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This article provides a historical overview of the Blanchard Senior knockabout, a wooden boat that was popular during the Great Depression. The boat was originally designed as an affordable sailboat with a cabin, but its price and quality made it a popular choice among buyers. The article discusses the boat's design origins, production process, and its continued use and racing capabilities today. The Blanchard Boat Co., which built the Senior, closed in 1969, but there are still a few of these boats sailing in the Pacific Northwest. The article also highlights the restoration of a derelict boat named ILLUSION by Rob and John Wilkinson, with assistance from David Willard. The restoration took a year and a half to complete and included modifications to accommodate one person with mobility issues, as well as modern conveniences and safety features. The restored boat performed well under sail, providing a comfortable ride and impressive speed. The restoration was driven by a desire to recreate childhood memories and the boat's aesthetic appeal. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides an overview of the construction and design of a 28-foot gaff-schooner named BISH. Built by Karl Bischoff over a 12-year period, the boat emphasizes traditional craftsmanship and materials. It features a unique five-pointed star design, bronze hardware, and wooden blocks made by Karl. While the boat has some limitations in terms of headroom and storage space, it offers a solid sailing experience. The article also briefly mentions another recently built Susan schooner that takes a different design approach. [Extracted from the article]

If you've ever thought of building your own boat, you are not alone. The road can be long, but the rewards are great Not many events in life are as [...]

FEATURES Around Vancouver, British Columbia, word is that Arnt Arntzen is your go-to guy whenever you accumulate a pile of castaway wood or metal oddments that have outlived their designated uses. The cabin trunk had to be built off the boat, so Arntzen made a template with its outline formed by the existing carlins and deckbeams and took it back to his shop. Her builder reimagined the boat without a trunk cabin, and her current owner, Arnt Arntzen, reinterpreted it again, giving her more heft, taller sails, better cabin accommodations, and a panoply of creatively repurposed parts. Tweaking a boat design for more headroom is always hazardous - it inevitably adds windage and risks making the boat look like a cartoon, angering the designer - but Arntzen figured there would be no harm at least in experimenting with a full-sized mock-up. [Extracted from the article]

ON VANCOUVER ISLAND, the road dribbles to an end in a gravelly dirt parking lot 350 miles northwest of the prim and dainty city of Victoria, the island destination most […]

Western suburbs are becoming more like big cities, and because of it, suburban living is growing richer and more sophisticated. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] […]

On the morning of August 4, 1998, all hell broke loose in Bisbee, Arizona. Nothing new in principle--hell has visited Bisbee regularly for as long as the town has existed--but […]

Always take the backroad. It's the smart traveler's truism everywhere, but nowhere will it work magic more reliably than in New Mexico. Set your course with all the certainty of […]

Seattle's city librarian, Deborah Jacobs, doesn't pause or equivocate when she's asked what the glittering glass starship newly landed in the heart of downtown celebrates. To her, it represents neither […]

A web of dry desert washes--more mellifluously called arroyos in Spanish--laces the city of Tucson, forming conduits for urban coyotes, dirt-bikers, and, periodically, mocha-brown flash floods of staggering ferocity. Normally--and [...]

The West Seattle neighborhood hated the idea from the start. Habitat for Humanity introduced it as the Roxbury Project, but residents heard only that last word, envisioning 'project housing' rising [...]

Real Seattleites--mossbacks, we might call ourselves--are natural connoisseurs of the color gray. Gray skies, gray seas, a landscape often revealed through a gray scrim of fog or drizzle: none of [...]

CITY Seemingly liberal, tolerant. nonconformist and proud of it. Santa Fe has long been deeply conservative when confronted with issues of tradition and change. In architecture, it has resolutely looked [...]

Driving into Tacoma on a clear day for an international press preview of the Museum of Glass, Arthur Erickson noted for the first time that the peak of Mt. Rainier, [...]

LEARNING FROM WUKOKI Twenty miles northeast of Flagstaff, the great ponderosa forest of the Coconino Plateau evaporates suddenly into a sere desert of pale red sand, black volcanic cinders, and [...]

Desert animals and even plants are smarter than most of us bipeds when it comes to negotiating an accommodation with the environment. Rattlesnakes slither under a rock to wait out [...]

Will Bruder transforms a Scottsdale, Arizona, cinema into a cultural landmark. Enough Will Bruder buildings are sprinkled around Phoenix, Arizona, that people almost know what to expect from the 52-year-old [...]

Age: 33 Education: University of New Mexico Current position: Associate, Antoine Predock Architect, Albuquerque, New Mexico Quirkiest research project at work: Scanning the Internet for images of UFOs to paste [...]

Age: 30 Education: University of Arizona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Current position: Partner, DeBartolo Architects, Phoenix, Arizona Radical career change: Used to work for desert shaman Will Bruder; now works [...]

'It's a blood-and-guts building from the concept right up,' says architect Robert Hull, whose cheerful appraisal would resonate around woodsy Mercer Island, Washington, like the report of a hunter's rifle. [...]

FEATURES For five years in the early 2000s, John and Ann Bailey raced and cruised the 49' schooner they'd just bought. In 2014 John took early retirement from the ferry system after 27 years and went to work full time - actually, double-full time, Ann estimates - on SIR ISAAC. Though both John and Ann emphasize that at an early point they realized they were so deep into the project that they had no choice but to push ahead - a 49' canoe has about as much market value as a tub of popsicle sticks - one has to ask John whether he considers himself a perfectionist. PHOTO (COLOR): Opposite page - The 49' Chuck Burns-designed schooner SIR ISAAC has recently emerged, in pristine condition, from a decade-long restoration by her owners, John and Ann Bailey. [Extracted from the article]

EMPTY-NEST STATUS loomed over Peter and Cindy Blandino in one of Phoenix's outer suburbs three years ago when friends who lived downtown innocently invited them over one evening. Recalls Cindy, […]

THE DENVER Art Museum's Daniel Libeskind--designed building, opened in October, looks as though a volcano has exploded with an immense pile of ship parts, jewel-faceted boulders, and giant titanium pterodactyl […]

THE RESCUE OPERATION begins just after dawn as Robert Ellis, a retired National Park Service ranger, passes out bottles of correction fluid. "Be sure to mark the south side of […]

Sapphire sky, pink stone, turquoise water. Three extravagances of nature--each one deep and intense and starkly beautiful in itself--intersect at Lake Powell, the West's most provocative spectacle. A manmade 186-mile-long […]

IT'S NOT HARD TO INVEST AN OFFICE ENVIRONMENT with the spirit of SeattLe: All you need is a jazzy fusion of informality and unpredictability, a tangible sizzle, and staggering ocean […]

I am spending the weekend at Neah Bay along the northwestern nose of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in a sea-kayaking course called, ominously, "Introduction to Rough Water." I am pondering one […]

by Lawrence W. Cheek Frank Stella and friends gather at Seattle's R.C. Hedreen Company by NBBJ Pocked and scarred and showing every one of their 81 years of service, 25 […]

by Lawrence W. Cheek Firm: Mithun Site: Woodinville, Washington The mood is serene, the materials unpretentious, the geometry sober. "No gratuitous lines" is how Mithun principal Kim Munizza puts it. […]

by Lawrence W. Cheek A sales-and-marketing satellite in Bellevue, Washington, runs an SkB Architects operating system based on fun The private office used to be a perk at Microsoft Corporation, […]

Four top Southwestern breakfast spots (and one great recipe) Like several other traditional New Mexican restaurants in Santa Fe, Tia Sophia's has a menu bearing a warning label: "Not responsible […]

While crowds convene at Carlsbad Caverns, nearby Guadalupe Mountains National Park blazes with fall color and desert beauty The western wedge of Texas is a hard-boiled land of miserly rainfall, […]

Smoked salmon is a Native American delicacy we Westerners can't get enough of * Meriwether Lewis's first taste of Pacific salmon, offered by a Shoshone warrior on an August evening […]

Allied Works demonstrates that modernism, meticulously detailed, makes a good neighbor. When he said that his architectural dream was 'to make a 20th-century building in Portland before the end of [...]