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by Donald Maurice Kreis
Bob Dylan was once so taken with a house he saw in
The New York Times Magazine that he decided to write a fan letter
to its designer, a 31-year-old architect who had just begun to make
a name for himself. The year was 1972, Dylan was already well into
superstardom, and the "earth-sheltered" architecture he
found himself admiring was about to grow wildly fashionable as the
energy crisis of the 1970s made the notion of living buried in the
ground seem terribly practical.
The architect -- Don Metz of Lyme -- told Dylan to
get lost. He has no patience for celebrities who figured him to
be a kind of hippie Frank Lloyd Wright.
Metz, who at 59 is the Upper Valley's most successful
architect if one measures success by the sheer numbers of projects
completed, has built a career around confounding expectations. His
earth-sheltered designs placed him on the runway to architectural
fame as a faithful yet innovative exponent of lean and stark modernism.
Not only did the Times notice, but so did Architectural Record magazine,
which named two Metz designs as "Record Houses," the residential
equivalent of a Grammy Award. Then Metz seemingly repudiated modernism
and began designing buildings in what architectural historians would
call "the styles" -- Shingle Style, Stick Style, Greek
Revival, anything that looks like great buildings of the past from
any era. And if that were not enough to confound and annoy those
who regard historicism as a kind of architectural apostasy, on January
1, 1985 Metz walked away his drafting table altogether and spent
the next six months writing a successful novel, the critically acclaimed
Catamount Bridge.
Another published novel, King of the Mountain,
followed. Metz says he has another complete one "in the drawer"
and still another in process. Meantime, his architectural practice
flourishes and, as he sits in the sunny studio he shares with his
friend and fellow architect Geoff Thornton, Metz pores over his
hundreds of designs stuffed into filing cabinets and reminisces
about his remarkable professional journey.
"I was doing much more radical stuff when I was
25," he admits. "But I don't think I was listening to
the client as well. I think at 25 I thought of architecture as an
abstract idea -- that somehow the building got to be what it was
despite the client or despite the site or despite the budget. That's
not the way it works now for me."
This is a cogent explanation of Metz's current architectural
muse. In middle age, Metz has discovered what Boston architect Jonathan
Hale calls "The Old Way of Seeing" in his 1994 book of
the same name. "Many of our most talented designers have no
influence beyond a small coterie of designers," Hale points
out and, indeed, the Museum of Modern Art's recent exhibit on contemporary
houses prompted the museum's architectural curator to sing the praises
of so-called Mobius houses and other residential designs that have
more to do with mathematical theories than actual living. "Each
building need not look like nothing else every built," Hale
argues. "The biggest mistake designers make in our time is
to think that design is outside of everyday, normal life. Even greatness
is not outside of daily life."
Thus, while the latest Record Houses defy gravity
and convention, Metz is happy to ignore the magazine editors and
show off three recent, local house projects that he says have made
their owners supremely happy. None resembles the other in the slightest,
and at least two are very evocative of the past: One pays homage
to the Craftsman Style of the early 1900s, but with a kind of sparseness
and simplicity that almost has Shaker overtones. Another evokes
the lush Shingle Style of the late 19th Century, with its long sloping
roof and eclectic window arrangements. A third, which Metz fondly
refers to as "Big Pink," shows what happens when the palette
of the desert southwest meets the streamlined look of 1930s Art
Moderne. Clad in desert rose stucco, accented with a purple pergola,
this luxurious residence is every bit the abstract "machine
for living" that modernist icon Le Corbusier advocated in the
1960s. In this case, the machine might well be a luxury liner, which
the house vaguely resembles. But it also has shades of the Spanish
colonial mission buildings of Mexico and California. The whole thing
is unabashedly, one could almost say gloriously, out of place on
an Etna hillside."I don't have a signature style," Metz
explains. "The reason is that I feel strongly that the client
gets to participate. The client bats last. I need the client to
love that building." People ask architects to design their
homes "because they think the architect will show them something
about themselves."
Here Metz begins to sound like a novelist. It is,
after all, the task of the fiction writer to reveal something about
the human character that had previously remained unexplored or unarticulated.
Considered in that light, the connection between Metz the architect
and Metz the novelist starts to become apparent.
Catamount Bridge, Metz's most successful
novel to date, is not about architecture. Rather, it is a story
of two twin brothers' divergent reactions to the prospect of being
drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam during the 1960s. The family
of whom Metz writes consists of working class farmers and construction
laborers from the Upper Valley, a far cry from Metz's own upbringing
in Pennsylvania, the son of a businessman and educated first at
an Episcopal private school and then at Yale. Eschewing the "write
what you know" ethic of the writing professors who would have
Metz penning variations on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Metz creates
characters and situations in much the same spirit he creates buildings.
"That's what imagination is for. I can convince you that I
know a lot about Death Valley," the setting of an unpublished
novel and also a far cry from his real life, says Metz, or write
realistically about the horrors of combat even though he has never
been to battle. He designed a Greek Revival home for a state legislator
although he has never worshipped Athena and he designed a speech,
as it might have been spoken by a grandfather to his long-deceased
wife in the comfort of his barn, about the death of a grandson in
a senseless war.
An astute reader of Catamount Bridge might well guess
that its author is an architect. The title refers to Metz's fictionalized
version of the Orford-Fairlee Bridge. A pivotal scene takes place
there. Although it does not necessarily require a novelist with
an designer's eye to be so drawn to this beautiful arched span,
only an architect or maybe an engineer would place the scene inside
one of the steel arches. One of the twin protagonists has a nighttime
assignation of sorts inside the superstructure, at the very apex
of the arch, with the other twin's wife. The two characters who
ascend there ultimately have a very innocent interlude, despite
their attraction to one another, in a spot that turns out to be
unexpectedly cozy, even womb-like in the darkness. A literary critic
would note the parallel between the fictional events and the fictionalized
setting, a place of unexpected safety and repose in what one would
suppose to be a dangerous place to hang out indeed. An architecture
critic would say that Don Metz has a refined ability to imagine
architectural possibilities. It turns out Metz has never been inside
the Orford-Fairlee Bridge, although he does know about the door
that would give one such access.
Metz's detractors see a dilettante and an architectural
innovator who lost his nerve, but these critics mistake a restless
spirit for a wreckless or fickle one. A consistent theme of Metz's
career is the quest for the right physical setting to solve the
problems of the people who come to him, whether they are fictional
characters or clients. Reminiscing back to 1971, Metz recalls that
he got into designing earth-sheltered homes not because he had energy
efficiency in mind or because he was sensitive to emerging trends
but "because I had a site that was a beautiful alpine pasture
and I hated the idea of besmirching the site with a building. And
then, all of a sudden, I was a bigshot."
The craze may have reached its zenith in late 1979;
that year's November issue of the long-defunct Solar Age magazine
carries a Metz design on its cover that looks for all the world
like a pleasant plot of suburban lawn, but bizarrely littered with
a chimney, a couple of skylights and two vents. Images like that
are what prompt survivalists to find their way to Metz even now.
They get the same treatment that Dylan did.
Linda and Rick Roesch, on the other hand, marched
Metz to the top of their snow-covered hillside plot in Etna and
posed a request that, to some, would seem as preposterous as a survivalist's
delusion: Could Metz create something there that would evoke the
California of her youth, evoke the Art Moderne, and be bold enough
to remind Rick Roesch, a South Dakotan by birth, of Mount Rushmore?
"He paused for a moment," Linda Roesch recalls, "and
then he said: Can do." This, she adds, is precisely why they
chose Metz as their designer and not other architects they interviewed,
whose muses were more contextual and cautious.
According to architect Pi Smith, who worked for Metz
prior to founding her own firm of Smith and Vansant in Norwich,
a trained eye who has looked at lots of Metz houses can discern
certain favorite architectural gestures ñ a particular way
of treating roof lines, a fondness for covered porches linking garage
and main house. But she agrees that Metz's "playfulness about
space," a "sculptural sensibility" about buildings
and the fact that he is "open to having adventures" are
what she finds inspiring in her former boss, even if he gets to
bring Mount Rushmore to Etna while she is busy with the more prosaic
task of persuading folks in Woodstock to restore their courthouse
according to her firm's historically and contextually correct design.
Given the hundreds of buildings Metz has created,
and the fact that many are in the Upper Valley, if you see a house
in the area that looks as if it was designed by someone with some
sensitivity to proportion and beauty, there is a good chance it
is the work of this architect-novelist. He is not the region's only
architect of stature, but he is surely its most varied and, in that
sense, its most accomplished. He embodies something expressed at
a recent panel discussion on architecture by Louise Hamlin, chair
of the Dartmouth College art department, quoting the great Italian
architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978): "The old builder, knew
there were critical points, which have to be worked on more than
others . . . . the cornice, window, plinth, steps the same places
as always concerned builders in the past. The problems involved
are the same as ever; only the answer changes."
Or, to put much the same thought in the mind of Leon
Woodard, the wizened grandfather of Catamount Bridge, speaking of
human affairs generally: "We see it going around and around,
like crops and livestock, seasons, moon. No stopping it. It's Nature,
how it comes up, new, the same but different, teasing us to keep
on watching, always changing, always the same, starting, ending,
starting, ending."
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