August 2011

I bumped into a friend recently at a coffee shop who asked, “Did you recognize me waving at you from my car” last week? I had to admit I didn’t recognize her or her car. But thinking about it later, I remembered a remark by the social critic Lewis Mumford, who suggested that it’s hard to have a conversation with someone when you’re traveling more than three miles an hour.

I had a similar thought last summer when I was looking out the window of a friend’s house in Provence in the South of France. In the distance, two ancient villages clung to the hillside a few kilometers apart, connected by a modern road where tiny cars flitted by like brightly colored bugs. Once the ” province” of Rome, Provence is now a high tech center of European research and development centered in the vicinity of Aix en Provence. The landscape I saw from the window — olive trees, wheat fields, and vineyards surrounding villages built of stone and tile –  has changed very little since the time of the ancient Romans. Yet the old farms and vineyards are giving way to vacation homes and superstores. Some of the farmers have converted their farms into equestrian centers, where the sons and daughters of European scientists can ride horses on weekends. I saw a horse and rider that afternoon, slowly cantering along a trail between the two villages. Both seemed perfectly at ease in the landscape.

Why did the gait of the horse and rider seem so natural in the landscape while the speeding cars did not? I was startled by the contrast. The Provencal landscape was originally scaled to the speed of a horse. For over two thousand years, people could travel no faster than a horse could gallop. Distances between villages were based on what a horse or a human could walk in an hour or two. Fields were sized according to what a horse and plow could cover in a day. That is why the young woman riding the horse in the distance fit so comfortably in the landscape, whereas the red and blue cars zipping along the road seemed independent of this particular, ancient landscape.

We can find similar, slower landscapes in this country. One of the most beautiful roads in America, for example, is the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through the Appalachian Mountains. The speed limit on the parkway is 45 mph. Drive faster and you miss the views (and risk a speeding ticket) because the designers of the parkway shaped the road for a slower pace.

And in rural parts of North Carolina where roads are small, it’s possible to see the face of a farmer coming towards you in his truck because you are both driving slowly. As often as not he will wave. (Imagine doing that on an interstate highway or a six-lane suburban throughway.) In the two hundred or so years before automobiles came to North Carolina, our counties were sized based on the distance a farmer could travel on horseback in a day to pay his taxes at the county courthouse or sell his crops at market.

Throughout North Carolina, you also can find remnants of pre-automobile culture: country stores, now usually shuttered, spaced every few miles within walking distance of farmsteads; and country churches like Olive Chapel and Mount Pisgah Church, where steeple bells rang at a quarter to eleven on Sunday morning to remind folks they had 15 minutes to walk to service. High-speed roads have liberated these older landscapes. People no longer walk to the store or to church. And on the whole, this is better. But as my friend Jim Schlosser, who writes about architecture for the Greensboro Daily News, observed, architecture began to go downhill with the construction of the Interstate highway system. Since people no longer slowed down to drive through cities, architects designed buildings to be viewed at 65 miles per hour, with a consequent loss of scale, texture, and detail.

So as we cruise along our wide highways, it’s good to remember that, as a civilization, we have been walking and riding horses far longer than we have been riding in cars. Perhaps some of our discomfort with modern settlements is due to the fact they are sized for the speed of cars and not for the pace of humans. And certainly it’s hard to recognize a friend passing by in her car.

At museums and visitors centers, less interpretation is more.

One day in the 1970s, I wandered into the rare documents room at the British Museum, where cloth-shrouded glass cases held poems, speeches and letters written by famous people. You could pull back a cloth, read the document, and

North Bridge at Concord by Frank Harmon

cover it up again. When I pulled back one of the cloths, I caught my breath: Before me was the Magna Carta. How amazing, I thought, to find the most important document in British history displayed so diffidently, in a glass case with a curtain over it. I was thrilled.

In America, we handle our history differently. The Declaration of Independence, for example, is encased in bulletproof glass in a gold-plated, titanium frame filled with argon gas. The case is lowered each night into a crypt beneath the National. Archive. The display is so overpowering that it is possible to feel that the container is more important than the founding document inside. It makes me feel as if I am being told of its importance rather than invited to discover it. Yet history is best discovered by each of us, just as democracy is best preserved as a personal responsibility.

I had another epiphany recently when I visited the North Bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, where the first battle of the American War of Independence took place. Now preserved as part of the Minute Man National Historical Park, the Bridge at Concord is a simple wooden structure spanning a stream about fifty feet wide. At each end of the bridge stand two stone monuments, one erected by the Americans, one by the British, many years after the battle. There is no visitors center nearby, no auditorium with a twenty-minute film, no interactive video recreating the battle, and certainly no titanium cases containing artifacts in argon. Instead, in a clearing next to the bridge, visitors sit in a small semicircle of wooden benches. A park ranger stands and tells how the British army, marching out from Boston to intimidate the colonists, approached the bridge and was met by a volunteer group of Minutemen.

The effect of his story is compelling. We can see the short distance between the two groups of men, who, muskets drawn, faced death that morning. We can imagine how the roar of guns silenced birds’ songs on that spring day. We can see the road where the American farmers approached the bridge, and we can see the road down which the British fled. The ranger quotes a poem written by Ralph Waldo Emerson for the dedication of the American monument on July 4,1837:

On the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

There at the North Bridge, nothing stands between our history and us except sunlight reflected in the dust. We are enlightened without being pushed, always a welcome experience.

Sometimes the best thing for a designer to do is to not get in the way.

This and all sketches (following text) by Frank Harmon

To reach one of the most remarkable historic homes in America, you must first pass through a pleasant and thoroughly familiar suburb of ranch houses in the rolling hills of southwestern Virginia. There, among the barbeque grills, carports, and basketball goals stands the second home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson. He built it 200 years ago in Bedford County and named it Poplar Forest for its grove of shade trees.

I visited Poplar Forest recently on a scorching hot June day, accompanied by forty architecture buffs from North Carolina. His elegant, one-story brick house is small at about 2000 square feet — smaller than some of the ranch houses we’d passed getting there.  We climbed out of our air conditioned bus and stood on the grass downhill from Jefferson’s home, where the sun shot past poplar trees to bake the lawn and gnats buzzed around us expectantly.

How, I wondered, could Jefferson and his family have endured this wilting heat?

Jefferson, a passionate architect as well as statesman, built Poplar Forest as a rural hideaway in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. He was the first president to turn the White House into an open house for public touring. Monticello, his home near Charlottesville, Virginia, was also an embassy to the world, with a constant flow of dignitaries demanding his time and attention. But this gifted man was essentially shy and abhorred public life. Here at Poplar Forest he could enjoy, as he wrote, “the solitude of a hermit.”

Jefferson’s belief in architecture was ideological: Just as the laws and principles of America were based on Greek precedent, so should its new buildings reflect ancient Greek and Roman principles of order. If architecture could express ideas, he felt, then courthouses, town halls, churches, granaries, and especially houses could instill democratic values in the hearts of his countrymen. Jefferson believed that every gentleman should have a working knowledge of architecture.

In his student days, he read law at the College of William and Mary and observed the architecture around the college in Williamsburg. There were no schools of architecture then, but he discovered Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture, which became his bible.  Palladio, the cutting-edge architect of his time, designed classical villas for the Venetian gentry. Palladio’s villas were actually working farmhouses, carefully adapted to the climate and countryside of the Veneto. While he served as minister to France Jefferson learned of the work of the radical French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, whose light-filled rooms were often illuminated by skylights. He would remember both architects when he designed Poplar Forest.

Poplar Forest is relatively small compared to Monticello. Jefferson imagined his country estate as a progressive model for the small, independent American farmer, who he saw as the natural guardian of the new republic. In plan, Poplar Forest is an octagon with eight equal sides — think of a stop sign laid on the ground — with porticos on the north and south fronts. The central and most important room in the house is the dining room, a cube shaped space 20 by 20 feet by 20 feet high, with a dramatic skylight crossing the ceiling from east to west, following the path of the sun. Surrounding the square dining room are four smaller, elongated rooms for sleeping, study, and conversation, embracing the dining room like the arms of his family. Here at the center of his house, on the center of his estate, under the arc of the sun and moon, Jefferson could retire to “the bosom of my family, my farm and books, which I have always loved.”

It’s hard not to notice the importance of the dining room at Poplar Forest. At Monticello dining takes place in a secondary room, as in most of our houses. At Poplar Forest the dining room is the central, most important space in the house. And although it is the largest room, it is the most intimate, where family and guests served themselves at dinner. Long conversations followed. When dusk calmed the summer heat, Jefferson could step outside onto the portico with his granddaughters and hear a barred owl hooting from the poplar trees while bats swooped across the great lawn. On nights when the moon was full, candlelight and moonlight illuminated the walls. There is no more poignant dining room in America.

And how did Jefferson keep cool?

Jefferson used his years of experience building Monticello to make Poplar Forest thermally comfortable. He employed several techniques to accomplish his goal:

• He put windows on three sides of the exterior rooms to capture the breeze from all directions. Floor-to-ceiling windows encourage hot air to move up and out of the rooms, and the octagonal plan allows the southwesterly summer breeze to flow right through the house. All these windows make the inside light and airy, and draw nature indoors.

• He built his one-story house on top of a basement. (Jefferson wanted his house to appear one story because it was all the rage in Paris.) Thus, cooler air from the basement rises to the rooms above.

• He raised the south portico on Roman arches to shade the south parlor from the summer sun and to offer guests a pleasant place to sit outside. For the windows on the east and west walls, Jefferson designed green painted shutters to block the sun.

• He knew that the exterior rooms and the building’s twelve-inch-thick brick walls would cushion the central dining room from the heat so that on the hottest days there would be a cool chamber to retreat to. On the June Saturday of our visit, it was 95 degrees outside, but a pleasant 84 degrees inside. All during our visit a southwest breeze flowed under the poplar trees and through the house.

Jefferson had an inquiring and inventive mind. Visitors to Poplar Forest are fascinated by his bed alcoves, planned so that he could wake up and go to his study on one side or to his dressing room on the other. He built a one-story wing to the east for the kitchen and storeroom space then covered it with a flat roof that he could walk out onto. Curiously, he did not plant shade trees on the south side of Poplar Forest to shade his portico. He was, after all, a Virginia gentleman and the stately vista of his house was sacrosanct.

How ironic that Jefferson’s architecture, in its day so radical, is now revered in Virginia for its traditional appearance. How sadly ironic, too, that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence had his fields plowed and his kitchen tended by enslaved people. His grand vision for America did not include the intimate lives of his slaves.

The construction of Poplar Forest took nearly twenty years, both during and after Jefferson’s presidency. Like many a handyman today, he liked to change and improvise. He is reported to have announced to a cabinet meeting in Washington that he had to leave immediately to attend to the layout of the octagonal foundations at Poplar Forest, which may be the only time in history a U.S. president has left the White House to lay a foundation.

For Jefferson, the journey from Monticello to Poplar Forest took three days, a trip we make today in less than two hours. Jefferson enjoyed staying in modest inns along the way, but how delighted he must have been when he arrived at his cool, silent retreat. Traveling in a closed carriage with his daughters and grandchildren, he would have first seen Poplar Forest on the brow of a hill, surrounded by fields of corn and tobacco. They would alight at an elegant portico on the north side of the house. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind “on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the Universe.”

I imagine Jefferson sitting on his portico overlooking his fields, which rolled out to the mountains beyond, imagining the promise of a new nation in the sweet morning air. He imagined an America of self-sufficient farmers, ready to defend their freedom as the Minutemen did at Concord. He could not have foretold that America would become an industrial nation, rather than agrarian one; or that the patrician villas he imagined civilizing the wilderness would be superseded by the egalitarian ranch houses that now crowd his estate.

At Poplar Forest he left us a building based on principle, not expediency, and his love of light and air and the delight of living in the midst of nature have endured. I like to think he would be pleased to see what is possible today, and that we share his unflagging optimism in the United States of America.

Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826.

Entry Porch

Floor plan

Floor to ceiling windows for natural ventilation

View from the north

Dining room door

View from the east

View from the south

Few building forms are more familiar than the one-story gabled roof. The earliest Greek temples feature this form, as do 19th century tobacco warehouses, churches, and government buildings. Our own state Capitol in Raleigh, designed by Town and Davis in 1840, is adorned by the upright columns and V-shaped roof of the earliest Greek temples.

Many architectural historians consider the temple form a descendent of an earlier forest dwelling, created by primitive builders who pulled tree branches together to create a canopied shelter. The 19th century French critic Viollet-Le-Duc thought this bowered structure of trees was the origin of all architecture.

In a swamp beside a pond in Mississippi, the esteemed architect Fay Jones, FAIA (1921-2004), who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, added to the history of the venerable building type with an open-air pavilion called Pinecote, which was constructed in 1986 as part of the Crosby Arboretum. Like Wright, Jones believed “the nature of the land must be the generator of the architect’s work.”

I visited Pinecote in mid-May, 2011, when the magnolia trees in southern Mississippi were just coming into bloom. Located incongruously next to a strip mall, Crosby Arboretum was created by landscape architect Edward L. Blake Jr. (1947-2010) on 800-plus acres of pine and wetland forest. The charms of Crosby Arboretum are quiet: a forest habitat mottled in shadows, the home of pitcher plants, river otter, and bay laurel.

From one end of the mile-long arboretum to the other, the earth falls only three feet, yet 36 inches of level change creates an entire shift in habitat, from pine forest to hardwood swamp. Compared to the Grand Canyon, which is more than a mile deep, Crosby Arboretum is shallow, yet it is no less satisfying — a subtle pleasure like the song of a wood thrush.

Fay Jones’ contribution to the quiet beauty of Crosby Arboretum is less a building than a structure that frames nature. His open-air pavilion is used for picnics, gatherings, reunions, conferences, and weddings, or simply for the study of nature outside its four open sides. The inside of Pinecote is about the size of a small church sanctuary and is covered by a broadly sloping gable roof. The roof ridge runs 40 feet above a brick floor from north to south, with the south gable end opening to a view of the pond.

Above the pavilion roof swamp oaks, maples and pine trees form a secondary roof of twigs and leaves. So hidden is Pinecote that the visitor doesn’t see it until entering — like coming upon a fawn in the forest.

Jones built Pinecote almost entirely of wood, with a few ingenious steel connectors that are as light as a wedding ring.

Although the pavilion can accommodate up to 200 people, the majority of its wood pieces are less than one-and-a-half inches thick and the wood columns are small enough to put your fingers around. Rising up from the brick floor, columns branch outwards to hold the roof, like a waiter’s fingers supporting a tray. When you look up to the underside of the roof, you see through a glass ridged skylight into the sky. Descending down from the roof ridge, rafters end as slender sticks — feathers against the leaves. A shaft of sunlight creates patterns on the floor. Breezes flow  easily through the shelter. The whole has the delicate scale of the forest. Wood is left to turn silver- grey, like the tree trunks, and the shingle roof is dappled by the shadows of the forest.

A short walk along a forest path brings you to a clearing on the far side of the pond where sky and forest are reflected as olive-green and blue slivers in the dark brown water. Merging with the pond, Pinecote hovers, wide and snug, set back in the shade beneath broad eaves. Next to it, a green heron stands motionless.

Many people visiting a redwood forest remark on how they are reminded of a cathedral. The Gothic cathedral is another manifestation of the gabled temple form with its clustered columns reaching heavenward. Perhaps Fay Jones had these precedents in mind when he sat down at the drawing board to design Pinecote.  Regardless, he designed a building of reverence for nature.

However dated this idea might seem in an age of cool buildings produced digitally, there is something about Pinecote that is endlessly satisfying. Fay Jones made a modest building that is just as moving as something far grander.

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

It is possible to discuss the current condition of architecture in North Carolina by referring to a geologic event that happened between 150 and 200 million years ago. A great geologic uplift, known as the Cape Fear Arch, pushed what is now North Carolina upwards several hundred feet. The arch also raised the sea floor, which had once been joined with South America, and the waves produced by this change created the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands that are farther offshore than in any other part of the Atlantic Seaboard. As a result, North Carolina has shallow rivers and only one major harbor at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, which is made treacherous by offshore shoals. Shifting river patterns caused by the Cape Fear Arch, which continues to rise, remove topsoil thus giving North Carolina poorer soils than in surrounding regions. The lack of rivers for transport, inaccessible harbors and poor soils meant that early settlements in North Carolina were modest. For much of its history, North Carolina was a land of small landowners, its population scattered across a vast landscape.

Though we have become the tenth largest state in the nation, our dispersed settlement pattern persists to this day. And that dispersal has created among North Carolinians a spirit of independence that is individualistic, self-sufficient, resourceful, and proud…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY

I discovered Harwell Hamilton Harris’s work when I was a student: a black and white photograph of his Fellowship Park House stood out from thousands of other published houses because of the clarity of the design and the way the house seemed to belong to its Californian hillside.

Harris built the house for himself and his wife Jean in 1935. It was small, less than 500 square feet, consisting of one large room open on three sides to a lush ravine covered in ferns and live oak trees. Attached to the room was a tiny kitchen. The floors were covered in rush mats, unpainted redwood beams spanned the ceiling, and a beautiful oriental ginger jar was poised on the edge of the living room, hovering just above the trees.

The photograph of the room with the ginger jar was published worldwide. It presented a new image of Californian modernism, one that was forward-looking yet comfortable – a quality not associated in 1935 with the avant-garde.

I met Harris for the first time in 1982 at the School of Design at NC State University, where he was professor emeritus after leaving his native California. For 50 years his fame had been widespread, acclaimed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as an American genius. Yet in person he was quiet and modest. He told me that he had built his hillside house for less than a thousand dollars, using parts salvaged from an earlier project in Hollywood. It had jump-started his career.

A few years ago, I visited Fellowship Park to discover the house for myself, which was then unoccupied. What I found was totally unexpected. I had known Jean and Harwell Harris in the last decade of their lives as gentle folk: kind, polite, and Edwardian in their courtly manners. Never did I think they started their marriage as Bohemians. But at Fellowship Park I discovered that to reach their house, they walked through the backyards of four neighboring houses; that their house had no plumbing for years; and that they showered outdoors with a garden hose, one partner keeping watch while the other bathed! But how perfect, I thought, that this symbol of domestic serenity was built out of relative poverty. Harris’s contribution to the art of American residential design began with a one-room shack. I was reminded of another cabin built with salvaged materials at Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau.

The house at Fellowship Park is slowly falling to ruin. The ferns are gone now; the hillside is thick with wild nasturtiums. I believe Harwell would accept this as natural. He believed that architecture, like delight, is ephemeral, and that ideas often outlast buildings.

– Green/sustainable architecture, green building materials, green building technologies (for low-tech and state-of-the-art)

– Green/sustainable urban design

– America’s new regionalism

– The impact of buildings on the environment

– The impact of architecture on society/culture

– “The best buildings begin with the land.”

– “The greatest potential for architecture today lies in regional locations.”

– What we can learn from old farmhouses and barns and how their builders respected the land.”

– Responsible revitalization of cities and towns

– LEED: what it is, how to use it to create green buildings

– Art and architecture; art and architecture

– Residential architecture and how to work with an architecture to achieve your dreams

– Commercial architecture

– Institutional architecture

– Historic architecture

SEMINAR AND LECTURE TOPICS

Growing Beyond Green: America’s New Regionalism:

For Regional Architecture to produce high-performance buildings, it must address context, materials, textures, colors and form, using both traditional and non-traditional methods. And it must connect clients’ needs and aspirations to a profound sense of place. This seminar/lecture explores contemporary regionalism’s influence on three Frank Harmon Architect PA major projects and the techniques used to meet social, cultural, economic and environmental needs for sustainability – arguably the most important architectural issue of our time.

Sustainable by Example – A Case Study:

Just as the national American Institute of Architects has committed to “Walk the Walk” to lead the sustainable evolution, so must the AIA’s state components. Using the recent competition-winning design for AIA North Carolina’s Center for Architecture & Design to be built in downtown Raleigh as a case study, this presentation demonstrates how architects can – and must – take an innovative, leadership role in drastically reducing our buildings’ carbon footprints. It will also demonstrate how urban architecture can enhance the urban landscape without harming the environment by educating clients and producing buildings that reduce energy consumption and emissions through both low-tech and high-tech solutions; that reduce the “heat island” effect in center cities; that use environmentally sustainable materials, including recycled materials wherever possible, that encourage density and “walkability,” and that ultimately make the land they inhabit better than they found it.

Sticks and Stones - Sustainable Architecture in the Mid-South:

This seminar examines certain elements and themes that run through regional architecture — landscape; materials and construction (the “sticks and stones” of a place); weather and climate; roof forms that shelter or collect; and clients – and demonstrates how each can and should be used to create innovative, sustainable and appropriate contemporary buildings.

Glass, Grits and Steel:

The evolution of Modern architecture in the South: Using his own work as examples, Frank Harmon examines the elements and themes that inform contemporary Southern architecture — landscape; materials and construction (the “sticks and stones” of a place); weather and climate; roof forms that shelter or collect; and clients — and illustrates the importance of “place” in the process of creating innovative, sustainable, and appropriate contemporary design.

Architecture With A Conscience – Designing Contemporary Regional Architecture:

Buildings with a “conscience” have existed in Southern farmhouses and barns for as long as farmers have erected them. These are simple structures built of wholesome, vernacular materials, perched on stone piers so rainwater flows under them. They nestle lightly into the hillsides without disturbing the land. They are rooted in their region and embody the principles of livability. And they speak of the Southern culture as eloquently as bluegrass music or clay pots.

Regional architecture is enabling, not confining, and embraces what these farmhouses represent, what the late Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA, called “the particulars of client, place and materials.”

Building Sustainability Into The Urban Context:

The way we live is making us sick. Healthy buildings and active living are the keys to healthy cities. Therefore, we must improve how we build in order to improve how we live. This session will discuss how urban buildings can be designed to make the most of natural light and ventilation so that they use less energy from coal-fired power plants, thus reducing pollution and improving the quality of the air. It will address the need for interior applications of natural materials without toxic byproducts to improve the quality of air inside our buildings. It will stress the need for greater urban density, rather than suburban sprawl, and increased public transportation to mitigate the unhealthy overuse of individual automobiles and their accompanying expanses of paved parking, which allows storm water runoff to ruin our creeks, streams and ponds. And it will address the need for “green,” or vegetated roofs in the urban context to collect and filter water on top of our buildings (another source of destructive runoff), to reduce the “heat island” effect, and to create more inhabitable surfaces in our cites.

Nature and Architectural Design:

For architecture to complement nature and contribute to a culture of place, it must conserve, protect and celebrate the specific regional landscape in which it exists, whether that landscape is a verdant hillside in Italy, a rocky crag along Canada’s coastline, or the flat plains of Texas. Architecture with a sense of place must engage that particular region’s climate, topography, vegetation and local materials. To be sustainable, it must also rely on that particular region’s resources and learn from its context.

This presentation demonstrates that the most important aspect of a building is the land upon which it will be built — because all good architecture begins with the land. The presentation discusses the influences buildings derive from landscape and region, from design concept to details of materials and construction – through the use of successful case studies. Using examples of the work of Glenn Murcutt, Rick Joy, Ted Flato, Brian MacKay-Lyons and Frank Harmon’s own work, it demonstrates applied, rather than theoretical, methods for using traditional and non-traditional materials to create modern, innovative and sustainable buildings that maximize the pleasures of a particular place’s natural light, air, color, texture and pattern.

Wood –  The Ultimate “Green” Material:

The vocabulary of construction in the South has been defined by wood for over 300 years. It was the only building material the settlers in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had. Yet when we gained access to other materials, wood endured. For the past 20 years, Frank Harmon has been studying 100-year-old vernacular structures — farmhouses, barns, boats, and old textile mills — to learn how they were built and why they have remained intact all these years. This has had a dramatic impact on the way he designs and builds. He has been able to translate the lessons learned from these old, wooden structures into a modern architectural vocabulary.

Architecture and Critical Regionalism Today:

Most architecture published in current periodicals comes from the centers of fashion, for example, Los Angeles, New York or Amsterdam, yet most architecture in North America is practiced in small towns and cities, away from the centers of fashion, by small to medium-sized firms. Today in this hinterland, away from Hollywood and Soho, there thrives an independent spirit of invention, fostered by architects who are nurtured by a sense of place and the everyday concerns of their clients.

What is the importance of regionalism in today’s theory and practice of architecture? “As we move into the unknown territories of the twenty-first century,” writes Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, “the unresolved conflict between globalization and diversity and the unanswered question of choosing between international intervention and identity are increasingly leading to crises as vital as the threat of a nuclear catastrophe in the middle of the last century. [T]he critical regionalist approach to design and the architecture of identity recognizes the value of the singular, circumscribes projects within the physical, social, and cultural constraints of the particular, aiming at sustaining diversity while benefiting from universality.”

When Henry David Thoreau set out to build his cabin at Walden Pond one snowy morning in March 1845, he created a new chapter in American thought – about the value of self-reliance, honest self-reflection, and the courage to live modestly: to live simply in means, but grandly in thought.

Less well-known is the fact that Thoreau built his cabin out of pine trees he cut on the site and covered it with boards he salvaged from a nearby shanty. By building a cabin for $28, he crafted a message about simplicity. By using the materials he found around him, he was being sustainable….

We are here today to celebrate an addition to Lance Hall, which was originally built just 6 years after Thoreau retreated to the shore of Walden Pond.

While he lived at Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote that “every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold.” As a child growing up in North Carolina, my favorite activities were outdoors, under the trees. Most of what I know as an architect I first learned playing along the banks of a stream in Greensboro.

Thus it came as a shock to me as a young architect to learn that everything I designed would cause the earth to be stripped or mined. I remember being paralyzed for nearly a year while I was designing my first house on the shore of the James River. How could I destroy that soft forest floor for my client’s floorplan? Finally, I realized that the only way I could work as an architect was to promise to make the site better than I found it. Sometimes that has meant not to build at all.

It seemed natural to me to design buildings to catch the sun, accept the breeze, and grow naturally out of the earth. I was thinking sustainablity, but at the time we didn’t call it that. I simply thought it was good architecture. Let me give you an example:

Ten years ago, Jim and Janice Taylor asked me to design a summer house for them on a remote island in the Bahamas. At the time, there was no electrical power on the site and no drinking water. I designed a house that was like an umbrella, with a generous, spreading roof that provided shelter from the sun and collected rainwater for drinking.

There was, of course, no air conditioning. But the shape and orientation of the house allow it to capture prevailing breezes and enjoy natural ventilation. The house is quite simple and quite liberating. Staying there, you experience the sun and sky, ocean and wind with an intensity unknown before.

Needless to say, the house is sustainable. It has to be. And through it, I began to understand the logic of Thoreau’s cabin: Reduce our daily needs to the essentials and live life to the fullest. Begin the world again, to some extent.

Children are not the only ones to discover the world anew. Decades ago, but especially since 2001 and Katrina, it has become apparent that our addiction to oil, our appetite for land, and our carelessness with water were not only polluting the environment, but making our lives unhealthy. Our lungs, immune systems, and skin, for example, are affected not only by how we live, but how we drive and how we built.

According to the Energy Department, residential and commercial buildings account for 40 percent of total energy consumption in this country, versus just 28 percent for the entire transportation sector, including automobiles. Thirty percent of all the forests are cut to make architecture, and 25 percent of all our fresh water is used in buildings.

Clearly, if we want to make a future in which human health and environmental health are one, a sustaining architecture is a good place to start.

Two years ago, you asked me to make a start: to design an addition to Lance Hall – “small rooms with big ideas,” you said. The site was a small outdoor room that held the graves of generations and an ancient elm tree. You asked for classrooms, an elevator, bathrooms – all next to a perfect temple. Talk about a challenging site – to do all this on a swatch of land about the size of a tennis court! I promised to leave the site better than I found it, and to make it “green.”

“Of course, your green building also has to be approved by the B.A.R,”  your building committee told me.

Being from North Carolina, I thought a B.A.R. was a place where you went to drink. But as you know, the B.A. R. is the Charleston Board of Architectural Review, the Supreme Court of architectural review boards.

So while I was designing the modern, green addition to Lance Hall, I kept thinking about the elephant in the living room no one talked about – the B.A.R. How would we make a modern, sustainable Sunday School in historic Charleston, a city more tortured than most by the conflict between past and present.

Well, what we did was to design the most “green” Sunday School we could, with respect for its place –  not only its place in Charleston but in the 21^st century. The new addition to Lance Hall has a green roof, which keeps the building cool and collects rainwater. We use cisterns to store the rainwater for irrigating the new courtyard, where children will play in the shade of live oak trees. To conserve energy, the new Lance Hall has a geothermal heat source, using the earth’s constant temperature to heat and cool the rooms. Those rooms will be lit by daylight and filled with fresh air, with windows offering views over the Circular Church. The morning sun will fill the Sunday School rooms. Wherever possible, we used local materials, as Thoreau did. The floors are recycled heart pine. The structure itself is made of Southern yellow pine and recycled steel.

We have tried to use materials reverently.

In the 21^st century, unfortunately, we take wood, steel and glass for granted, no matter the effect of cutting or mining them. In historic Charleston, however, you can see in the way people wove a sweetgrass basket, built a steeple, or made a Windsor chair expressed joy in work, and a spiritual quality in how something was made. Materials, no matter how common, are precious. I hope that in the porches of Lance Hall, the way steel columns grasp wooden floor beams, and the way the smoothness of heart pine contrasts with the strength of stucco walls, express our joy in the making of it.

The addition to Lance Hall will have all these wonderful, efficient, green systems, but you won’t have to know that to like it. Just as playing beside a stream can be the greatest learning experience because it is unconscious, so the addition to Lance Hall will teach by experience. Children and visitors will learn about sustainability simply by being here. The new Lance Hall will automatically inspire those who experience it, and exist as your gift to future generations.

And what about the elephant in the living room – the B.A.R.? I presented the green design concept to the B.A.R. with Whitney Power’s invaluable coaching, Bert Keller’s spiritual support, Susan Davis’ advice, and some trepidation. To my great relief, they approved this sleek, modern, sustainable building outright!

“We’ve been waiting for a building like this for years,” they said.

Reinvent the world, I thought.

That brings me to my last point, which is about balance. What our experience with the BAR shows is the possibility that the past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. The ancient Greeks thought that perfection in art meant balance; that in a painting or a building, you would add nothing nor take anything away without destroying it: balance.

Since the Greeks, we have come to equate balance with beauty, and that alludes to a state we call happiness. I hope that the addition to Lance Hall has balance and happiness!

The task we face –  to build sustainably and to deal with climate change — is immense. I was reminded of that last night, driving to Charleston past miles of suburban sprawl and parking lots, unable to see the sky because of light pollution. What we have done at the Circular Congregational Church is a small start. But I am reminded of the immense change brought about by Thoreau’s cabin — 10 ft. by 15 ft.

An article for The Independent Weekly by Frank Harmon, May 9, 2001

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

An article for The Independent Weekly, by Frank Harmon, February 23, 2000

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ENTIRE ARTICLE