Arbors and the California Revolution
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Please review the Copyright Notice and Rewards Program
for copyright-infringement reporting at the bottom of this page.
The arbors and pergolas shown in this website were all built in California's Silicon Valley. The whole world knows about this area because right here in many garages were spawned a number of technological revolutions that have changed the entire globe. Now another revolution has taken place. This time it was in the valley's backyards and it's architectural !!
For decades, homeowners erected rectangular shade arbors that looked pretty plain-Jane mundane. Now new materials, construction tools and fabrication methods are making it feasible to build open-air structures with arches, vaulted canopies and curved beams as major components of the design.
Why an architectural revolution? For one, home-owners wanted ancillary structures to have an appearance comparable to their well-appointed homes. They were particularly concerned about durability.
Gone were those cheese-cake untreated wooden trellises and decks of earlier times. Home-owners wanted things that would have the same endurance as the home itself and were especially concerned about the cost of perpetual maintenance.
Other factors laid in the construction industry itself.
To name a few :There were the new Dacronite self-tapping wood screws, narrow as a nail, up to 6" long.
And the powerful hand-held battery-powered clutch-chuck screw drivers that put these screws in as fast as nails without stripping the heads.Another was the new polyurethane waterproof glues and the polyurethane strongly-adhesive paintable caulks.
And there were the non-shrinking paintable epoxies for filling large voids so bolts could be
recessed and covered-over.
There were a whole host of plastics:
For the canopies there was hollow PVC (poly-vinyl-chloride plastic) rectangular and round tubing with built-in UV (ultraviolet) protection.
There was the 3-D plastic PVC lattice (made like the wooden lattice with crossing lath strips).And there was the double- and triple-walled pliable polycarbonate plastic sheeting for water deflection and light diffusion which can be used to give an otherwise open arbor some rain protection beneath it.
And there were the new ultra-white polyethylene solid-plastic boards like PrimoPlank which could be used for curved beams and arches and would never need painting, ever!And for wooden canopies, the wood was capped with PVC plastic.
Any outdoor structure is constantly exposed to the elements. Of all the hazards in Silicon Valley, the sun is the most damaging. It parches the wooden elements, curling and warping the canopy's top-most pieces. It blisters and cracks the paint. To permanently protect the skyward side of the canopy from the elements, all of my wooden arbors had PVC plastic caps over every wooden piece -- even the curved pieces.
Now that these problematic weaknesses in materials had been overcome, many residents in the valley were opting for more architectural outdoor structures -- the increased longevity and low-cost maintenance justified the added expenditure.
Plastic needed nomaintenance -- it made great material for the thinner linear elements such as the lath atop the canopy. That made possible some of the more elaborate arched and round canopies shown here, because by reducing the canopy's weight more emphasis could be placed on the design elements over engineering ones.
After all the wooden elements of the structures were finish-painted with a brilliant-white semi-gloss latex paint, the distinction between what's wood and what's plastic became almost imperceptible! Moreover, after a few years of weathering, the PVC plastic elements lost their sheen and could then be spray painted, so repainting the entire structure posed no problems for the future.
Painting wooden elements also has its own science. Have you ever tried to clean a used paint brush left out overnight? Well, to hold the paint on wooden surfaces, timber needs to be fuzzied-up first. That's called resawing. All my wooden beams and rafters were resawn.
They were then painted with 1 coat of heavy-solids primer and 2 coats of premium elastomeric latex. These wooden components won't have to be painted again for another 10 years. However it's always advisable to do a precautionary touch-up coat after the first full year to catch any stress points, omissions or breaches in the original paint membrane -- that's the owner's responsibility.
Many considerations went into each one of these designer arbors. The primary one was safety. Some of those suspended arches were over 150 lbs.! Those wooden arches must by code support 10 lbs/sq ft of canopy -- sometimes that added up to a half ton or more itself. Bracing, heavy-duty bolts and safety cables, often hidden internally, were used to guard against components becoming detached in an earthquake of any magnitude. And my structures always minimized the visibility of the hardware.
What made these arbors, porches, patio-covers, gazebos and other open-air structures interesting were the myriad design details. They were architecturally varied to enhance the space rather than just fill it. For a structure to keep from becoming boring with familiarity, it requires an integrated complex of forms compatible with functions. And like a complex melody, the forms needed to be compatible with each other too, otherwise you get something equivalent to a sour note like those seen in my
"Renditions of the Arbordiculous" .
You can search the internet the world over and you won't find a comparable collection of completed arbor and patio-cover projects like those found here in this site. Try clicking on the pictures and investigating these arbors in more detail. Find out all the considerations that were addressed in these various situations -- they may just hold some important points that you could apply in addressing your project.
Arbors made from stained cedar or redwood
Here are five designer arbors constructed with stained natural wood. Plastic has been used in two of the structures; for the yellow decorative elements in the bridge arbor and as the blue-gray roof-sheeting in the arbor with the gabled roof.
Click on the photo to go to the related project.
Blue-gray 1/4-inch plastic panels as roofing
Active Links
Professional photo book is now available with full-color pictures and discussions of each arbor in this website .
The 120-page book covers 40 different designer arbors built in California by MR. DECK between 1993 and 2008, grouped into 12 distinct styles. The book captures every arbor depicted in this website and more.
Features: landscape size 11x8½ full-color semi-gloss pages; full-color glossy soft-cover bound; multiple photos of all but 2 of the structures; all photos in full color.
Cost: $49.00 plus approximately $4 US postal shipping. Click here to order:ist of 30 registered US architectural-structure copyrights granted to Mr. Deck
Reporting Copyright Infringement -- Reward Offered
Mr. Deck has an established REWARDS Program. It applies only to arbors and patio-covers. This program compensates anyone who first notifies me of a suspected copying of any one of my designer structures and provides the specific location.
The reward is $100 immediate payment upon verification of the informant's claim, plus 10% of the judgment amount. If you see a structure in your neighborhood that resembles one of the arbors pictured on my Projects pages, contact me asap.
Some people have the mistaken notion that if they make some minor changes to the original design, they are circumventing infringement. A derivative work is defined as any distinct structure which incorporates any one of the unique design features of the original structure.
The copyright holder is the only person with the right to construct a derivative work. This right is protected for a period from the date of first public publication through 75 years after the death of the artist.
Some people make the mistake that I won't find out about their infringement if they're in another state or build it in a secluded location. Don't count on it -- I have been alerted to structures in the most hidden and remote areas by savvy observers or visitors. Many times it's a jealous or vindictive neighbor who has viewed this very page. Sometimes it 's been a competitor of the contractor who built the structure. Other times it's been someone in the neighborhood who had no affiliation with the infringer but had a sense of what an unfair advantage the theft of intellectual property bestowed upon someone else who didn't pay the fair price.
I have successfully prosecuted several infringers to date and will continue to do so. Because of the punitive damages awarded in these cases, there's more money in my prosecuting an infringement case than in building the original structure, so be forewarned. Not only that, but the infringer will also be ordered to demolish their copy structure.
The minimum litigation cost to the infringer these days for his defense in Federal Court is $60,000. It doesn't cost me much since I litigate my own cases and reside within a few miles of the Federal Court. So you might think twice about copying any architectural element in any structure you see here.
Work with me and I'll bend over backwards to help you. But if you are the cheap or sneaky type, you're going to collide with a freight train coming at you -- and that's me.
My advice is to work with me from the start and avoid a big problem later: see the Copyright notice for preliminary costs involved for my participation.
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