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Valley
News, November 12, 2005
Donald Maurice Kreis
“Is
this going to be a rest stop or a Four Seasons resort?” Valley
News columnist Jim Kenyon mused on June 29 in reference to
the new $6.3 million rest area on the northbound side of Interstate
89 in Sharon. Noting that the facility also serves as Vermont’s
new and improved Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Kenyon accused politicians
of “just throwing
Vietnam vets a bone” in hopes of distracting them from a billion-dollar
shortfall at the federal Veterans Affairs department.
The New York Times published an account of the rest area
on Aug. 31 that featured Kenyon’s “Four Seasons” quip prominently.
Neither newspaper bothered to name the architect who designed the
place.
He is Bennington architect Timothy D. Smith, who deserves, rather
than ridicule, recognition as a designer in the public interest.
It happens that Smith was an interesting choice for the project.
At the height of the Vietnam conflict, his sister was jailed for
her antiwar activism. “The same day she was arrested, my baby brother
left for Vietnam,” ultimately to return with a chest full of military
service medals, Smith recalls. Here is a designer uniquely qualified
to confront ambivalence with architecture.
The
result is the only building in the state that expresses rather than
suppresses the two sides of Vermont. And it does so with clarity
and efficiency.
One
side is the traditional Vermont, the one that is said to have contributed
more soldiers per capita to every one of the nation’s military conflicts.
It is the side of Vermont that turns out once a year for a solemn
vigil to honor the state’s 139 Vietnam War dead by, among other
things, lighting votive candles. Now there is an amphitheatre for
this purpose, and Smith gave each candle its own square plinth of
polished white marble reaching outward at random points in a wall
of rough granite stones.
The
image of disciplined, strong, precision-hewn marble literally pressing
forward boldly from the good Vermont earth is stunning no matter
what one’s view of American military incursions. The other side
of Vermont honored here is the one that started as
back-to-the-land and has matured into the desire to create a sustainable,
even regenerative, relationship with the environment. To some extent,
this is the Vermont that Bill McKibben explored in his recent book
Wandering Home, proclaiming it our nation’s best hope for
reconciling human needs and desires with the natural world’s long-term
requirements for survivability. A building that succeeds in communicating
something about this Vermont, as Smith’s does, is a noteworthy achievement
even if it does not create a bold new form.
The
new building at the Sharon rest area consists of two octagonal pavilions.
The decision to use octagons grew out of a more fundamental choice:
Smith insisted of moving the rest area up the hillside from the
site of its predecessor – a move which, in turn, argued for the
kind of panoramic views facilitated by a roundish structure.
“You’ve
pretty much got a fabulous view no matter where you’re standing,”
the architect correctly reports.
One
of the pavilions contains the bathrooms and a dignified exhibit
listing every Vermonter who served in Vietnam. The other, which
Smith and his clients at the state Buildings and General Services
Department call the “Living Machine,” contains a series of tanks,
some employing natural vegetation, designed to turn the outgoing
bathroom wastewater into usable incoming water again.
The
mere fact that wastewater is recycled is interesting but not revolutionary.
Smith notes that the idea first arose as a temporary measure at
his somewhat similar project, the Vermont Welcome Center that opened
five years ago on Interstate 91 in Guilford, near the Massachusetts
border. The Welcome Center is informative and inviting. But in form
(a timber-framed barn) the Guilford facility is about postcard Vermont
rather than the real Vermont that inspired Smith in Sharon.
Hence
the architect conceived the idea of building the Living Machine
entirely out of glass and opening it to the view of the public,
which can circumnavigate the little tank farm along a platform that
hovers above the hydroponics. At each tank there is a placard offering
an explanation that will edify travelers with a scientist’s curiosity.
For
the rest of us, the Living Machine will simply be a delightful visual
respite from the bathroom break. In the process, it will communicate
something true and inspiring about today’s Vermont in the same way
that Greek Revival buildings testify to a democracy that was still
new in the early 19th century. And that’s revolutionary.
Other
virtues will remain mostly invisible. For example, an array of 25
wells, each 450 feet deep, will draw enough heat from the earth
to eliminate the need for fossil fuel at the building.
What
Smith calls his “honorial” rest area is not perfect. The bathrooms
themselves are gloomy; all throne rooms deserve natural light. And
profundity overload can set in; at nearly every step there is another
inspirational message chiseled into the rock or hung from the wall.
But
this is essentially quibbling. There was a time in the Green Mountain
State when the expenditure of significant funds on an important
public building was considered a laudable expression of the community’s
strength and values. Think of Ammi Burnham Young’s 1838 State House,
so revered it was essentially built twice (because of a fire in
1857). It still both evokes and facilitates legislative wisdom
as well as any comparable structure in the country.
Smith’s
new work presents a stark contrast to the unambitiousness of most
new public buildings. Convincing Americans that public architecture
should express a resurgent civic virtue rather than the usual cinderblock
peevishness is a fine use of our tax dollars, even if it happens
just one bathroom-seeking motorist at a time.
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