warmed up yet, and the house’s windows (which were just as Matisse depicts them in this painting) provided a surprisingly sophisticated way of modulating the interior environment. It’s a system with three layers (curtains, windows and shutters), and their interplay modulates light, heat, noise and ventilation in 32 basic combinations (2x2x2x2) depending on what you decide to open and close. The clever shutter-within-a-shutter provides a way of blocking the sun from whatever angle it might be in the sky – and with her living room facing west, my grandmother, in a daily late-afternoon ritual, would pretty much arrange her shutters just as shown in the painting.
As we live in a world of ever-increasing technological sophistication, it is useful to remind ourselves that many of today’s indoor environmental quality issues were solved in simple, elegant ways by generations past.
Yann Taylor
Yann has been designing retail and mixed-use projects for more than 25 years. After working in the UK and the US on a number of different
building types (residential buildings, civic buildings, healthcare), he landed at
Field Paoli and has never looked back. His focus is on how the public realm
is experienced: how can the buildings we design create lively and energetic
environments that allow for positive social interactions between friends as
well as strangers? Some of the may groundbreaking projects he is proud to have designed include the master plan for Victoria Gardens in Southern California;
the redevelopment of Broadway Plaza in the San Francisco Bay Area; the first Whole Foods
store to include a full brewery; and the conversion of an old garment factory
into the open-air Forum Cuernavaca, located just south of Mexico City.
Beyond the office, you’ll find Yann enjoying his
daily bicycle commute to and from work; doing research on the great public markets
and food halls of London, Paris and Barcelona; and reflecting on the subtleties
of experiential urban design. Yann is a
frequent speaker and panelist; most recently he moderated a panel for the Urban
Land Institute's Fall meeting on the challenges faced by restaurants and
retailers in San Francisco and shared his thoughts on the joys of an urban walk
with James Cook on his "Where We Buy" podcast
Although he is energized by the richness and
vitality of urban retail environments, some of Yann's favorite
buildings tend to be located at the end of long dirt roads: it's nice to get
away sometimes.
