“I Don’t Know what to call him,
But he’s mighty like a rose.

Lyrics by Frank Lebby Stanton
Music by Ethelbert Nevin

It was New Year’s Eve at Duke University Hospital emergency room in Durham, North Carolina, and my friend Perry was dying. Few places have the adrenaline rush and high anxiety of a hospital emergency room at night. There was nothing anyone could do for Perry but make him comfortable.

I stepped outside under the canopy where the ambulances unloaded.

A mother and her eight-year-old son offered me a place to sit beside them on the wooden bench underneath the canopy. Then she walked away to talk on her cell phone.

As I sat thinking of Perry, a tiny voice from behind me asked, “What did you get for Christmas?”

It might as well have been Elijah; I was so startled.

I told the little boy that my favorite Christmas present was a book about the oldest living things in the world. And what did he get, I asked? His favorite gift was a football.

It seemed as though Perry had dispatched an angel.

St Giles Presbyterian Church
A wild place

Harwell Hamilton Harris designed St Giles Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, late in his life; he was 80 when the sanctuary was finished in 1983. But his church on a wooded hillside was about youth.

“Every child begins the world again...,” Henry David Thoreau wrote. Harris grew up on a ranch in California and played in valleys carpeted in wildflowers. He discovered nature there.

He conceived of St. Giles as a family of shingle clad, one-story buildings forming a courtyard around a native piedmont forest. Thus, at the center of St. Giles was nature, the place which, for Harris, was always a sanctuary.

North Carolina’s piedmont forest is not a celebrated landscape. Most people think of it as leftover space between mountains and sea. Yet its ordinariness is what makes it unforgettable.

The places we remember from childhood are often ordinary -- a suburban tract with a stream nearby, for example, or a scrap of land in a city. But to a child, no place is ordinary.

Harris wanted his family of buildings to embrace a place in nature, a wild place at the heart of the church that he left for us to rediscover. Why? Because each of us has a wilderness in our heart, stowed away when we were children.

Robert Venturi’s Rome. Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby. (Oro Editions, $24.95)

Two architects with a passion for watercolors draw on their experience as Fellows of the American Academy in Rome to provide this illustrated commentary on iconic buildings in the Eternal City. The frame for their erudite text is the book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which Robert Venturi wrote in 1966 following his two year fellowship at the Academy. Fisher and Harby quote his text on nearly 30 Roman buildings–mostly Mannerist and Baroque–which he cited as exemplars of his theme. To these, they’ve added their own descriptive text.  Their watercolors–abstracted or richly detailed–add another layer to a slim volume that doubles as a guidebook and a lesson in architectural history.

Rome is a palimpsest of styles and accretions, built up over three millennia, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the celebrated landmarks and dense urban fabric. Every step brings a fresh vista and a glimpse of a sunlit building at the end of a narrow street. First-time visitors try to see all the famous sights in a week and exhaust themselves. A happy few–like the authors– enjoy a residency that allows them to look closely, one building or complex at a time, and puzzle out the details, as Venturi did.  All three architects are fascinated by Michelangelo, Bernini, and Borromini, who immersed themselves in the history and power politics of Rome and produced highly original variations on the conventional typologies of churches, palaces and public spaces. They put their stamp on the city and inspired successive generations of architects.

Fisher and Harby are the latest in a long line of perceptive observers, who succumb to the spell of the city, but provide a clear-sighted analysis of its parts. Their text, sketching in the history and context of each building,  conducts a dialogue with the ephemeral play of light and shade in their illustrations. And they understand the broader significance of a city that has survived barbarian attacks, from the Goths to the tour buses of today, without losing its soul.  As they write in their conclusion, “The story the stones and waters of Rome tell is about how we as individuals and societies create meaning and focus in our confusing times.”

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