“He got the lion’s share,” said Arkansas architect Marlon Blackwell, one of the judges.
Jameson is known for his unique minimalist houses in Maryland, Virginia and the District. None looks like another; he designs each specifically for site and client, rather than attempting to conform to any particular style. “He’s a guy with a 450 Hemi that has incredible restraint at either full bore or idle,” Blackwell said. “He varies his speed: He can scream at you or whisper architecturally.”
In a highly conservative real estate market dominated by colonial and Georgian styles, Jameson’s designs stand out.
Carl Alving, a research investigator at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said his Jameson-designed “Glenbrook Residence” in Bethesda is an outright attention-grabber.
“It’s totally amazing,” he said. “I’ll look out my window and people slam on their brakes, jump out of their cars, grab their cameras and take pictures.”
Alving had asked for a home with three wings: one private, one semiprivate and one public. Jameson gave him a 1,500-square-foot courtyard inserted between two heavy walls, to form a central outdoor pavilion — a prismatic, crystal-like jewel nestled in its landscape. Sheathing the home in bronze, stone and glass, the architect calls it an urban lodge. When he discovered that the demolished former house had been built atop a spring, he adapted and introduced geothermal heating and cooling.
Other recent projects illustrate a striking versatility. In Kensington, in a home owned by Maureen Sandman-Long, an economist with the Government Accountability Office, and her husband Adam, director of Inflectra, Jameson stretched light and space beyond the footprint of a former Cape Cod.
Calling for 60-foot trusses tied into the demolished home’s foundation, he freed the new interior from load-bearing walls.
The building is now a three-dimensional rectangle, featuring subtractive voids at lower right and upper left, with slashes of light ripping through its interior all day long. Clad in oversize fiber cement boards, it’s an abstraction in a gridded landscape of tiny postwar colonials. Shadows from 60-year-old maple trees play out as though upon a movie screen, on exterior walls that are neither white nor gray, but somewhere in between.
On six acres in Great Falls, he created for graphic designer Stephanie Wikberg and her patent-lawyer husband Terry a three-story tower connected to a 100-foot-long horizontal “bar” that plunges, cantilevered, into the woods. In between, a 400-square-foot prismlike entry space links the two larger geometric forms.
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