Perhaps the coolest house in La Crosse Wisconsin is, in my opinion, Helgaland. Helgaland was the summer residence of Mr. A Gundersen and his wife, Helga. Dr. Gundersen is known as the founder of Gundersen Health System. The home was designed by Bentley and Merman Architects in the year 1918. It is located smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi river on the north end of Pettibone Island. It is so significantly seperate from the city of La Crosse itself, it must have been considered Dakota Minnesota when it was built. All documentation from the architects say it is located in Minnesota, though it is clearly within La Crosse county borders today.

The site itself is very unique. Pettibone park is seen along the bottom 2/3 of the island. The north 61 acres are the site of Helgaland. The property is still in the Gundersen family to this day. Half of the reason this is the coolest house in La Crosse is simply due to the property itself. It is surrounded by the Mississippi on three sides, with a private forest on the fourth side.

The designs for the home were found in the La Crosse Public Library archives. They are part of the Bentley, Merman, and Skogstad collection. The amount of archived architectural drawings is incredibly cool and I know I will be checking out many more of these when I get the chance.

The level of detail is inspiring. Every little element of the building is hand sketched.

Architectural Drawings:

I think it is fascinating how they used all of the limited sheet space. The sheet below has a long elevation on the bottom half, but then on the top half two details are shown oriented to the narrow side of the sheet. Very cool. This is not the only sheet using this technique. Frankly, it makes many of the sheets very difficult to read, but cool nonetheless.

Revit Renderings

I modeled the building in Revit as a bit of practice in using the architectural tools. There are so many little details that give this home its character. I have a lot of work to do in creating these details.

The view of the front door below shows off some framing details I added. These details are generic models, modeled in place.

The back door has similar framing details.

The exterior log walls are such an important design feature of this house, I had to figure out a way to model them. Generally, Revit prefers straight and flat walls. I haven’t used the complex wall tools in Revit much, so this project was a great reason to expolore them.

This first technique that I tried was using vertical wall reveals spaced 9″ apart (Because the logs are approx. 9″ in diameter). This only worked well in long stretches of walls, with no windows. It fell apart quickly near the corners as it is disrupted by the joined wall sections. See the image below for the limitations of this technique.

After the vertical wall reveal concept showed many flaws I started brainstorming. The second idea I had was to use architectural columns to hand place each log in the wall. With just columns, the windows and doors would have nothing to host to.