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Donald Maurice Kreis
Skiing is an odd reason to build great architecture.
For one thing, the whole reason for the sport is being outdoors
-- so, any building associated with skiing is arguably irrelevant,
or, at least, ought to be invisible to the skier enjoying a day
on the slopes. For another, skiing tends to take place at resorts
-- locations like Killington, Stowe, or Waterville Valley -- and
resort buildings tend to elevate style over substance, architecturally
speaking. Great public architecture is usually for serious places
like museums, universities and libraries.
And yet every skier knows that a bad building
can ruin an otherwise good day on the mountain. Hot, overcrowded,
run-down lodges can make skiing feel like commuting into Boston
in rush hour -- with the added dimension of kids spilling their
hot chocolate on you, personal items lost in a sea of other people's
stuff, disgusting, run-down bathrooms and a general sense of gloom
that is so horribly incompatible with the pleasures of being outdoors
on a mountain in wintertime.
These realities are well known to Banwell Architects
of Lebanon, the Upper Valley's most venerable architecture firm
-- and one that has made something of a specialty out of designing
ski lodges. Banwell buildings are well known to skiers at places
like Suicide Six, Mount Sunapee, Haystack, and Loon Mountain. Now,
Banwell's work at the Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme is also well known
to the jurors who recognize quality design by making awards on behalf
of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Institute of Architects
(AIA).
Bestowing one of nine "Excellence in Architectural
Design" awards for 2002 on the skiway lodge, the AIA jury praised
the project as a "very humble, straightforward design"
that "didn't try to be too clever." The jurors described
the year-old base lodge as "well sited," "not overly
romantic for what it is," and "very functional."
In the context of a citation for architectural
excellence, these comments have an odd ring to them ñ as
if the jurors intended a kind of praise by faint damnation. But
the building's chief architect, C. Stuart White of the Banwell firm,
also prefers to catalogue the building's virtues in understated
terms.
"Nothing about this project is trendy,"
White cheerfully concedes. Rather, he is proud of replacing the
"ski lodge from hell" with one that makes a day at the
Skiway a more pleasant and hassle-free experience than it used to
be.
Consultants confirmed that the new building
should go up on the site of the 1950s structure it would replace,
at the foot of the Skiway's slopes on both sides of the road to
Lyme, but as White sat down at his drafting table he resolved to
work with the location rather than against it. At the old lodge,
one bought lift tickets at a booth left chillingly exposed to the
prevailing north wind. At the new lodge, the outdoor ticket area
is sheltered within a sort of dooryard created by the lodge's two
wings, which form a wide Vwith a southwestward orientation that
both screens the wind and offers stunning views of the sunny slopes
across the street.
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Stylistically, the lodge is an amorphous creation.
White sought to evoke the storied traditions of the school's outdoor
adventurers, so he placed the main entrance beneath a curved portico
that deliberately imitates a similar feature at the home of the
Dartmouth Outing Club in Hanover. Although the overall plan and
massing of the building have a contemporary feel to them, White
clothed the lodge in clapboard of Dartmouth green and added windows
and other details that are calculated to evoke mercantile buildings
of 100 years ago. In this sense, the flavor of the building is that
of the old-time railway stations at which passengers would alight
from the ski trains that first made New England slopes accessible
nearly a century ago.
Not unlike the designer of an efficient railway
terminal, White prides himself on having organized the lodge in
a manner that minimizes the hassle of transitioning between modes
of locomotion. Upon entering, one finds the basic necessities -
ski rentals and bathrooms - immediately and conveniently to the
left and right. In the middle is an ample lobby and an octagonal
atrium leading upstairs, both with ample room to accommodate the
awkward clompety-clomp of people walking in ski boots. The ski school
desk is just inside the front door, and lift ticket sales are just
outside, so it's easy to take care of these things on either the
way in or the way out. This highly logical program seems like a
no-brainer, but any skier can readily rattle off a list of mountains
with lodges that present jumble rather than order, with a seeming
random array of facilities liked by awkward and too-narrow passageways.
To prevent such a result here, White had to
carry on a noble struggle that is familiar to any architect who
ever designed a public building. Three separate committees of the
college collectively comprised White's client on the project; he
had to create a design that would satisfy the disparate priorities
of all three groups while staying within a strict budget. The Skiway
lodge cost less than $3 million, which is modest by the lavish standard
Dartmouth typically uses for academic buildings in Hanover. In such
circumstances, answering to three committees can make it easy to
design a camel rather than a horse.
Dartmouth added yet another level of complexity,
albeit a crucial one for responsible design. To guarantee that the
building would be energy efficient, they employed local consultant
Marc Rosenbaum, who is to energy efficiency what Willy Sutton was
to bank robbery. (Rosenbaum worked on Vermont Law School's three-year-old
Oakes Hall, which uses one eighth the thermal energy of a typical
academic building in the region, according to the University of
Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide.) But if energy efficiency is
allowed to run riot, grace and user-friendliness can tend to go
out the triple-glazed argon-filled window. "Wait a minute,"
White found himself insisting from time to time. "There are
other things than getting the last BTU out of this sucker."
According to White, making this or any building
serve the needs of its users and owners is what makes a project
like this qualify as architecture, as opposed to mere construction.
But, he adds, to take the next step and create something that can
be characterized as an architectural success, the design "must
also have that transcendent quality that goes beyond function and
makes humans happy, excited, inspired to be in that space and to
look forward to returning to it."
The Skiway Lodge has this quality. Oddly, the
award jurors missed it - or at least they didn't mention it.
To clomp up the stairs of the lodge, through
the skylit octagonal atrium, and to arrive on the dining and lounging
area that comprises the second floor is to experience happiness,
excitement and inspiration, as a result of the forest of eastern
white pine that greets the visitor upon arrival. For this White
credits a key collaborator from outside his firm.
Timber framing is enjoying a renaissance throughout
the Upper Valley, reports Ed Levin of Paradigm Builders in Hanover.
But the timber framing Levin was able to design and construct for
the Skiway lodge is an especially satisfying example of this ancient
way of holding up a building. Timber framing embodies the virtue
of simplicity, and gives instinctive pleasure to all who enjoy seeing
natural materials used in a natural way. It just feels right to
be able to see that big pieces of wood, which once held up a mighty
pine tree, now support the roof overhead. To stand at one end of
the second floor of the Skiway lodge is to see a veritable forest
of pine, an effect that is accentuated by the aforementioned bent
plan that breaks the symmetry and grid of the framing.
The individual trees are as pleasing as the
forest. You don't need to know that the horizontal members are called
girts, that girts are built of individual timbers called bents,
that the central post connecting the peak of the rafters with the
central bent is a king post, that two diagonal struts reaching upward
from each King Post only appear to be decorative (since they perform
the important function of relieving the compressive force on the
post), and that the queen posts, not the king posts, actually reach
the ground to support the central bent, leaving the His Highness
suspended in space. But the richness of this vocabulary testifies
to the history, tradition and splendor of timber framing.
Asked what makes this particular framing design
beautiful and Levin quickly but somewhat apologetically utters the
phrase "sacred geometry." His ambivalence grows out of
his commitment to sound engineering principles of the sort that
guarantee his buildings won't collapse; Levin does not want to sound
too new age. But he is hardly alone in thinking that certain mathematical
relationships ñ the so-called "golden section,"
roughly the relationship of a person's height to the horizontal
reach of a person's arms, being the most famous example - are inherently
right and beautiful when they occur in the built world. Jonathan
Hale's recent and popular book, The Old Way of Seeing, describes
these mathematical relationships at length and complains that most
current architecture is ugly because it ignores these principles.
"You can't just go slapping golden rectangles
everywhere, it just doesn't work," Levin explains. Here, designing
a framing pattern with rectangles expressing the Golden Section
and other such relationships was difficult because he essentially
had to design a structure within dimensions specified for him by
the architects at Banwell. The result is a distinctive angular shape
formed by the juxtaposition of the rafters and diagonal struts,
bisected by the king post. "I don't know what it is,"
Levin says. "It's a kind of strange figure . . . it leads the
eye onward [and] there's a kind of tension in it, like you're trying
to close a compass." For Levin, it almost connotes the mysticism
of masonic imagery, itself designed to evoke ancient Egypt. The
important thing, though, is that the intriguing pattern invites
contemplation at a time when lesser ski lodges would simply facilitate
snarfing a burger between runs.
Both Levin and White concede that their joint
Skiway effort falls short of perfection. Only the building's second
floor is timber-framed; the first floor is made of steel and, structurally,
is no more distinctive than big stores on Route 10 in West Lebanon.
Timber meets steel awkwardly here; to the regret of architect and
timber-framer it was necessary to reinforce the outer walls with
steel beams. This steel is hidden behind the drywall, but elsewhere
- particularly outside, under and around the portico - one sees
details that reflect cost-cutting. As a result, the cement, steel
and stone of the portico detract jarringly from the satisfying clapboard
and timber of the lodge's upper story. The food service area itself
looks as if a glorified hot dog stand had been plunked in the middle
of the pine forest. And a big, beautiful granite fireplace in the
dining area is unusable because it fills the room with smoke, although
White hopes to find a fix.
"I am proud of the Skiway and not inclined
to apologize for it on stylistic grounds," says White, whose
1974 home in Norwich, an unmistakably contemporary building in the
tradition of White's hero Louis Kahn of Phillips Exeter Library
fame, has won an AIA award as one of the best Vermont buildings
of the last half of the 20th Century. "To date at least [the
Skiway Lodge] has been enthusiastically received . . . but I have
no illusions either about its importance relative to being on 'the
cutting edge' of architecture . . . [I'm] not sure it's worth so
much ink."
This endearing humility sets White apart from
the famous, non-local architects that Dartmouth typically hires
to design campus buildings. The resulting architecture is very much
worth the ink used to describe why it succeeds. Let the museums
and the libraries define the cutting edge. At the Skiway, the winter
sports enthusiasts will be content to enjoy the forest outside as
well as the forest inside.
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