ChattMag Conversations

Louis Wamp, architect
An architect for 30 years, Wamp is a champion for natural, sustainable design in both commercial and residential buildings.
Last three photos courtesy of Louis Wamp Architect & Associates

Q: Tell me about yourself and your architecture.
A: I’m a naturalist. I’ve been very organic in my design work for years. I’m an outdoor enthusiast and started backpacking in the mountains as a child. When we talk about architecture that’s so monumental and out of scale, some people gravitate to that and some people don’t, and obviously I go the other way. I head to the woods away from mega structures and malls and that sort of thing.

Q: You hand draw all your renderings instead of using a computer program. Why is that?
A: My father is an architect, my youngest brother is too. It’s a family thing. I’ve had my own practice for ten years. I interned with my father, and he had a partner ten years older than him, my Uncle John I called him, who I’ve known since I could remember. I was taught old school by these older architects. At that time everybody hand drew. 

Q: There is a lot of interest now in green building and design. What do you think of this new trend?
A: I think it’s funny because a lot of the concepts behind green design were around for centuries when we lived closer to the earth, before we conditioned our atmospheres inside and brought in the technologies that we have. That’s made us move away from natural, sustainable and green living conditions.

Q: What are some examples of those older ways?
A: Capturing roof rainwater in a cistern and running that water back through for the toilets and showers, things like that. You captured the water because your well might be bad. My grandfather had a cistern on his farm in Alabama. They had a sulfur type well, and the rainwater was preferable for drinking than the sulfur water.
All of the farm houses had large deciduous shade trees along the southern edge of the houses to keep the houses cool in the summer, then the leaves came down and they were warm in the winter cause they had plenty of sunlight. They had pine trees and the evergreens to block northern winds.
I’ve always designed having grown up with the farms. My father, he was a farm boy. My grandfather was a builder. Growing up with that sort of country element, I was exposed to a lot of things that were already around, the concepts behind doing things.

Q: How do you integrate sustainability into your designs?
A: When I start on a site plan, I take a survey, I mark up the survey and then I do some studies. I’m looking at the whole site, the weather orientations, the wind directions. This is where you start with green design. You design a house that is sheltered from winter winds so your heating loads will be less. It’s cool from summer heat so your cooling loads are less, it can naturally ventilate, so it doesn’t require air conditioning or heat at certain times of the year.
Our dominant wind direction here in Chattanooga is from the west northwest most of the year. We rarely have east winds and we have southern winds when the storms are coming, but all winter long it’s from the west to northwest or due north. If you lay out a house where, for the winter months, you have an eddy on the southeast side of the house, that’s the warm area and you’ll have solar gain. Those are the kinds of concepts you can design around. Every house I work on, I’m looking at winter months, summer months, I’m looking at shade. Summer rooms should be in the shade side of the house and winter rooms in warmer areas.

Q: So this is really a holistic approach. You’re thinking about the reasons behind the designs.
A: Right. The first thing is that tiny little footprint. We do little thumbnails and get everything oriented to the sun travel, to the wind and the weather, and what natural topography you have.
Like the Anasazi Indians who built along the cliffs. The Indians would go up into the shelters in the winter months because it’s warmer, and they could back up into those rock shelters and build fires along the face of them. The shelters that face the sun and had their back to the cold north wind are the ones that they inhabited. That’s logical. It doesn’t take a genius. Our technology actually pulls us away from our natural genius.

Q: Is this a concept that a lot of other architects subscribe to?
A: Probably not. But a lot of green and environmentally sensitive people do, and there are some in the architectural profession. But I think a lot of the architects are carried away with monumental work rather than shelter.
And there’s a reason for monumental architecture, like churches and cathedrals and public spaces and celebrating the greater mind of man, but there’s also the side that architecture started as a way to provide shelter, and in my mind, shelter for me as an architect is the point. It’s not to create monuments, but to create shelter, and shelter is practical. Shelter is not excessive and indulgent and pretentious.

Q: What are some of the natural elements that you try to incorporate into your designs?
A: In my 30 years in the practice, I’ve done every style. I’ve done modern stuff, high rise, vertical. But I’ve gravitated back to natural styles. It’s not that I’m a traditionalist, but a lot of traditional things are still here because they work. They were logical at the time. Things like ventilation, overhangs and porches, natural light.
Vitruvius, the Roman architect, said that all buildings should contain three things: “firmness” which is structural soundness, “commodity” which is the economic, the practical, efficient, not indulgent, not wasting anything. And then the third is "delight." Those are the three principles that architects get in school.

Q: How do you make your designs both functional and artistic? How do you interpret the “delight” part of those principles?
A: One way I’ve found to make it aesthetic and beautiful has to do with the site. I’ve been a tree-hugger since I was five years old. I go on a site, and if I see big rocks and beautiful trees, I try to figure out how I can weave a house or structure into that without destroying it, how to get the best views out of every window of the existing site, as if it was permanent. 

Check out Chattanooga Magazine's You're in Business feature on Collier Construction Company. Louis Wamp did the renovation for the Davenport home featured in the story.

Chattanooga Magazine is available now online or at local booksellers.