Past Teaches Us

These three architects never tire of the art and craft of home-building. They push humble, affordable materials into mimicking the much more costly substances of which castles and monuments are made. Every detail from the nosing on a stair tread to the flashing of a chimney is for Jacobsen, Bohlin, and Bowman another opportunity to pursue a better way of building. Like old cobblers, they fret about whether their houses are comfortable to live in and whether they are built well enough to last. Their concern with how people respond is what makes these designers romantic and sets them apart from architects who detail with only the sculptural quality of construction, rather than feeling, in mind. I had the pleasure of seeing first-hand that their obsession with seeking and applying the newest technologies is not aimed at being avant-garde but at being sure they are producing good homes.
Each of the three adapts to the site, whether on the shore of an ocean, at the edge of a precipice, or in the middle of a farmer's field. All of them manipulate the landscape's attributes in conjunction with the home's layout, hiding a view from the visitor until just the right moment. They meticulously fit the home to the site and wrench out every possible attribute the location can offer. These are architects who know that a single tree can be a wonderful landscape. They can make the most of exceedingly humble properties as well as magnificent ones.
Their buildings are not shelters whose sole purpose is to contain life. They are homes that let life in, let nature in. The three do not build "glass houses"; they frame nature with windows. The patterns of the glass transform views into portraits that are capable of revealing nature's complexity. They harness the sun so that it brightens corners, casts deep shadows, remains neutral when it ought to, and makes the homes richer and more complex. There is no doubt, though, that each of the architects in this book is his own person. Each of these architects has a flair for the picturesque. The meaning of "picturesque" design I use the word "picturesque" differently than most people do. Today picturesque is often taken to mean "pretty"—or pretty with an overlay of quaintness. I instead use the term the way art historians do—to refer to an aesthetic approach that emphasizes irregular and unexpected features that catch people's attention and engage their interest. That was the sense of picturesque that prevailed among many Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century, when architect Alexander Jackson Davis and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing ranked among the nation's most prominent tastemakers. Davis and Downing disliked the strictness of the Greek Revival; they rejected houses modeled on temples from the classical world, and they insisted that American houses should aim for a more informal and expressive character. In The Architecture of Country Houses, Downing wrote that domestic architecture "should exhibit more of the freedom and play of feeling of every-day life." In my first book, The Good Home: Interiors and Exteriors, I made the case that houses today should be designed in a picturesque manner, and presented several homes of my own design as examples.

By the 1840s and 1850s, thanks to Davis and Downing, the Picturesque Movement had started to influence American houses. The movement encompassed a number of styles, including Stick Style, Queen Anne, and—the mode that architectural historian Vincent Scully identified as a high point of American domestic design—the relaxed and relaxing Shingle Style. A picturesque house is not shy about incorporating irregularity and expressiveness or about arousing sentiment. The designer may exaggerate the shape and prominence of the roof, give windows unusual dimensions, or prolong the experience of entering the house. A room may rise surprisingly high, to generate a sense of expansiveness, or its walls may slope down, to create a cozy, enveloping refuge. Picturesque houses allow experimentation and departures from the norm. It is these departures, exaggerations, surprises, and mysteries that invest a house with feeling and give it soul. The picturesque is a form of romanticism, an approach that prizes emotion and imagination. So in this book 1 sometimes call these three "picturesque architects" and at other times call them "modern romantics." They brilliantly combine romantic traits and modern methods.

When I first proposed presenting the work of these three architects, the reaction was always the same: Why Hugh Newell Jacobsen, and who is Obie Bowman? Peter Bohlin was the only identifiable modern romantic of the bunch. When I met Peter at his home in Waverly, Pennsylvania, he was as confident as I that he would belong in any book on picturesque homes. Architects have a great fear of being misinterpreted (because it happens so often), and Peter Bohlin's initial concern was that I would show only his projects that had cottage-like profiles. Peter is a renowned designer, but many of his most published projects have traditional attributes: gable roofs, wood-frame construction, and common house parts such as columns, double-hung windows, and porches. The traditional projects have the virtue of being the most affordable of his designs; the cost is naturally higher for nontraditional buildings made entirely of custom-made components. Despite the quality of the work he's done in a relatively traditional vein, Peter didn't want readers to get a skewed view, one that would ignore his more nontraditional designs.
This book therefore features diverse projects of Peters firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Some of the houses shown are relatively simple, with fairly traditional profiles, whereas others are more complex, exhibiting modernist elements such as flat roofs. Regardless of the budget or the character, the genesis of a Bohlin house does not vary. Peter starts, as each of these architects does, by intensely studying the property's potential to take advantage of natural features: sunlight, vegetation, and views, to name a few. The next step is to work out a simple geometrical organization of the house on its land. What that generally means is that Peter takes the plan of the house—which is based on the size and functions required by the homeowner—and incorporates it into a diagram of lines and rectangles showing where the views are, how people approach the house, how large the parking area or the patios should be, and where any special landscape features should be situated. The lines and rectangles are laid down according to an academic set of proportions. The goal, though, is not academic. Peter wants the house to please the homeowner with its beauty, and he wants the house to be well suited to its landscape.
Inside and out, Peter's houses exude warmth that transcends the nature of their materials. Why some of his houses feel warm is obvious—he's been known to line a home's interior with wood on nearly every surface. A preferred wood for Peter is clear Douglas fir finished with satin polyurethane that glows, like a flame, with the littlest bit of light. Other homes are constructed with rough concrete, metal connections, and sheetmetal sheathing, industrial materials all, yet as Peter assembles and details them, they take on the same warmth as their wood counterparts. The best way to describe how he accomplishes this is to refer to agricultural buildings. Farmers have rarely been shy about using crude or industrial materials to build the structures they need, such as grain silos, milking barns, and storage sheds. As these structures have aged, they have blended into the agricultural landscape, coming to look as natural as the crops and the livestock. Peter uses these same materials in ways that recall their practical and unpretentious application by farmers. They initially appear to have been chosen mostly just to get the job done, but the final result is enchanting.
No one could imagine Hugh Newell Jacobsen employing the warm palette of Peter Bohlin, which is why bringing these two architects together into one book surprised many of the people I spoke with. The fact is, both Jacobsen and Bohlin restrict themselves to a very limited palette in order to create beautiful houses; the palettes are simply different. Where Bohlin covers floors, walls, and ceilings with Douglas fir, Jacobsen makes all the surfaces white. That difference has made an impact on how the two architects are regarded. Being known for all-wood homes has made Bohlin touchy about not being thought of as a modernist. Being known as a master of all-white homes has made Jacobsen sensitive to being seen only as a modernist. When I spoke with Jacobsen, he complained about potential clients who avoid him because they think he is too much of a modernist.
In truth, few designers have a more romantic orientation than Jacobsen. His homes may be ail-American in shape—perfect profiles of gable-roofed New England houses are part of his repertoire—yet he straddles two worlds, finishing those traditionally shaped homes with white-painted brick and sheets of glass: materials and details more often associated with modern office buildings. Whereas photographs of Bohlin's interiors easily exude warmth, presentations of Jacobsen's struggle to avoid appearing cold. "Warm and cozy" is a maternal attribute possessing undeniable appeal, but we should recognize that bright, airy, and clean are equally sensual attributes. Jacobsen designs homes that are meant to be loved for a lifetime, and he makes a point of telling his clients so. Many people feel at peace in a comfortable mess—a fact sometimes used in arguments against the purity of Modern design—but just as many, if not more, find peace in tidiness, orderliness, and Puritan principles, essential parts of Jacobsen's lasting appeal.]

Jacobsen designs homes to be successful in their efficient use of space, in their spareness and avoidance of frivolous details, and in their no-nonsense relationship to the landscape. The effect is nevertheless romantic because efficiency, in Jacobseri's hands, achieves the character of poetry. When Jacobsen chooses the site for a house, he finds the sweet spot that will make a striking impression on visitors and that will allow the landscape to change constantly as the visitors take each step toward it or around it. Jacobsen's houses do not need the assistance of a screen of foliage or the curve of a hill to make them vigorous. The shape and the layout of the house are dynamic in themselves. The house's profile may consist not of a single, simple gable form, or of the even simpler flat roof form, but of multiple volumes assembled like cards—one lapped over another, partly concealing and partly revealing the next. These are then arranged into V-configurations or into courtyards or rambling compounds, depending on the light, the topography, or the views. There is no dogmatic reason for laying out a house this way. Jacobsen simply knows that a design of this sort will be satisfying to live in and that with this layout, the house will make the best of the land it sits on. Jacobsen's compound layouts serve more than one purpose; they enliven the approach to the house, dramatize movement through the interior, and enhance ordinary experiences such as sitting at the dining room table—all good picturesque reasons for designing in this fashion.
Then there is Obie Bowman. Visiting Bowman at his office, you are not surprised that few people have heard of him. Nestled into beautiful countryside in northern California (where wealthy families start vineyards for the fun of it) lies a aluminum Airstream trailer small enough to be pulled by a Volkswagen Beetle. This is the main office of Obie Bowman Architects. All the bravado of Peter Bohlin and Hugh Newell Jacobsen combined would not be enough antimatter to negate the modesty of Obie Bowman. Yet just like those two, Bowman has the skills and the power to bring nature to its knees. The Pacific coast, Bowman territory, is far more fierce than places like the shores of Virginia where Jacobsen's clients have settled down in his troupe of colonial shapes. In settings where the wind refuses to let trees grow taller than flag poles, Bowman's structures wedge themselves underneath the landscape's skin. Permanently embedded, they are impossible to move. The forms Bowman uses are not entirely unfamiliar, and they blend remarkably into the scenery. From the outside, they appear reclusive. A Bowman design may be a courtyard house on the coast, or a three-story dwelling with a tiny footprint squeezed between the trees in a forest, or an earth-bermed house with ground cover growing up and over the roof. Visitors must find their way to the front door, yet they are subtly led by what seems to be some mystical force. This is an aspect of good picturesque design. Like the view to the house itself, the view to the ocean, the distant hills, or just to the evening sky is held back, then revealed, then taken away again, to give the lucky homeowners more pleasure than any ordinary home would render. The exterior is visually forceful yet it seems less rigid or organized than Bohlin's or Jacobsen's designs, gwing Bowman houses a deceptively hodgepodge composition.
All three of these architects inject a bit of levity into the mix. Jacobsen's prim and proper clapboard houses have big holes cut into them. Bohlin's houses have giant window boxes globbed on like big warts. Bowman leans absurdly large posts against a house; the house would cave in from the weight if it weren't for the hidden structure. The textures, colors, and scale of the building parts that make up the exterior may seem organic, but they're actually a bit affected, considering their location. For example, a closer look at the hefty column of tree trunk used to frame the entry to a Bowman house would reveal that neither is it structurally essential nor is it cut from a tree that could be found on that land. As with all romantic architects, the possibility of creating a delightful or humorous composition is sometimes the only reason Bowman needs to add one more bracket or beam to a facade.
On the interiors, ordinary house-building becomes extraordinary, because nothing is taken for granted.

Waste not, want not is the best way to describe Bowman's interior wall construction. What homeowner could not use another set of shelves for books, trophies, or family photos? Wherever possible, Bowman exposes the wood members that hold up interior walls, and he assembles them into a beautiful matrix of cubbyholes. Rooms are positioned up and down, here and there, as if they had built on uneven ground so that there is a natural flow throughout the house. Bowman uses inventive construction techniques to make fantastic interior spaces that the child in everyone would love. The families that inhabit them enjoy enchanting, cave-like corners in seemingly impossible places. Some Bowman houses have fully suspended platforms large enough for an entire master bedroom, even if the home is tiny.

All three are master architects. One purpose of this book is to demystify what makes them astonishing, so that their work can be admired more widely. My other purpose is to present modern homes that embody feelings, expression, and a love of nature. It is important to see these architects together, for it is through comparison that their common threads—their approach to the landscape and construction technologies, and their use of memorable forms—are revealed. This is the only way to recognize the picturesque techniques and principles that are the foundations of their practice, since they take many different final forms. That says a great deal about the potential of the picturesque. What I have tried to illustrate here is an approach that allows the individual homeowner and the architect to invent a completely unique residence without abandoning all those things that are sentimental, poetic, and familiar.