| Hcarraro |
01-28-2014 10:24 AM |
The Carraro House
Thanks for your interest in architecture and the house I built in the hill country of Texas. Look closely at the pictures. Lots of interesting design features. Mike noticed the "dog trot" or more commonly referred to as a breeze way. The screened porch is 1,800 feet. Twenty feet to the eaves and 35 foot at ends of the structure. The floor covered is with bricks on packed sand.
Many many things came from the cement plant. My goal was to reduce the cost of the construction by salvaging materials that we could use in the process. I walked the abandoned industrial complex with a roll of yellow plastic ribbon marking things I wanted to buy. Pennies no the dollar.
For example, the hand rails you see in the second picture were found atop a massive diesel engine. The engine as a German made flat head 5 cylinder diesel at least 8 foot across the cylinder head and about 48 feet long. There were 4 of these giant engines as I recall.
The hand rails surrounded the top of the engines and were there to keep the mechanics from falling off the top of engine. The steel hand rails were molded and machined. It is hard to see but the horizontal rods screwed into the molded and machined vertical part. I found them simply elegant and bought enough to what I wanted.
I had a computer crash and lost most all of the pictures of the construction and the finished product. The folks I sold the house before retiring in Arkansas created a web site. See the link below:
The web site they created is The Plant at Kyle
There are numerous pictures on the website and show the the building standing at the Alamo Cement Plant. It was called the "tool shed" and is where they made specialty tools and replacement parts to keep this 1,000 acre industrial complex going. At the time it was the oldest cement plant west of the Mississippi River.
You can also Google "The Carraro House" or the architecture firm Lake Flato in San Antonio, TX and find pictures and stories. The house has been published in several architecture books and dozens of magazines. It was a Metropolitan Home of the Year award winner as well as the Gold Medal winner at the AIA convention in 1990 at a black tie event at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
Again thanks for your interest in architecture and the story behind this house.
Henry
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