|
by Donald Maurice Kreis
Glenn Murcutt, whose 2002 Pritzker
Prize makes him architecture's equivalent of a Nobel laureate, invents
buildings that are beautiful because they respond to the landscape
around them, harmonious because they are respectful of the local
design traditions, innovative because they are created in the spirit
of the giants of modern architecture, and virtuous because they
are crafted with energy efficiency firmly in mind. Murcutt works
by himself, far from the intellectual pretensions of the big architecture
schools and famous firms, and in that sense his design sensibility
is grassroots. In a perfect world, he'd be from Vermont or New Hampshire
because the imperatives that make his architecture worthy of honors
are so at home in northern New England.
But our world is imperfect.
Glenn Murcutt lives and works in Australia.
If our region ever produces
an indigenous architecture to rival Murcutt's, it could well come
from a place very much like the Tunbridge home and studio of Alisa
Dworsky and Danny Sagan. They share most if not all of Murcutt’s
convictions, about building with a sense of environmental responsibility
as well as beauty, but their inspiration is not the Australian outback
but the rocky green hillsides of Vermont with their challenging
four-season climate. They call their approach, with a phrase-maker’s
tongue held in the cheek of skepticism about the reduction of complexity
and artistry to glib phrases, "rustic tech."
The rustic and the tech,
as well as a playful respect for the traditions of rural New England
design, are on display at the Tunbridge home that Sagan and Dworsky
built for themselves after meeting at Yale’s architecture school,
marrying and moving to Vermont a decade ago to found their design-build
company, Terra Firma. Built into its hillside setting, the plan
of the house is simple – the cruciform intersection of what
looks like a traditional clapboard farmhouse (or even a small schoolhouse)
painted yellow and sporting an appropriately show-shedding pitched
roof with a perpendicularly aligned tower module, clad in corrugated
metal, that owes much to the indigenous monitor barn designs and
perhaps even a little to talismanic urban industrial forms like
grain elevators or factories.
Welcoming a visitor to
this remarkable structure, home to their business as well as their
family, which includes three-year-old Leah Sagan-Dworsky, Sagan
launches into an enthusiastic disquisition on the building’s
energy efficient properties. "The long axis of the house is
along the east-west," he explains, with the south side of the
house is open to the sun. "The north side has the least amount
of openings. In plan the bathrooms and the kitchen are located to
the north. Also closets and storage."
"There are deciduous
trees to the south that help shade the building and patio in the
summer," he continues. "The winter sun shines through
the branches into thehouse. The winter sun also allows for us to
sit on the patio in winter."
According to Sagan, the
house’s tower-like section, which contains the master bedroom
at its summit, "allows for us to heat with one wood stove.
The stairs are staggered so that the heated air must meander through
the space heating the three floors rather evenly. This vertical
height also allows for passive cooling in the summer. The windows
at the top of the tower exhaust the warm air ,while cooler air from
below flows in through the lower windows. In a warm moist climate
, like summer in Vermont, you want to move the air." He points
out that the house’s walls and windows are super-insulated,
while hidden in a closet is a heat recovery system that allows outgoing
air to warm the incoming air before being vented outside.
Dworsky, on the other
hand, welcomes a visitor by talking about the difference between
buildings that have a striking form and architecture that moves
the visitor with the splendor and "buildings that knock you
over with their interior." She mentions the work of Brunelleschi,
the great architect of Renaissance Florence.
And from this contrast
– Sagan talking about the "R" value of the insulation,
Dworsky rhapsodizing about the renaissance – one could easily
leap to the conclusion that Sagan is the technician and Dworsky
is the artist. One could even be forgiven for doing so – after
all, Dworsky IS an accomplished visual artist. Her one-woman show
opens on May 31 at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon. Her recent installation,
"Luminous Fields: Longitude in Time," brought waves of
blue and green roadside reflectors, 1,500 in all, to Vermont’s
Route 4 near Castleton. It was a beautiful shock to the nighttime
motorist, and so unprecedented that some people thought the state’s
Agency of Transportation was crazy for funding it. But when it comes
to architecture, Dworsky does not play artist to her husband's building
science.
Husband and wife teams
have become something of a recognized phenomenon in American architecture.
There’s Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, whose recently opened
American Museum of Folk Art is New York City’s best new art
museum since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim. Denise Scott
Brown and Robert Venturi are architecture’s perennial power
couple, even if their Berry Library annoys many denizens of Dartmouth.
Atlanta has Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin, who received a national
honor award from the American Institute of Architects in 1999 for
their Nomentana Residence in Maine. And this year’s "Record
Houses," in which Architectural Record magazine recognizes
the year’s best residential designs, includes work by Vancouver’s
John and Patricia Patkau as well as two houses by Brigitte Shim
and Harold Sutcliffe of Toronto.
All this spousally linked
professional achievement offers two lessons about architecture,
both of which emphatically apply to Sagan and Dworsky. First, the
kind of intense collaboration that can be achieved by people who
are more than just professional partners is a paradigm for excellence
that rivals the notion of a Glenn Murcutt or a Frank Lloyd Wright
or a Howard Roark (as in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead)
working in idealistic isolation. Second, in proof of the Buddhist
maxim that everything contains its opposite, couples who design
together are constantly switching roles – even where, as here,
one has fame as an artist and the other can quote chapter and verse
with regard to the "R value" of the insulation in every
wall and window of their buildings.
"Alisa worked with
the plumber and the electrician," Sagan readily confesses with
regard to the construction of their home, the first part of which
the occupied in late 1994. She jokes that she attracted her husband
at Yale because they met in the summertime, she had been working
on building projects and therefore "looked buff and tan."
Conversely, it is Sagan
who describes the values that informed the design of the master
bedroom, which is small and bathed in light from three sides, as
befits its garrett-like location atop the building's corrugated
metal tower. "We wanted this room to be a nice place to be
when you're sick in bed," he explains. That's the sort of thinking
that Frank Lloyd Wright left to his mother, or his several wives.
Because their professional
and family lives are already so seamlessly connected, most husband-wife
design teams at least make sure they work and live in separate places.
The Terra Firma design studio occupied prime real estate right in
the Dworsky-Sagan home (at least until their artistic empire has
sufficiently grown to allow them to build a separate studio building
nearby). Thus, explains Sagan, "we had to develop systems and
rules." For example, there's the requirement of "no talking
about work after 8."
"I don't think we
follow that rule," Dworsky laughs.
All rules, of course,
tend to be honored in the breach, but these design collaborators
do have a formula that allows for creative success as well as domestic
tranquility. At the beginning of a design project, both Sagan and
Dworsky sit silently at their design tables – they used to
be back-to-back, but they've learned that some physical separation
is felicitous – and draw for two or three days without so much
as a word about the project to each other. (They do discuss other
things, however; their loquacious toddler sees to that.)
Then the couple holds
what Dworsky describes as a "formal pin-up," where each
of them affixes their drawings to a wall and they critique each
other, an exercise familiar to any architecture student. Sagan stresses
that you don't have to be married to collaborate this way; indeed,
he's taught this process to his students at the Yestermorrow Design-Build
School in Warren, where he is an adjunct.
The house that has arisen
out of this process for their own enjoyment in Tunbridge is a fine
example of rustic tech. Somehow the building manages to be modest
(in its combination of familiar forms, its cozy relationship to
its setting, and its creation of a south-facing dooryard, unconsciously
familiar to everyone in the area because this is precisely what
the traditional New England connected farmhouse does) bold –
because the fenestration shows a sense of artistry and proportion
that most home builders neglect, because the design reflects a love
of great materials (like the slate siding that Dworsky and Sagan
have used on the house's lower level, which has a tactile appeal
not unlike the titanium cladding of Frank Gehry's fabled Guggenheim
Annex in Spain) – and laudably practical.
Not only is the place
a paradigm of energy efficiency, not only is it designed flexibly
to allow spaces to change uses as the owners' needs change over
the years, but the house reflects a domestic need that is only remarkable
because it's so widely ignored: storage space! Bookshelves line
the main hallway; Sagan explains that they, like most homeowners,
love to collect books and memorabilia but find that devoting a whole
room to a library would consume too much space and money. An entire
wall in the downstairs living room is taken up by a set of custom-designed
cabinets, one of which hides the family TV – and thus young
Leah can grow up in a TV nation without her family's living room
wasting space on the typical television-shrine.
Although Sagan and Dworsky
have done other residential projects in Vermont and New Hampshire
(and have contributed to the design of the emerging restoration
of the Tip-Top Bakery building in White River Junction), they are
especially proud of their involvement with Prospect, Colorado, where
one of their houses has been built and another is in design. Prospect
is an effort by developer Kiki Wallace and planner Mark Sofield
to take the pedestrian and community-friendly principles of New
Urbanism – think Seaside in Florida, the cozy neighborhood
setting for The Truman Show – and replace the New Urbanists'
hostility to modern architecture with a penchant for innovative
house design. "We think that new architecture and New Urbanism
is a marvelous solution to sprawl," Sagan explains.
The first of their Prospect
houses is a fanciful juxtaposition of shapes, angles and different
kinds of cladding, somewhat more bold in form than their Vermont
work as befits its more adventurous context. Yet the house is small
and energy efficient, proving that good and innovative architecture
need not be lavish and extravagant.
Just as important, from
the standpoint of Rustic Tech, is the very fact that Dworsky and
Sagan actively cultivate the process of collaborating, through computer
technology, with designers and clients thousands of miles from Tunbridge.
This goes to the heart of their view of "rustic tech"
– the notion that one need not be part of a huge firm in a
metropolis to be designing great buildings.
It is precisely thus with
Glenn Murcutt in Australia, so resolute in his determination work
on his own. As people who fled the megalopolis for Vermont, Dworsky
and Sagan both use the word "romantic" to describe the
impulse, Dworsky noting that it is indistinguishable from what took
Thoreau to Walden Pond. Their struggle is to keep romanticism from
degenerating into false nostalgia, as in the penchant for so many
new homes and other buildings in New England to evoke bygone times
that were almost certainly not as good as our Norman Rockwell fantasies
suggest. Instead, Sagan and Dworsky want to innovate – to create
a new look, a new respect for environmentally responsible design,
that the world can associate with this region and this time.
"One can be romantic
about Vermont and make an architecture that's fresh – you can,"
insists Sagan. And because they're still early in their careers
– Dworsky is 37 and her husband is 38 – they have time
to catch up to the 66-year-old Murcutt and bring the Pritzker Prize
to New England where it belongs.
back to top
|
