Falling for the Fly

I’ve been fishing pretty much since I could walk. My dad is a talented angler and he started taking me when I was a toddler. Growing up in Vermont, we caught a lot of freshwater fish. It was always something we could do together, a bond and connection that was strengthened on family vacations to Cape Cod, where we spent hours wading the sandy flats stalking striped bass, the Cape’s crown jewel of inshore sport fishing.

Hillside Haven

Article in New England Home Magazine.

www.nehomemag.com

Bid for the Bookmatch Bench….

We made a chair! Our team worked with Jeff Soderbergh and the folks at JS Studio to create a one-of-a-kind furniture piece that will be auctioned on June 1, 2017

Book Learning

An interview with Mark Hutker in Residential Design magazine.

A new perspective…

As a board member for Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod (HHCC), I have witnessed, firsthand, the impact of creating home ownership opportunities for working class families in our community. Several weeks ago, I traveled to the village of San Juan de la Maguana, in the Dominican Republic, for a house build with a group of other HHCC volunteers.

We worked with construction techniques that were very different from anything I had worked on or designed before. The first house was made of pre-cast concrete panels and a corrugated metal roof. We poured concrete into molds, which were laid out to bake in the sun, and then stacked dried panels within vertical aluminum channels to create walls. The structural integrity seemed suspect to me until all of the panels were erected, and I saw how simply and strongly they supported each other. Once the walls were in place, we parged seams and imperfections, and then painted them inside and out. This work was done in three days, leaving only the roof and wiring, all of which would be completed in about a week.

An interview with Skolos & Wedell

Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell work to diminish the boundaries between graphic design and photography—creating collaged three-dimensional images influenced by modern painting, technology and architecture. They recently spoke about the poster they created for the Lyceum Fellowship, an architectural competition for students co-founded by Mark Hutker.

Listen here: http://dissection.jkdesign.com/skoloswedell/

The Making of Penn Field

“Little League baseball is a very good thing, because it keeps the parents off the streets.”- Yogi Berra

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I played competitive baseball until I was twenty years old. After that, I have coached high school and/or youth baseball for another twenty years. I have always appreciated what appears, to me, to be the most precise of all competitive team sports. I also happen to love the fact that baseball has been played for over 150 years on a “diamond,” with a raised “pitching mound” in its center and the opposing chalk lined “batter’s box”.  There are bases, foul poles (inexplicably titled) and foul lines, on deck circles, coaches’ boxes, dugouts, bullpens and a warning track – all of which add to this outdoor theater.

In his 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” Ray Kinsella painted a tactile picture of how a baseball field, of all things, could be socially intriguing.  The whispered line “If you build it, he (they) will come” has been the inspirational root for innumerable baseball fields ever since.

Fast forward: In 2008, the Martha’s Vineyard Little League program was hoping to create similar intrigue by converting not a corn field, but an old car dump into a meeting place for learning and playing the game of baseball, while families and friends could comfortably gather and cheer the kids on. The premise was worthy, the task in doing so was far more complicated…

At first glance, the property looked perfect…flat, open and big enough to build the dream. Upon closer inspection, even after removing decades’ worth of automobiles, the land itself was littered with glass and metal debris, invasive roots, and compacted sand that would prove to be a drainage nightmare. Additionally, there was no legal road access or utilities, no topsoil and very little money. With such impediments, the project floundered for the following three years. By 2012, much of the initial $200K in Community Preservation Fund dollars allotted for the field had been absorbed by clean-up efforts, and the entire project was on the brink of stagnation. I was asked by a dwindling group of volunteers/coaches if I would design a field complex in hopes that the design drawings would suggest some positive momentum for the project, as well as help garner additional financial support and/or in-kind work.

Now Trending

Mark Hutker talks trends in residential design for the Winter issue of ArchitectureBoston magazine. Read it online here:

http://www.architects.org/architectureboston/articles/now-trending

Hutker Architects named Best of Boston 2017

Hutker Architects is thrilled to have been named a Best of Boston Home® 2017 Winner as Best Architect, New Construction for the Cape & Islands.

We extend our congratulations to all of our friends and colleagues in the industry who were honored!!

Cape Cod Getaway in Architectural Digest

Architectural Digest gives readers an online tour of this incredible seaside home, a brilliant collaboration between Hutker Architects and C.H. Newton, Inc., Richard Hallberg Interior Design, and Horiuchi & Solien Landscape Architects.

Layers and Meaning in Berlin

Over the winter I had the opportunity to visit Berlin, Germany, and found myself in a modern city in the process of coming into focus. Berlin’s unique history and culture, combined with its relative accessibility and affordability, have made it one of the most rapidly growing (and changing) cities in Europe. An atmosphere of creativity and opportunity is blossoming in the German capital, where somber vestiges of prior conditions are layered with development and revitalization.

Today a fashionable and egalitarian melting pot, the city is rooted in- and intimately familiar with divides. Whether it’s the physical separation of East and West Germany, or the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism, Berlin’s material attributes and personality have been marked by dichotomy for decades. For me what stood out was the emotion of the place. The city’s architecture figures as a palimpsest; it is renewed, yet still bears traces of earlier forms.

On Botany and Design

As an architect, I tend to look at life through a designer’s lens; my desire to edit, improve, and create is constant and, probably, innate. For the past twenty-five years, I have supplemented my passion for architecture with the practice of Bonsai. It grew from a collision of other interests – gardening, sculpture, and science, but truth be told, I didn’t know anything about Bonsai until I saw the original Karate Kid.

There is a classic scene where Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel-san, “Close eye. Trust. Concentrate. Make a perfect tree down to the last pine needle. Wipe mind clean of everything but – tree. Nothing exists whole world, only – tree. You got it? Open eye. Remember picture? Make like picture.”

That kind of approach can transform all types of design. I see many tethers connecting the art of Bonsai and architecture, in particular.

The first is function. In houses, the program of interior and exterior spaces must support the lifestyle of its residents – it must create a stable shelter and take into account things like access to the outdoors, room configuration, and balancing private spaces with rooms for gathering. In Bonsai, the health of the tree depends on certain horticultural requirements – everything from adequate water and sun, to soil composition, root maintenance, and pest control.