ArchiTakes

“Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?”  Theodore Roethke asked in his 1953 poem, “The Waking.”  Trees have been our natural environment since before we came down from them, and they hold a deeply embedded place in the human psyche.  Their generations of leaves are an intuitive metaphor for death and renewal.  In a poem that contemplates mortality, did Roethke want his listeners to unconsciously hear “blight takes the tree?”  Or just recall the redemptive wonder we feel on seeing a tree mysteriously transformed by horizontal sunlight?  Beyond a metaphysical import, every tree has specific qualities that might influence its selection as an intermediary between artificial shelter and nature.  The poplar pictured above, for example, has brittle leaves that make the wind audible as a gentle clapping sound.  

Philip Johnson called his Glass House a “pavilion for viewing nature,” and referred to its lush setting as “expensive wallpaper.”  A year after the house’s completion, Johnson explained its formal influences in the September, 1950, issue of Architectural Review.  The uncaptioned photo above accompanied his article, a goes-without-saying nod to his design’s source in the landscape.  The image also highlights the incidental but pervasive and integral effect of trees as animating sources of shadow and reflection.  

Caspar David Friedrich’s 1822 painting, “Noon,” captures the fundamental allure of a stand of trees.  In his 1963 book, Ecology, Eugene Odum wrote:  “Human civilization has so far reached its greatest development in what was originally forest and grassland in temperate regions. . . . Man, in fact, tends to combine features of both grasslands and forests into a habitat for himself that might be called forest edge. . . . in grassland regions he plants trees around his homes, towns, and farms. . . . when man settles in the forest he replaces most of it with grasslands and croplands, but leaves patches of the original forest on farms and around residential areas. . . . man depends on grasslands for food, but likes to live and play in the shelter of the forest.”

An admirer of Caspar David Friedrich, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel painted “Landscape with Gothic Arcades” in 1811.  The romantic appeal of Schinkel’s architectural vision is closely related to the natural pull of Friedrich’s grove in “Noon.”  The architect Robert Geddes’ 1982 essay in Architectural Design, “The Forest Edge,” quotes the passage above from Eugene Odum’s Ecology, and takes its title from his name for man’s prefered environment.  The forest edge, Geddes wrote, “can be seen both as man’s ideal habitat and as a mythical image.  Consequently, just as man has enjoyed the forest at the edge of the clearing which has offered him both shelter and openness, so today we enjoy being in architecture which recreates similar spatial conditions: arcades and colonnades, loggias and porches, thresholds, cloisters, courtyards and peristyles – all of which resemble clearings at the edge of the forest.”

A convention of Japanese woodblock prints creates spatial depth by framing distant views in a foreground of trees or branches.  Kawase Hasui’s 1922 view of a scene in Katsusa, Hizen Province, goes further by picturing an entire tree-defined foreground space, and placing the viewer within its protection.  Trees placed around a house can give its exterior views a similar spatial depth and sense of shelter, without the expense or artifice of a colonnade or porch.  

Frank Lloyd Wright’s rendering makes his 1905 Glasner House seem to peer out from the woods into a clearing.  

The double-height stair space of Richard Neutra’s 1927-29 Lovell Health House lets natural light and the moving shadows of trees deep inside.  

Charles and Ray Eames’ 1949 Case Study House #8, better known as the Eames House, has a planted forest-edge colonnade of Eucalyptus trees between its façade and the meadow and ocean vista it overlooks.  The trees not only frame the open view, but provide a play of shadows and reflections across the contrasting industrial surfaces and interior of the house.  Their animation is indispensible to the design’s vitality, as demonstrated in countless frames from the Eames’ film, “House after five years of living.”   

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House was completed in 1951.  Despite its 360-degree views, the house very much has a front and back.  Its living spaces and terrace overlook the nearby Fox River to the south.  A venerable sugar maple mediates this view, while providing much needed summer shade.  The ailing tree is now guy-wired together to preserve the integrity of Mies’s vision.    

Rule 8 is to use trees.

Trees can bring nature to affordable sites far from the shore or landscape vistas.  If a building lot offers no existing trees to exploit, new ones should be included in a house’s budget, and chosen and placed for maximum effect.  As well as providing shade and privacy, trees capture the mystery of changing light, give voice and visibility to the wind, mark the passage of the day with the sweep of their shadows, inform the seasons with their changing leaves and, in their slow growth, echo the accumulation of the years of memories that give a place personal meaning.  Use trees for these rewards and to extend a house’s sense of shelter and give a foreground to its exterior views.  Let the moving shadows of branches and leaves animate the surface of the house and fall inside to vitalize its interior and keep nature near.

Johannes Vermeer’s The Music Lesson was painted in the early 1660s.  As in most of Vermeer’s thirty-odd paintings, light enters from the left, spreading itself across a rear wall.  The situation is modeled on his studio, where a window and wall intersected to create just such a wash of illumination.  While light can be visibly suspended in the thick air of haze or smoke, it typically manifests itself on the surfaces it strikes.  Vermeer portrayed this presence so strongly that light is said to be a character in his paintings.   Read the rest of this entry »

Architect Jørn Utzon’s home, Can Lis, was completed in 1972.  Composed of individual structures and courtyards, it stands on a cliff overlooking the sea in Majorca, Spain.  A one-room building at its center contains a built-in crescent seat facing the vista through deep openings, with a fireplace on one side. Read the rest of this entry »

An illustration from William A. Bruette’s 1934 book, Log Camps & Cabins, shows an example of a cabin open at one end like a cave.  Outside, a campfire extends the domestic realm into nature.  The composition is the barest refinement of primitive man’s cave with banked fire outside.  The book’s epigraph reads:  “The cabin in the forest, on the banks of a quiet lake or buried in the wilderness back of beyond, is an expression of man’s desire to escape the exactions of civilization and secure rest and seclusion by a return to the primitive.”  Or in Huck Finn’s words, “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.”  Few humans would prefer any kind of architecture to the pleasure and freedom of being outdoors in comfortable weather.  Even without retreating “back of beyond,” houses can make the most of their devil’s bargain between shelter and space. Read the rest of this entry »

A cutaway drawing of the Temple of Diana Propylaea at Eleusis illustrates Auguste Choisy’s 1899 Histoire de L’Architecture.  From tepees to temples to iconic mid-century glass houses, one-room buildings derive a primitive power from their simple integration of interior and exterior. Read the rest of this entry »

“A Lake or River Villa for a Picturesque Site” illustrates A.J. Downing’s 1850 book, The Architecture of Country Houses.  Its orderly cruciform plan of perfectly shaped rooms is undisturbed by the messy supporting business of kitchen, laundry and storage hidden out back.  Unprepared for the encroachment of modern equipment, the villa’s designer simply tacks on a perfunctory service wing that drifts off the page while he focuses on the familiar building blocks of room and stair.  Today’s house designer has even more services to integrate, with bathrooms, wrap-around kitchens, utility rooms and attached garages.  He seems just as ill prepared to integrate these, and often puts up a dummy house-front of formal rooms to simplify composition of the street façade and to serve as an uninhabited buffer zone shielding the private family spaces and their services in back.  As with Downing’s example, the rear face of today’s house is a secondary concern.  The accidental backs to be glimpsed across rear yards of housing tracts attest to this.  Modern house-plan fare visibly strains to juggle curb appeal, integrity of rooms, and integrated services.  Downing’s example drops the ball on incorporation of services in favor of whole rooms and a picturesque face.   Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hickox House of 1900 opens its dining room, living room and library onto each other, combining them into a single expansive living space that runs the full length of the house.  The glazed ends of this space imply its infinite exterior projection, even as the doors leading from its center onto a terrace allow the living room to spill outside.  “Vista without and vista within,” were Wright’s words for the effect.  The outward thrust of the living space is countered by its focal hearth.  Wright attuned his houses to the ingrained daily rhythm by which our forebears faced outward to hunt and gather in the landscape by day and returned to the fire at night, tapping into the primitive brain with the calculation of a movie about alien predators.  In its human insight, its simultaneous appropriation of exterior space and indoor simulation of outdoor scale, and its diagrammatic clarity – pure living pavilion on one side and unintruding support functions on the other – the Hickox House is a particularly compact illustration of Wright’s multilevel genius.  It was a radical dwelling in its time.  In his 1954 book, The Natural House, Wright described how he had broken the box of the American house a half-century earlier: 

“Dwellings of that period were cut up, advisedly and completely, with the grim determination that should go with any cutting process.  The interiors consisted of boxes beside boxes or inside boxes, called rooms.  All boxes were inside a complicated outside boxing.  Each domestic function was properly box to box.  I could see little sense in this inhibition, in this cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions, except for the privacy of bedrooms on the upper floor.  They were perhaps all right as sleeping boxes.  So I declared the whole lower floor as one room, cutting off the kitchen as a laboratory . . .  Then I screened various portions of the big room for certain domestic purposes like dining and reading.  There were no plans in existence like these at the time. . . .  The house became more free as space and more livable too.  Interior spaciousness began to dawn.”

The lived-in rear of today’s typical American house, with its combined kitchen, informal dining area and family room, owes its existence to Wright’s pioneering vision, even as today’s self-contained, under-used and obligatory formal living and dining rooms are over a century behind him.  

Rule 2 is to combine living spaces. 

 Who has more?

Combine living, dining and other activity areas to partake of each other’s space.  Create a single generous area rather than several smaller constrained rooms.  If private activity areas are needed, incorporate them in bedrooms or circulation space, so these do double-duty.  Most homeowners spend the great majority of their at-home waking time not only in a favorite room, but on one or two favorite pieces of furniture, and even the richest mansion owner can experience only one room at a time.  Redirect resources from unnecessary partitions and redundant spaces into the best of all possible – and always used – living spaces.       

Cape Cod, saltbox, colonial, barn; American vernacular prototypes have simple rectangular plans, and shapes that are mere extrusions of their end walls.  These plain and practical forms represent the oldest and arguably most authentic stream of American domestic architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

A 1958 Corvette, one of the last models designed by the line’s visionary creator, Harley Earl.

No design product is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette.  Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air.  It is as much about the experience it promises (and delivers) as about its material allure.  The two-seater’s reductiveness is arguably far more American than the prevailing national tendency toward bigness.  Today’s ubiquitous SUVs hold only an empty promise of off-road driving.  They are parked outside equally pointless and oversized houses full of formal spaces and bedrooms that are never used, “empty guest chambers for empty guests,” as Thoreau observed of the typical American house over a century and a half ago in Walden.  

The American house has doubled in size since the first Corvette was launched in the 1950s, even as households have become smaller.  According to the 2000 census, less than a third of American households are families with children under 18 at home, and over a quarter are individuals living alone. 

American life needs a new vehicle.  American literature offers the introduction to the rules of its design.     Read the rest of this entry »

Linked Hybrid, a Beijing complex designed by Steven Holl, was completed last year.  As with his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT, Holl sets windows deeply into a uniform and pervasive grid, camouflaging them as dimples in an enveloping waffle texture that’s applied like shrink-wrap.  He so accentuates the window grid that it takes on the geometric purity of abstract sculpture.  Like many other architects today, Holl hides his windows in plain sight.  Unlike so many others, he does this by embracing the grid rather than fleeing it. Read the rest of this entry »