Talking to the trees

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Penelope Digby-Jones

In the Adirondacks of upper New York State, this house is a restatement of the ideal of the natural dwelling in the forest that has inspired a strand of modern thinking from picturesque cottages for eighteenth-century aristocrats through Thoreau's Walden, to, in the twentieth century, Aalto's Villa Mairea and the California Woodbutchers' cabins of the 1960s.

It is approached downhill through the forest from the main road, and the site itself suddenly starts to slope steeply towards the lakeshore. The precise location was chosen to minimise the destruction of trees, and the house is entered at the upper level, partly so that the main living space can command wide views above the trees to the lake. This big volume is approached from the north under a generous porch which is supported by stout peeled cedar logs which reflect the surrounding forest. Peeled cedar logs provide most of the primary structure of the main spaces as well, and are supplemented at the junction of the north-south axis and the east-west one with a massive stone fireplace made of smooth rounded granite boulders, like those that form the retaining walls near the entrance porch.

The tree-like columns in the living space are clearly intended to echo the rhythms and forms of the forest outside and they are carefully placed so that you do not get an impression of regularity as you enter the volume. As well as the forest, the other inspiration for the house has been the Adirondack Great Camps, holiday resorts, which date from the early part of this century, in which the American Arts and Crafts Movement created recreational centres from the great timbers of the forests, drawing on precedents of Japanese and European mountain buildings.

This influence has perhaps been followed too literally and not ingested enough into the basic conversation between Modernism and Nature. For instance, the small-paned windows on the gables seem too close to late-nineteenth-century precedents for comfort. This is not to suggest that the openings should be simple planes of glass: the frames and glazing bars modulate the view, and intensify the experience of containment inside and its relationship to the the wild exterior, But did the windows have to be quite so eclectic - or for that matter, the boulders arranged so much like a turn-of-the-century mountain hotel fireplace?

But for all such reservations, the house is a bold and sensitive attempt to make the most of the site and to speak to the forest that surrounds it. Like trees, its trunk-like columns spring from natural boulders; they terminate under the dull silver of the lead-covered copper roof that reflects the sky.