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aiaVT,
May 2004
Donald Maurice Kreis
Before
he retired, Professor Penn Kimball of the journalism school at Columbia
University was fond of terrorizing his students with a red stamp
bearing the words “Here is Your Lead.” No matter what Kimball’s
students produced by way of written reporting, he would invariably
zero in on some detail in the middle of the article and declare
it the real news.
In
that spirit, here’s the lead in Jeremiah Eck’s recent book The
Distinctive Home: A Vision of Timeless Design . It’s on
page 87, beneath a plan of an unbuilt home. Eck writes:
I’ve
often thought that a 1,200-sq.-ft., two-story house would be perfect
for many people if the spaces were divided up just right. It
could contain a public, informal kitchen/sitting area at one end,
a small private getaway space at the other (separated by a fireplace,
perhaps), with two small bedrooms on the second floor. This
would be an ideal plan for our time.
Zowie!
Eck did not get the FAIA after his name for designing 1,200 square-foot
homes, as his book and his web site, www.jearch.com, readily attest.
He does what virtually every other accomplished residential architect
in New England does – create big, luxurious homes for his wealthy
clients. The Distinctive Home, published jointly by the
Taunton Press and the AIA, is clearly intended as a polemic for
potential clients who might otherwise be tempted to eschew the architect
and go straight for the mass-produced McMansion.
Given
that purpose, Eck should be forgiven for burying the revelation
that small can be distinctive too. Nor can Eck be accused of hypocrisy,
at least to this extent: Similarly buried on page 63 is a photograph
of the 1,150 square-foot house, a simple and compelling tribute
to the colonial house form, that he designed for himself on a half-acre
site and inhabited for more than 15 years.
But
here’s the rub: Eck moved out, to an older home he extensively
renovated. It looks to be considerably bigger than 1,150 square
feet -- but decide for yourself. The photos are on page 4. And
for all that Eck complains of sprawl and the proliferation of “heavy,
boxy, and out-of-scale building,” he cannot resist telling his prospective
clientele what it wants to hear: “While it’s fashionable lately
to criticize big houses as bloated and ugly, I don’t think size
is the problem.”
For
this and other reasons, The Distinctive Home reveals more
truths about architecture in northern New England than does, say,
anything that could be written about House II, the leaky tribute
to Jacques Derrida that Peter Eisenman designed in the Northeast
Kingdom town of Hardwick. This is because the bread-and-butter
of architectural practice in these parts is not deconstructivism
but shingles, clapboard, fancy trim and the eternal struggle against
the risk-aversion chronic to the architecture commissioning classes.
Eck
gives those classes excellent advice. He points out that bigger
isn’t necessarily better and that a good design does not start with
a particular style – it ends up with one, as an appropriate response
to the site and program. In language that is refreshingly straightforward,
Eck addresses the importance of light, proportion and what he calls
“marrying a house to the land.”
And,
based on the projects pictured in Eck’s book, his taste is refined
and not egocentric. There are certainly plenty of Eck’s creations
featured here, the zenith of which is arguably the almost Wrightian
cascade of triangles that he designed for a client with a craggy
oceanfront site in Gloucester, Massachusetts. (The Bay State,
specifically Martha’s Vinyard, is also the scene of the featured
Eck projects’ nadir, a prissy pseudo-Victorian shack of just 616
square feet – proof that small is not always beautiful and that
not everything capable of meeting stringent zoning limitations deserves
to be built.) But the great majority of the projects featured
in The Distinctive Home are by other designers, from Brian
MacKay-Lyons of Halifax to James Cutler of Bainbridge Island, Washington
– and, in between, a banquet comprised largely of projects that
have received excellence awards from various AIA chapters.
An
impressive egalitarianism prevails nearly throughout. Only occasionally
does the text identify the particular projects Eck singles out for
praise. Alas, the egalitarianism is not geographic. No work
by Vermont architects is pictured, unless one counts a certain Turner
Brooks of New Haven, Connecticut.
Buy
this book and leave it in the waiting area of your architectural
firm’s reception area. But do so with the understanding that,
fundamentally, this book is about business as much as beauty.
What really bugs Eck, and what he posits as the opposite of the
distinctive home, is uniformity – houses “that face the road like
soldiers in formation” and have “an anonymous quality.” Never
mind that uniformity plus ingenuity equals affordable excellence.
Ignore the millions of people who live in cities precisely because
they crave anonymity. The SUVs are streaming up the interstates,
their drivers craving homes of distinction, if only they knew it.
Overwrite
text here.
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