by Frank Harmon, FAIA
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.