In about two weeks, Oro Editions will release North Carolina architect Frank Harmon’s new book, ‘Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See.’ It’s a book of 64 drawings selected from the author’s website of the same name. Today, we reach back into the A+A archives for a 2011 post that Harmon wrote about one of the South’s most iconic plantations. Rich in layered observations, the post’s drawings are equally potent:

I went to see Oak Alley plantation in St James Parish, Louisiana, because of its shadows. An architect friend told me that the pattern of light and shade cast by its double row of 300-year-old live oak trees was unforgettable. The Mississippi River flows past one end of the alley of trees, which is about the length of two football fields. At the other end stands the plantation house, three stories high and wrapped in dusky pink columns that appear like trees of stone surmounted by foliage and dappled in shadow.

Few buildings are as evocative of the Deep South as the pillared mansion preceded by an alley of live oak trees. These ante bellum houses represent a gracious way of life, of languid afternoons on shaded porches, of mint juleps and magnolias, of a world of well-being.

Yet behind Oak Alley’s columns lie some practical strategies for coping with long, hot summers, such as porches that shade the mansion’s rooms, and the symmetry of spaces that allowed the family to inhabit rooms on the east side in summer to escape the afternoon sun, and to live in west-facing rooms in winter when the sun’s heat was welcome. Tall ceilings allowed hot air to circulate upward, and the legendary oak trees, planted 100 years before the mansion was built, shade the house and help steer the breeze through the house’s tall windows.

Today, Oak Alley’s plantation house is a flourishing events center where visitors arrive for business retreats, hold reunions, dine at sorority luncheons, and shop at crafts fairs. And then there are the weddings: Marriage ceremonies are as common at Oak Alley as magnolia blossoms, as are the preceding bridal showers, catered luncheons, engagement parties, bridal photographs and, later, anniversary dinners. Think Gone With the Wind that you can rent. Columns, trees and the river vista create a perfect wedding backdrop, suggesting a life of Southern charm, beauty and perfection.

It is easy to idealize a place as beautiful as Oak Alley, and the lives of the people who lived there. Perhaps our sense of a lost world is part of its fascination.

Yet the irony of Oak Alley is that life there was very different than we imagine.

Built in 1841 by a Creole planter for his bride, it suffered a series of misfortunes. First, the bride hated the remoteness of the house and refused to live there, preferring the social life of New Orleans. And of course, the entire enterprise was founded on human bondage.

Also, the man who built it died of pneumonia after living there only seven years. His wife died two years later. Indeed many of its inhabitants lived short lives as a result of malaria, cholera and yellow fever. In fact, one of the 20 rooms was a mourning room to shelter the deceased prior to burial.

After the Civil War, the children who inherited Oak Alley were forced to sell it at auction for a pittance. The house stayed empty for decades until it was restored in the 1920s to begin its present life as a wedding backdrop and tourist attraction — just in time for Margaret Mitchell’s epochal Southern novel “Gone With The Wind.”

One might say that Oak Alley has a far happier life today than the life that originally took place there – a life we have romanticized over time.

Twenty-eight columns surround the house just as there are 28 trees that form the alley. Trees and columns cast shadows that vary daily and seasonally, much like a sundial. There is something timeless about this uniquely American dream house and its enchanted grove of trees.

In London recently, another enchanted grove of trees adorned the great stone nave of Westminster Abbey for Kate Middleton’s and Prince William’s royal wedding. Elizabeth Sinclair, the wife of the recently disgraced Dominique Strauss Kahn, wrote of the royal wedding, “I can understand those who didn’t want to miss a crumb. As if, quite simply, we were children who, before going to sleep want a tale, a story with a princess and a dream, because real life catches up with you soon enough.”

Late on the May afternoon when I visited Oak Alley, one wedding was in progress while another was queuing up — pretty girls in gowns laughing, young men in formal wear chafing each other. Hopes for the future contrasted with a more troubling reality at the other end of the alley, where the levee held back the Mississippi River, now surging at a level higher than the roof of the plantation house. Perhaps its witness to slavery, plague, war, and flood makes the beauty of Oak Alley more poignant.

As evening fell and the wedding candles were lit, none of that seemed to matter. We were bathed in the shadow of romantic art.

– Frank Harmon, FAIA

#363 An Erickson-Massey masterpiece

September 02nd, 2018

Smith House II

by Michael Prokopow, with photography by Michael Perlmutter and foreword by Douglas Coupland

Novato, California: ORO Editions, 2018.

$24.95 (U.S.)  /  9781940743387

Reviewed by Harold Kalman

UBC SALA/West Coast Modern House Series

California musician and publisher Gordon Goff launched ORO editions in 2006 as a vehicle for producing “bespoke publications” on architecture, art, and design.

The small and handsome book under review is the most recent title in ORO’s UBC SALA / West Coast Modern House Series, “SALA” being an acronym for UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The series is edited by Sherry McKay and Leslie Van Duzer, who both teach at SALA.

“Smith House II” is archispeak for the second residence that architect Arthur Erickson created for artists Gordon and Marion Smith. Designed in 1963 for a challenging waterfront site near Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver, the house was completed three years later.

The remarkable cedar-and-glass structure blurs the lines between house and landscape. It grows upward as a “square spiral,” as Erickson called it, around an open central courtyard, taking the West Coast post-and-beam manner to a new and higher level.

Prokopow properly credits Erickson’s integration of Japanese sources and the American minimalism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Perhaps the author overstates these debts when he writes that the house “constituted a visionary recasting of modernist forms where the functional and philosophical traditions of historical Japanese princely and domestic architecture predominated” (p. 16). To this observer, these borrowings take a secondary role behind the architect’s own skilled command of form, space, and light. The house is a masterpiece of our time and a gem in the heavy crown of an extraordinary designer.

The editors’ opening notes reveal Prokopow’s friendships with Erickson and the Smiths, which brings into question his ability to consider the subject objectively. More problematically, the architect is identified throughout as Arthur Erickson, whereas the house was a product of the fertile partnership of Erickson / Massey.

The book cites the firm twice, but nevertheless overlooks Geoff Massey and his contributions. It was Massey who kept Erickson grounded during his formative years, from around 1963, when they jointly entered the competition for Simon Fraser University and designed the Smith House, until 1972, when the partnership dissolved. The steady-handed Massey graciously retreated into the background as the volatile Erickson was showered with praise.

Readers will hope that the books in the series will collectively define their subject, the West Coast Modern house. The term is used widely and variably in the literature. However, this may not come to be. The editors curiously duck the challenge and declare that “Perlmutter’s images lay bare the truth that the so-called ‘West Coast Modern’ style is indeterminate indeed” (p. 7).

The book is small (21 x 14.5 cm) and thin. Its 80 pages include a 15-page “essay,” of which 9 pages are text, with another 32 pages of first-rate colour photographs by Michael Perlmutter, 10 pages of newly-made and austere line drawings, a short foreword by Douglas Coupland, front matter, endnotes, and a chronology. To its credit, it reproduces a pair of classic photos of the house, one each by Selwyn Pullan and John Fulker (pp. 17, 22-23).

Smith House II certainly deserves celebration in a monograph. The diminutive size of this volume and the previous titles in the series may well carve out a niche for small-scale, budget-priced handbooks in a market dominated by luxury tomes. Books-on-a-budget notwithstanding, this title required fundraising support, as presumably did previous volumes.

A half-dozen individuals and organizations are identified as having backed the present volume. This raises the troublesome question of the sustainability of an architectural press with Canadian connections, and that in turn reflects the relatively low value that our society places on architects and architecture. This reviewer can only hope that the publishing industry and its marketers act boldly and find ways to interest the general public in looking at, and reading about, the buildings and communities that surround and define us all.

Source

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Over the past four years, many of you have asked me when I was going to turn “Native Places” into a book. Well, I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally done just that -- with the help of my publisher, Gordon Goff, of ORO Publications and graphic designer AnLe Banh.

I’ve chosen 64 essays and sketches from four years of posts on NativePlaces.org to include in a full-color book entitled Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See. The release date is September 15th.*
I’ll continue to post a new “Native Places” online every other Wednesday and make sure those posts appear in your inboxes that morning. But if you prefer print to digital as much as I do, here’s a version of Native Places that you can hold in your hand.

For more information, please visit nativeplacesthebook.com.

Pre-orders from now through September 15th are available exclusively at Quail Ridge Books.

*Book Signing at Quail Ridge Books September 15

I’m going to celebrate the official release of Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See by presenting an illustrated talk then signing copies of the book on Saturday, September 15, beginning at 4 p.m. in Quail Ridge Books in North Hills, 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh NC 27609 (919.828.1588).
Come by if you can. I’ll be glad to see you