So you have a modern house and you need a modern sidewalk ... this is the post for you (if you live in Dallas)

When you pull up in front of a house, did you know that you can determine if the house is modern even before look up" Just a look at the sidewalk. If the sidewalk is in a continuous pour from the street to the front door, someone didn’t get the Bob Borson memo on modern sidewalks.Despite the fact that I’ve been designing residential sidewalks for a long time, I’ve don’t think I’ve ever poured an uninterrupted concrete sidewalk that led up to the front door of one of my projects. Instead, I like to pour individual floating pads of concrete to help modify the scale of the approach so that you aren’t walking along a concrete landing strip. So that’s what I thought I would talk about today – how we build concrete sidewalks out of individual pads of concrete.The image above is a landscape plan for one of the houses we currently have under construction. We worked with a landscape architect on the layout and planting, but the sidewalk layout is something that we put together in our office from the beginning. One thing that I don’t have to consider too often as a design parameter is accessibility and snow. I’ve personally navigated pads like this in a wheelchair so I know it’s possible without much effort, and the amount of snow we get here doesn’t make shoveling snow an issue.This formwork for th...