The Studio of
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Apartment interior, 101 Beacon St.
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The Inner Designer
#1 - A beautiful room
I was rather young when I read “The Eighteenth Century Houses of Williamsburg” by Marcus Whiffen. I certainly was in grammar school at the time. I had acquired from my mother a passion for “Colonial” buildings. This was during the 1950’s. Scholarship on the subject was still rather quaint, and the terms “Colonial” and “Early American” were still in general use- often absent any specific reference to 1776. Our library at home contained many lovely picture books, “The treasury of Early American Houses” for instance, “The Architectural heritage of the Piscataqua” or many other regions. My mother collected these books in our 1954 mid century modern home that my father had built and which caused much tension between my parents.
The Whiffen book however was mine, a gift from my mother. I suspect that its importance to me was unanticipated, but it struck a cord that I still hear sounding in the back of my mind. Unlike the genealogies of ownership and politics that was usual in describing old buildings, this book explained how the buildings were built, how the parts and materials related to one another, and the technical aspects of design. I was enthralled!
A number of years later I found myself in Dublin, Ireland. This was the time when the idea of urban renewal and the international school held sway and determined official attitudes to the built environment. A time before Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Ben Thompson among other would cause us to look again at the fabric of or cities. Georgian building in Dublin were being destroyed at an alarming rate.
I became connected with a gentleman there who had taken on the mission of saving as much as he could of the interior detailing of buildings under demolition. The first project that I worked on with him was house on Nassau Street. It was a very nice mid 18th Century building, fine but typical. The first lesson for me, which on the surface would seem to be the important one, was how a square newel stair of this period was constructed. In order to remove these materials it was necessary to determine the sequence of installation and the methods and places of connections, then to very carefully dismember the staircase in reverse order, knocking out or drilling pegs. Three stories of three or four flights per story came apart like the pieces of an erector set. it was stunning!
But there was another, more subtle lesson in store. Being low man on the totem pole, it fell to me to do the final walk through when we finished, checking for left tools or important bits and pieces- that bag of pegs, for instance. Up the ladder that now replaced the stairs I went, and I walked alone into the drawing room. This beautiful room was now shorn of it’s “eared and shouldered” window and door cases, the thick mahogany doors which swung on their brass hinges and closed with a satisfying click of their brass box locks were gone, the chair rail and dado, the wall base that was as heavily molded as the base of an ionic column, gone, as were the paneled window shutters. I expected the room to be a disheartening scene of devastation. But when I walked through the door I was stunned to see that the room was still a beautiful room, majestic in proportion, with its sensuous light flooding in from the outside.
All that we had taken away turned out to incidental, the beauty was not in the superficial detail, but in the planning and proportion.
I was rather young when I read “The Eighteenth Century Houses of Williamsburg” by Marcus Whiffen. I certainly was in grammar school at the time. I had acquired from my mother a passion for “Colonial” buildings. This was during the 1950’s. Scholarship on the subject was still rather quaint, and the terms “Colonial” and “Early American” were still in general use- often absent any specific reference to 1776. Our library at home contained many lovely picture books, “The treasury of Early American Houses” for instance, “The Architectural heritage of the Piscataqua” or many other regions. My mother collected these books in our 1954 mid century modern home that my father had built and which caused much tension between my parents.
The Whiffen book however was mine, a gift from my mother. I suspect that its importance to me was unanticipated, but it struck a cord that I still hear sounding in the back of my mind. Unlike the genealogies of ownership and politics that was usual in describing old buildings, this book explained how the buildings were built, how the parts and materials related to one another, and the technical aspects of design. I was enthralled!
A number of years later I found myself in Dublin, Ireland. This was the time when the idea of urban renewal and the international school held sway and determined official attitudes to the built environment. A time before Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Ben Thompson among other would cause us to look again at the fabric of or cities. Georgian building in Dublin were being destroyed at an alarming rate.
I became connected with a gentleman there who had taken on the mission of saving as much as he could of the interior detailing of buildings under demolition. The first project that I worked on with him was house on Nassau Street. It was a very nice mid 18th Century building, fine but typical. The first lesson for me, which on the surface would seem to be the important one, was how a square newel stair of this period was constructed. In order to remove these materials it was necessary to determine the sequence of installation and the methods and places of connections, then to very carefully dismember the staircase in reverse order, knocking out or drilling pegs. Three stories of three or four flights per story came apart like the pieces of an erector set. it was stunning!
But there was another, more subtle lesson in store. Being low man on the totem pole, it fell to me to do the final walk through when we finished, checking for left tools or important bits and pieces- that bag of pegs, for instance. Up the ladder that now replaced the stairs I went, and I walked alone into the drawing room. This beautiful room was now shorn of it’s “eared and shouldered” window and door cases, the thick mahogany doors which swung on their brass hinges and closed with a satisfying click of their brass box locks were gone, the chair rail and dado, the wall base that was as heavily molded as the base of an ionic column, gone, as were the paneled window shutters. I expected the room to be a disheartening scene of devastation. But when I walked through the door I was stunned to see that the room was still a beautiful room, majestic in proportion, with its sensuous light flooding in from the outside.
All that we had taken away turned out to incidental, the beauty was not in the superficial detail, but in the planning and proportion.