| |
Donald Maurice Kreis
Elizabeth and Michael Mayor are the perfect
architectural clients. She is an accomplished artist; her prints
are sold through McGowan Fine Art in Concord. He is an accomplished
orthopedic surgeon at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, specializing
in both the development and the implantation of artificial joints.
Artistic beauty and smart engineering are the
key ingredients in great architecture. So it makes perfect sense
that the Mayors' new house, in a wooded part of Hanover, is the
most distinguished work of contemporary architectural design to
grace the Upper Valley in recent memory.
Designed by the Falmouth, Maine architect Carol
Wilson, Mayor House shatters the illusion that architecture has
to be traditional in order to commune effectively with the landscape
of northern New England. Using simple forms, a variety of familar
materials, and an uncomplicated plan organized along perpendicular
axes, Mayor House confidently and gracefully cascades down a hillside
to the Mayors' pond, just as water would. The effect is not unlike
what Frank Lloyd Wright sought to achieve with Fallingwater in Pennsylvania,
but Mayor House is more serene, and unlikely to need shoring up
by engineers from an ensuing generation, as Wright's masterwork
has.
Since taking up residence last summer, the Mayors
have had the experience of inviting friends to visit them and sensing
their polite disapproval of what seemed so raw to these guests,
so radically different from the Mayors' former digs, which were
typical of the homes on the streets near downtown. "It was
like a jail cell to them," Elizabeth confides.
Actually, it's the opposite of jail. For example,
the Mayors' bedroom is positively liberating. Their bed looks out
on nature through floor-to-ceiling windows, a view that is intimate
and comforting rather than threatening because the bedroom faces
into the forested hillside.
"It would be hard to describe to someone
who hasn't experienced it," says Wilson of the pleasures of
living in such a dwelling. "That," the architect asserts,
"is the real leap of faith."
Indeed, Elizabeth's affinity for art and Michael's
for structure do not fully account for how they made the leap, how
they were able to accept that Wilson's design, which looked on paper
like nothing familiar, would yield a home of distinction and delight.
An additional catalyst was necessary, in the form of the Mayors'
adult daughter, Sloane Mayor Chambers.
Given their talents, it is hardly surprising
that the Mayors produced an offspring who grew up to be an architect.
Moreover, at the time that Mayor House was on the drawing boards
of Wilson's studio, Sloane was working for Wilson in Maine. The
Mayors had long owned their Occum Ridge property, and had harbored
a dream that it might prove a vehicle for their daughter's artistry.
"We wanted Sloane to express herself,"
Elizabeth recalls. Looking across her open kitchen, with its boundless
counter space and flowing sense of connection to the adjacent dining
area and, outside, a forest of birch trees, she smiles at Wilson
and remembers hearing Sloane talk about her employer. "She
said you were fantastic. We wanted to trust her implicitly. . .
. I had no basis to totally trust you in the beginning, except that
Sloane told me so."
This is a variation on a familiar architectural
theme. The first commission of many a great designer involved a
house for the architect's parents. Robert Venturi, for example,
is more renowned for the home he created for his mother at the beginning
of his long career than the one he has more recently designed for
Dartmouth College's library. It says something about the generous
spirit of Sloane Mayor Chambers that she did not seek to keep this
important family commission for herself, opting instead to serve
as a bridge between her professional and her familial mentors.
Mayor House has something else in common with
Dartmouth's new Berry Library. Venturi and his partner Denise Scott
Brown organized the library along a lengthy "Main Street"
that will, when renovations to the adjacent Baker Library are completed
and Gerry Hall is torn down, proceed from the Dartmouth Green and
back outdoors to the school's developing North Campus section. Similarly,
there is a ribbon-like pathway that proceeds through the Mayor House,
starting with the concrete stairway that separates Elizabeth's studio
from Michael's workshop near the top of the hillside, proceeds through
the dining-living area and adjacent terrace, and then proceeds down
to the pond along a walkway that seems to hover over a field of
ferns and literally floating on the surface of the pond itself,
where the pathway terminates in a dock. What feels like social engineering
at Dartmouth reads as poetry at the Mayors'.
Along this ribbon, remarkable things happen.
Placing the owners' individual work spaces at
the top of the complex, overlooking the living areas and the pond,
in a separate module atop garage and storage spaces, acknowledges
the primacy of the owners' individual identities and, in particular,
provides Elizabeth with views that cannot fail to inspire her as
she draws and prints. The outdoor staircase that separates these
two spaces is as cool and elegant as the narrowest commercial passageway
in one of the ancient cities of the Mediterranean, creatively protected
from the elements by a covering of translucent plastic Kalwall,
a sliver of which sneaks into the roofs of the workplaces themselves,
artfully adding daylight.
One level down the hillside, the terrace and
the adjacent living-dining area commune in a manner that speaks
to Wilson's interest in defying the climate by linking the indoor
and outdoor realms of her buildings. The bluestone that paves the
terrace continues uninterrupted from patio to hearth. Separating
the outside from the inside here are floor-to-ceiling Oslo Windows,
stained in a mahogany color that Wilson specially selected for the
Mayors and simply decorated with curtains fabricated from synthetic
sail-cloth. Wilson explains that she is striving to be "thinking
about windows differently" from the traditional New England
conception of just "a punctured hole in the wall." The
Mayors' windows, she explains, are more like "a moving glass
wall."
From the hillside-facing side of the living-dining
complex, the master bedroom and two guest rooms are organized along
a line perpendicular to the communal spaces. Built-in closets along
the passageway recall Shaker design values, ample bookshelves provide
a colorful contrast and a desk space for each owner is cleverly
carved into the passageway. Standing at the intersection of the
two axes ñ the book-lined hallway connecting the living rooms
and the more fluid pathway connecting the living areas to the studio
spaces, one has, through doors and windows an airy glimpse of sunlight
and nature in all four directions, a vista of which Wilson is particularly
proud.
On the pond side of the living module is the
house's paean to playfulness - a separate, screened-in porch on
tall steel pilotis, linked to the rest of the building by a walkway,
and obviously evoking either a treehouse or, perhaps, the most luxurious
of exotic birdcages. The porch and the workshop-garage module are
aligned with one another, several degrees off parallel with the
living module, which adds a further and pleasant sense of complexity
to what is otherwise a very straightforward and cartesian plan.
A sly touch is the pavilion's invisibility from the living area,
making it something of a hidden pleasure.
One of Wilson's friends and mentors is the great
(but largely unknown in the U.S.) Australian architect Glenn Murcutt,
whose credo involves striving for buildings that resonate with their
site and with nature generally while still embracing the sparse
and elegantly simple design theory espoused most famously by the
late Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies's fabled Farnsworth House in
Illinois is nothing but glass and steel; in the same spirit, the
structure of the Mayor House is always prominent in a way that makes
it central to the project's allure. The tubular steel holding up
the roof of all three modules is ubiquitous, resembling the surrounding
birches at the porch and reaching inside and outside in the living
areas, reinforcing the connection between these two realms. In other
elevations, Wilson expresses the building's structures through bands
in the clapboard siding. It is universally true, but little known
among users of buildings, that when one can tell while inside what
is holding up the roof above, occupants feel a sense of comfort
and pleasure in their surroundings.
Other important influences for Wilson are the
architects Edward Larrabee Barnes and Peter Forbes. The former's
Haystack Mountain School, in Deer Isle, Maine, was when opened in
1961 a great leap forward in New England architecture, proving that
the modern idiom is especially suited to rustic settings. The latter's
award-winning coastal Maine homes have proven that the combination
of steel framing, glass, stone and concrete can exude warmth as
well as wood can.
What all of these influence have in common,
and what they clearly have taught Wilson, is an obsessive interest
in materials and their properties - the certainty that the feel
and finish of a building, the very texture of its surfaces experienced
at close range, is as crucial to the building's success as the forms
and concepts the architect has chosen. For example, Wilson can eagerly
deliver a lengthy disquisition on the concrete used extensively
at the Mayor House.
"We used board-form cast-in-place concrete,"
she notes, even though this an old-fashioned technique and "it's
not really done anymore" in an era of pre-cast concrete structures.
"What's interesting," the architect
continues, "is that the form work was pine," which, she
notes, contains sugar that reacts with the cement and accounts for
the greenish color in the resulting concrete, "so you really
have a memory" of the wood when the formwork is removed. She
also insists that New Hampshire concrete looks distinctly different
from its Maine counterpart because of the differences in a key ingredient
- sand - in the two states.
Mayor House is actually Wilson's second project
in the Upper Valley. Her "Country Living" House in Lyme,
commissioned in the mid-1990s by the magazine of the same name,
is a dynamic effort at reconciling traditional and modern. Mayor
House is bolder and ultimately more successful, an achievement Wilson
credits in great part to the owners and their architect-daughter.
"They were so influential," Wilson
reports. "I've had clients who've said 'Call us when the building's
done.' That doesn't interest me." Rather, she says, working
actively with a surgeon whose fascination with materials and mechanics
gives him the perspective of an inventor, a visual artist whose
work Wilson describes as "sublime" and "tactile,"
and a daughter "who basically held her parents' hands and said,
'Take a risk,'" allowed for a collaborative process that created
"a new kind of beauty."
Every new building should strive to do that,
though few do. The fact that it happens sometimes, in a real-world
realm of a profession so full of practical considerations that art
can seem impossible, is the very essence of why architecture matters.
back to top
|
