Journal | frank harmon architect pa

“There is more wisdom in African-American gardens and yards in the rural South than in a million McMansions.” - Frank Harmon, FAIA in “What I Have Learned,” Triangle Modernist Houses

The House That Steve Jobs Grew Up In, And How It Shaped Apple

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill said, and perhaps no place has the power to shape us like the place where we grow up.

Lyndon Johnson was born in the hardscrabble and desperately poor Hill Country of Texas. His life and political legacy were shaped by the threadbare surroundings of his childhood.

Steve Jobs grew up in a small, modern house in Mountain View, California. So important was the

Jobs grew up in an Eichler house very much like this one.

house that he took his biographer, Walter Isaacson, there to show him the many ingenious details of its design — like the radiant floor and the open plan and windows that brought the outdoors in. It’s nice to think that the man many call a genius grew up in a house with ingenious details.

Joseph Eichler, a California developer noted for bringing good design to the mass housing market, built Jobs’ childhood home. Eichler homes were airy and modern in comparison to most of the mass-produced, middle-class, postwar homes being built in the 1950s. Eichler believed that people of modest means could have beautiful things.

Including the modest family who adopted Steve Jobs.

The clean elegance of the Eichler home, available to everyone, was the original vision for Apple, according to Jobs. “That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac,” he recalled. “That’s what we did with the iPod.”

Paul Jobs made a place on his garage workbench so his young son could work beside him. Outside he built a fence around their Eichler home, crafting the back of the fence to look as good as the front. Steve Jobs never forgot that lesson, and would insist that every element of his Apple products should be beautiful, not just on the outside but even on the inside. “But no one will see it,” his engineers groaned when he insisted on a beautiful hidden circuit board. “But I will!” Jobs replied.

Apple stores were conceived of and meticulously supervised by Steve Jobs. From the open plan to the glass stairs, no detail was unimportant. They are the 21st century embodiment of Paul Jobs’ workbench in Mountain View. We are used to thinking that the digital world is placeless, but in the digital world of Jobs, place mattered.

A student of Zen, Jobs absorbed the belief of Dogen Zenji, a Zen master who wrote, “Whoever told people that ‘mind’ means thoughts opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses.” And, we might add, IPods, workbenches, and Eichler homes.

Like Eichler, Jobs brought beauty to ordinary things. He shaped the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Now they shape us.

Tags: Apple computers, Joseph Eichler, Steve Jobs
Posted in Journal |

The Road Less Taken: Clark and Menefee’s Inn at Middleton Place

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

Sometimes we can appreciate a work of art for what’s left unsaid, for the missing piece that we get to imagine. Ernest Hemingway doesn’t mention abortion in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Yet

The yellow clay road

the couple waiting for a train beside the Ebro River is consumed by the thought of it. The devastating memory of war stalks the young American fishing in “Big Two Hearted River,” but suffering is not mentioned, its absence underlined by the grandeur of the landscape.

The composer John Cage thought that the greatest music lay not in sounds but in silence. And In architecture this phenomenon can be observed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Asked by his client to celebrate a beloved waterfall, Wright built the house over the stream so that you can’t actually see the waterfall. Instead, you hear it, which makes the experience of Fallingwater unforgettable.

I had a similar experience recently at the Middleton Inn near Charleston, South Carolina, built 25 years ago by architects WG Clark and Charles Menefee. A series of dignified, elegantly proportioned residential buildings rests beside the Ashley River underneath 100-year-old pines and live oak trees. To many architects, these are the most important modern buildings in the South. (To others they aren’t)

What makes these buildings so Southern? They lack the obvious architectural symbols of the South. There are no white painted Corinthian columns, no porches with rocking chairs. Missing also are the wrought iron gates and grand allee of oak trees you might expect. Instead you arrive along a winding road to an earthen clearing overlooking a salt marsh where the inn stands quietly to one side. The inn’s 55 rooms seem to have floated to the banks of the Ashley River. Hardly a shovel full of earth seems to have been disturbed.

But the earlier history of Middleton Place is quite different. For centuries the land here has been pushed and scraped. The extensive terraced earth parterre at nearby Middleton Plantation was the first of its kind built in the colonies. Below it slaves toiled in the rice paddies carved from the earth. And after the Civil War, the banks of the Ashley were strip-mined for phosphates.

“These earthworks have left a profound mark on South Carolina’s wetlands,” wrote MacArthur Fellow Ted Rosengarten, “…evoking man’s temporal conquest of nature, and nature’s ultimate conquest of man.”

In contrast to the turbulent history of its site, Clark and Menefee’s inn has a quiet languor and equilibrium as relaxed as the Spanish moss draped across the trees. Clark wrote that all building should be atonement for the disturbance of the land.

But what about the missing piece? It’s hiding in plain sight: At Middleton Place there are no paved roads. The effect is profound. This elegant, sophisticated residence is reached by a dusty, shadow flecked dirt road so that, on arriving, you experience the place, not the asphalt. And what a place it is — live oak trees, Spanish moss, and alligators in the river. A friend says that to get to the real America you have to scrape off the first six inches of asphalt, so preconditioned have we become by the many layers we use to cover up meaning. By leaving out the paving, perhaps the most ubiquitous artifact of modern life, Clark and Menefee leave nothing between the land and us. Hemingway would get it.

Tags: Charleston SC, Clark & Menefee, Middleton Place
Posted in Journal |

When No One Could Travel Faster Than A Horse

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

Sketches by Frank Harmon, FAIA

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.

Tags: Appalachian Moutains, Blue Ridge Parkway, Lewis Mumford, Provence, rural North Carolina, South of France
Posted in Journal, Lectures / Writing |

The Bridge at Concord

Monday, July 25th, 2011

By Frank Harmon

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.

Tags: architecture, concord massachusetts, Declaration of Independence, historic places, Minute Man National Park, War of Independence
Posted in Journal, Lectures / Writing, Press Releases |

Poplar Forest: Mr. Jefferson Builds His Dream House

Friday, July 8th, 2011

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

Tags: Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson
Posted in Journal, Lectures / Writing |

Graduation at Harvard: Splendor On The Grass

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

June 2011

I recently attended my daughter Laura’s graduation at Harvard University, where more than 7200 fellow students received their diplomas and honors in a daylong ceremony attended by family and friends.

Like many commencement ceremonies, there were speeches, recognitions, honorary degrees, and closing remarks. Graduates received advice about life, the world, jobs, work, and career during the three-hour commencement, and much of what was said will be forgotten. But the ceremony was held outdoors in Harvard Yard, and that will be unforgettable.

Laura’s previous graduation ceremonies were all held indoors. Her high school graduation took place at the convention center in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her college commencement was held at Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center in New York City. And the university where I teach holds commencement in a 19,000-seat indoor sports facility

By contrast, Harvard’s commencement was held in the very same college yard that the graduates have walked through so many times.

How can this familiar yard, its name even suggesting the everyday, fulfill our need for the pomp and circumstance befitting a great university?

On graduation day, my wife and I entered Harvard Yard at eight in the morning to take our seats in white lawn chairs laid out on the grass, along with about 15,000 other parents, alumni, and friends. The day was sunny and warm with no sign of rain (although the tradition is to hold the ceremony outside regardless of the weather). At about nine o’clock, the graduates began to arrive, marching in rows from many directions to take their seats with us in the yard. Crimson banners dotted the lawn, a breeze flowed through the trees, and the sound of the Harvard band echoed off the academic buildings that surround the yard. Many of the alumni wore top hats, which, combined with the faculty’s crimson robes, lent a theatrical air to the occasion. At 9:45 the commencement ceremony began. As the ceremony continued through the morning, shadows changed, the leaves on the trees cast a pattern on the graduates, and we moved our chairs to escape the sunlight.

At times when the ceremony verged on tedious, my daughter sent me irreverent text messages. I noticed my wife reading the New Yorker. There was no coffee available, so I found myself daydreaming…

…Of Henry David Thoreau, also a Harvard graduate, walking under the same trees that shaded us.

…Of the crimson banners leading this cohort like a Roman legion into the future (part of the commencement was in Latin).

…Of the wind that rustled the trees coming to us from the Gulf of Mexico and continuing out over the North Atlantic to places as distant as those from which these scholars had come from and to which they would soon disperse in their individual journeys.

At noon, the band began to play, the graduates threw their mortarboard hats into the air then rose to march away.

Despite the occasional tedium and the hours spent sitting in a skimpy lawn chair, the experience was unforgettable.

Why is that? Was it memorable because it happened in plain daylight? We have become so accustomed to theatrical lighting that we forget the power of daylight and how democratic it is. Theatrical lighting obscures the audience. In daylight, speaker and audience are one.

Or was it memorable because it was held beneath spreading trees? The word “academy” comes from the akademeia, located just outside ancient Athens, where Plato made the gymnasium famous as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, had formerly been an olive grove, hence the expression “the groves of academe.”

Here, in a grove of New England maple trees, we watched an odyssey begin. It all seemed so natural: Whoever heard of having a revelation indoors?

Another everyday outdoor space that is witness to the extraordinary can be seen in London, where, each year on November 11, the British nation observes Remembrance Day for the over 1.5 million British subjects who lost their lives in the two World Wars. They hold the solemn ceremony not in Westminster abbey, nor in the mighty St Paul’s Cathedral, but in the middle of a street. The event is disarmingly simple. The Queen, Prime Minister, and other dignitaries lay a wreath at The Cenotaph, an empty tomb located in the middle of Whitehall, a street near the Houses of Parliament. When Big Ben strikes 11 a.m. a two-minute silence follows. For the rest of the year, cars, taxis and lorries rush past the stone Cenotaph. But on this day the street is closed. Thus, one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, closed down for Remembrance Day, becomes a symbol of a nation’s gratitude — a pause to remember. Far from being trivialized by its location, the ceremony is made poignant by its connection to the mundane life of the street.

As the graduates filed out of Harvard Yard after commencement, one could sense both anticipation and apprehension as they left academia for an uncertain economy and a brave new world of technology and planetary challenges. How appropriate, then, to experience a simple outdoor ceremony that would have been recognizable to Thoreau and even John Harvard. It seems as though Harvard Yard was designed in some unconscious way to be the only appropriate space on campus for graduation.

Tags: Harvard University, Harvard Yard
Posted in Journal |

Oak Alley: “Gone With The Wind” That You Can Rent

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

The alley of oaks leading to the plantation home. (Sketches by Frank Harmon)

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.

The relationship of the house to the levee and river beyond.

Tags: ante bellum houses, Deep South, Oak Alley, plantation homes
Posted in Journal |

Pinecote

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

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.

Tags: Crosby Arboretum, Fay Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, open-air pavilion, Pinecote, reverence for nature
Posted in Journal, Lectures / Writing |

Taliesin: Wright’s Ideal World

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Sketch by Frank Harmon, FAIA

By Frank Harmon, FAIA

Taliesin was built and rebuilt three times from 1910 to 1959. And for Frank Lloyd Wright, it was his experimental laboratory.

Taliesin hugs the hillside over a peaceful valley near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Through its horizontal windows, you can glimpse the rolling landscape, the Wisconsin River, and the mid-western sky. Because Taliesin was Wright’s laboratory, many elements are not finished. In fact, the crudeness of some of it is quite shocking.

Frank Harmon outside Taliensin, March 2011

I visited Taliesin in early March 2011. The hill was covered in snow and icicles hung from the eaves. Although the home and studio were empty, I sensed the incredible vigor of Frank Lloyd Wright, the extraordinary energy he possessed to create and maintain so far-reaching an endeavor on a lonely mid-western hillside.

The spaces inside the building are like no other. Wright located cave-like hearths beneath billowing tents of roof forms. Spaces merge into adjacent spaces in a progression that you simply don’t want to come to an end.

Wright often talked about his architecture as though it was a type of weaving, and at Taliesin you see stone, wood plaster and glass woven together and washed in sunlight. He loved Beethoven more than any artist and there is music in Wright’s architecture.

I saw the Wisconsin hills through his living room window and realized that the living room roof soaring above me was the exact twin of the hills beyond.

Years ago, one of Wright’s clients, Stanley Rosenbaum, told me that visiting Taliesin was like going into a dream world. Standing in the studio overlooking the river, I understood his description: This was Wright’s ideal world, and he was the magician who brought it into being.

To learn more about Taliesin Preservation, Inc., visit www.taliensinpreservation.org.

Tags: Frank Harmon architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin, Wisconsin
Posted in Journal |

The Bridge Across The Rio Grande

Friday, February 4th, 2011

San Agustin Plaza by Frank Harmon

The bridge across the Rio Grande between Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, is only a few hundred feet long, but the apparent distance between the two cities is far greater.

Like many American cities, Laredo is laid out in broad blocks with wide streets. Yet over half of its downtown blocks are empty and turned into parking lots because life in Laredo has moved to the fringes. Big block stores, strip malls and residential suburbs have sucked the life out of this American town, just as they have in so many towns from Texas to Maine. Recently, Laredo’s last bookstore closed.

What still makes Laredo special, however, is it position on the border of Mexico, separated from Nuevo Laredo by the Rio Grande. San Agustin Plaza, near the river, suggests Laredo’s Mexican heritage. Surrounded by stone and stucco buildings that look as though they were built when Texas belonged to Mexico, San Agustin Plaza is a quiet and sleepy place, with a well-tended lawn dotted with stately palm trees. Unfortunately, few people were there to enjoy it.

A few hundred feet from San Agustin Plaza is the International Bridge, leading to Nuevo Laredo and the Plaza Juarez. And between the two plazas lies a tale of two cities.

I visited both cities a year ago on a bright weekday morning in December. At lunch at the Posada Inn on the plaza in Laredo, my wife asked our waitress about visiting Nuevo Laredo that afternoon.

“Don’t go!” the waitress exclaimed. “Drugs! Kidnapping! It is dangerous place.”

Indeed, Laredo is at the apex of drug smuggling through Mexico to the USA, its streets “…awash in money, stacks of grimy bills tainted in cocaine residue…” according to a recent article in the New York Times. As the United States has tightened bank regulations to prevent money-laundering, more money from illicit drug sales is being smuggled across the border, wrapped in plastic and stowed in secret compartments built into the trucks, busses and cars that flow over the Mexican border. And a sluiceway of this river of drugs and money is the International Bridge at Laredo.

I’ll admit it sounded a little frightening, this trip to Nuevo Laredo, if I believed the description of Mexico as a center of the drug trade. But my wife had been to Mexico and Nuevo Laredo many times since she was a child. Undaunted, she asked our waitress to recommend a guide, and twenty minutes later we were standing at the customs entrance to the International Bridge with Francisco Velasquez, our guide for an afternoon tour of Nuevo Laredo.

The bridge was jammed with cars and pedestrians. At midpoint of the bridge, as though passing through an invisible barrier, we crossed into Mexico. Most of the pedestrians going to Mexico with us were carrying luggage or pushing carts stuffed with oversized boxes of Corn Flakes, clothing and video games. We were now fifty feet above the Rio Grande, and the weather was sunny.

Plaza Juarez, by Frank Harmon

Customs at the Mexican side of the bridge seemed casual. Leaving the bridge we came to Plaza Juarez, the twin, you might say, of San Agustin Plaza in Laredo. In contrast to the stately yet virtually empty plaza in Laredo, though, the plaza in Nuevo Laredo was bustling. People were coming and going in the shadow of live oak trees while older people sat on benches, children chased around the plaza, and teenagers watched each other.

The buildings around the square were durable but rough, made of concrete and stone. The plaza itself was paved in stone, in contrast to the lawn in Laredo. And every storefront around the plaza was occupied by a shop or cantina. We sat for a moment and watched the sunlight filter through the trees as children laughed and played around a fountain. Francisco told us that the people of Nuevo Laredo were renowned for their friendliness. During the afternoon he greeted over two dozen people on the street by name. But he was moving back to Laredo, he said, because his children had bought a house for him there.

At one corner of the square we walked into “Marti’s,” a gallery that sold furniture, glass, pottery, jewelry and clothing—all handmade in Mexico, all woven or carved in the region where they were being sold, and all of a quality that told me the people who made them loved what they were doing.

The shop itself was an esthetic experience, approached through a pink stucco courtyard draped with vines where we could hear our footsteps. Entering we found a quiet, well-lighted interior, like a museum but a friendlier, where every object was affordable.

Marti's by Frank Harmon

After shopping for an hour we went to the Cadillac Bar down the street and drank freshly made limeades from tall glasses at a polished granite bar underneath a ceiling supported on stone columns. A group of Mexican businessmen dined at a long table nearby. No sign of drug barons. Eventually, we said goodbye to the bar manager and made our way towards the bridge. Outside a parade was forming.

The Felice Navidad parade in Nuevo Laredo is held every year during the week before Christmas. While we’d been shopping, marching bands from many parts of the region had assembled in Plaza Juarez. At 4 p.m. they set off down Avenue Guerrero. The musicians were mostly young, everyone seemed to know each other, their uniforms didn’t always fit well, the music was out of tune, and the marchers were definitely not concerned about being in step. But it didn’t matter because the whole show was magnificent. Back in North America, we watch our bands in a stadium, we buy our lemonades in a drive-thru, and we shop for clothing in a mall. Here in Mexico we could do all three on a crowded city street. Here, life is the spectacle. How simple, I thought, and how incredibly pleasant.

There is something to be said for finding pleasure in the everyday, because the most important things in life turn out to be quite simple: people, relationships, the shadow of oak leaves on the pavement, the laughter of children, the sound of a trumpet in a city. Simple pleasures that seem hard to find on the other side of the border come easily in Nuevo Laredo.

At six in the afternoon most of the traffic going north on the bridge was pedestrian. The Mexican government had built awnings to shade the sidewalk on the bridge, and I imagined what a difference shade would make on a hot summer day. We crossed the international border, through a serious U.S. Customs hall, and climbed the hill beneath thousands of blackbirds on the telephone wires above us. How easily birds can cross the border. How complex it is for humans. I felt totally refreshed to have visited a culture so simple yet so rich.

Ironically, many people in Nuevo Laredo would choose to live in Laredo if they could. And much of what I valued about the simplicity and richness of Nuevo Laredo is actually the result of its relative poverty. Sadly, one of the consequences of poverty is drug trafficking. Yet what we brought back from Mexico was profoundly legal: the simple enjoyment of the everyday.

Postscript:

The pleasure we experienced in Nuevo Laredo a year ago is harder to come by now. In December of this year, the State of Texas warned its residents not to visit Mexico. In Nuevo Laredo, the “Cadillac Bar,” in business for over 50 years, closed along with many other restaurants that served tourists and locals. “Marti’s,” the gallery of Mexican craft and material culture, is moving north to San Antonio.

Posted in Journal |