9 Ironwood ROAD

O’Neil Ford’s first building commission in San Antonio was for this house horizontally extended one- and two-story house of stone and cedar. The house is pulled out, one room deep, across its sloping site. Ford and Swank turned its back to the street while opening the garden elevation to the downhill slop and the prevailing breeze. The blind, gabled end walls with exposed stone chimney stacks, the shallowly pitched copper roof and the cantilevered, south-facing balcony recall the mid-nineteenth century building traditions of San Antonio and central Texas. The horizontality and openness of the house, however, identify it as Modern in the spirit of the American Regionalist movement of the 1930s.

‘San Antonio Architecture, Traditions and Visions’, AIA San Antonio, 2007