Frank Harmon Architect

projects, sketches, and studio life

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Drawing Shadows

One September afternoon after I’d moved from England to Alabama, I saw the shadows of leaves dancing on a whitewashed shed. I cried with happiness. I loved England, but not it’s overcast days.

Years later, my wife Judy and I built a house in North Carolina with stucco walls like blotting paper for shadows. When I wake in this house, I see images of leaves on the curtains. Moonlight casts shadows onto the living room floor. A prayer and a benediction.

A shadow cast by the sun is a diary, moving slightly every 24 hours. Drawing this is a quiet moment against the distractions of daily life.

The light from the sun traveled 93 million miles to make these shadows. The least I can do, faced with such wonder, is to draw them.

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Aimery Joëssel

“Three Strange Visitors in the Garden”, 2006

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Hymenocallis I believe

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Crinum Lily A postcard from the pandemic: “One of my grandfathers died of a clump of Iris stylosa,” wrote Beverly Nichols, the British gardener and playwright. “It enticed him from a sickbed on an angry evening in January, luring him through the snowdrifts with its blue silver flames; he died of double pneumonia a few days later. It was probably worth it.” I thought of Grandfather Nichols recently when a pink crinum, usually a late summer flower, decided unexpectedly to bloom in mid-December. I trudged out to see it, not in a snowdrift but in my frost-withered garden. There it was in the pale December sunlight, a frail and slender lily that chose to fling its pink star into the night. After nine months of fear and darkness, it seemed like hope. 

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Cozumel

From the airplane window, I glimpsed a small airport terminal in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was painted in bright colors. The jacaranda trees were blooming and a mother was selling tortillas in the open breezeway. I wanted to get off the plane and start my life over. How is it that a small detail can change the way we live? What does a painted airport tell us about a country, and even about ourselves? In Mexico everything matters, my wife Judy said. “The stones in the street, the fruit placed on a market stand, the geometric pattern on the dress of a tortilla seller. It’s all esthetic.” Moreover, this esthetic wasted little and honored much. After seeing toy animals made of soda cans, eggshells turned into flowers, and an ordinary philodendron growing on a wall in a reused jar, I slowly realized that the extraordinary could be made from the ordinary. When I looked out of that airplane window 30 years ago, our children were in school and Judy was becoming a landscape architect. We wouldn’t get off.

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Angel in a Cornfield

It was one of those winter days when rain came down in sheets. We'd visited a construction site and were going back home. There was a quick way to get back to town, but she didn't take it. Instead, we drove along country roads.

Occasionally we saw Christmas lights on farmhouses, coming into view like galleons over the hills. We stopped for peanuts at a dimly lit general store. A sign beneath a wreath read "no public toilets."

The store, which was about the size of two large living rooms, smelled of tobacco smoke, the way stores did 50 years ago. Three people with deeply lined faces sat talking and smoking at the back of the store. One gave us some brownies she'd made. We paid for our soft drinks and peanuts at the counter where another hand-written sign said "NO CREDIT."

Outside in the lamplight, a woman picked through a pile of sweet potatoes taller than she was. "Take some, " she said. “They're free."

We drove away with our salted nuts and gifts, thinking about the mixed messages at the store. But it was the Christmas lights we watched. And as we were crossing a flooded creek, we saw an angel.

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Bernard Maybeck: Gardener and Architect

A building usually looks prettiest on the day the last brick is tucked into place, then it begins to weather and fade. By contrast, a freshly planted landscape leafs out and grows better with time.

Bernard Maybeck’s landscapes and buildings improved with age, however. That's because he valued leaves as much as bricks.

Maybeck (1862-1957) designed Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, on a hilltop bluff 250 feet above the Mississippi River. He insisted on buildings that were long and thin and followed the contours of the limestone bluff. As a result, "You can read the topography of the land at Principia just by looking at the buildings," observed architect John Guenther.

Maybeck planned his buildings at Principia as though they had been dropped in among the oak trees. "You already have a garden," he told the client when he first saw the wooded bluff. “All you have to do is keep it up.”

Frank Lloyd Wright famously said that a surgeon could bury his mistakes but that an architect could only plant vines. Maybeck planted vines not to cover his errors but to make Principia more natural, more romantic. He penned this note on his blueprints: "Vines to be grown on building wherever possible."

"In creating his own small harmony," his friend Jean Murray Bangs said, "he does not destroy nature's larger one."

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Is Height Important?

Stroll down Fifth Street in Columbus, Indiana, and you will observe three towers in a row: Columbus City Hall, First Christian Church, and St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Height gave City Hall a sense of civic dignity. First Christian Church’s clock tower was a civic and religious symbol. And the spire of the Lutheran Church pointed to heaven.

Why was height so important?

The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto observed that the tallest buildings in a town usually represented the most important values in that town. Here in Columbus, tallness represented civic and spiritual values. But in most American cities, banks and office buildings tower above everything else.

What does this say about our values?

The people of Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to say that government mattered, so they enacted a law that no building could be higher than the pillars supporting the dome of the State Capitol. Seen across Lake Mendota, the Madison skyline is breathtaking. And from what I can tell, the real estate and finance industries in Madison are doing just fine.

It's reassuring that in Columbus size mattered. "Architecture belongs to culture," Aalto wrote, "not to civilization."

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Building In Cities

"There is nothing in which birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before," wrote Irish essayist Robert Lynd.

Mr. Lynd might change his mind if he saw this house built into a quarry wall near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Roman masons cut rock here 2000 years ago, leaving a pit the size of a football field. A family then built a cave-like dwelling into the rock face.

Birds nest in cities, also, in eaves, chimneys, and even mailboxes. And some of our greatest cities are composed of modest, well-proportioned buildings that make an effort to leave the city as it was – just as birds do. Historian Sir Nicolas Pevsner observed, "One building is architecture, two buildings are townscape." Ordinary buildings are the fabric of a city.

So when architects strive to stand out in this context with structures that are new and different, we might offer this advice: If all things were new and different, we would feel uncomfortable, just as we would if all buildings were the same.

Robert Lynd may have the last word, though. “Friendship,” he wrote, “will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long."

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Why do we enjoy dining by the water? Beside the obvious reasons that a summer evening is cooler near the water and the view is charming, I believe water gives us a sense of time against which we measure the comings and goings of the day.

In the late 1800s, ordinary working Parisians flocked to open-air drinking spots along the river Seine. Renoir painted such a gathering in Le déjeuner des canotiers.

These drinking gardens were known as guinguettes and something like them survives today, often connected to a campground, such as this one at Etang de la Bonde in Vaucluse, France. The menu includes steak, frites, and haricots verts prepared simply and served with wine on metal tables beside the lake. At dusk the lamps come on and light is reflected in the trees.

Renoir's painting captured the petit gestures and everyday pleasures of working people on their day off nearly 140 years ago. At Etang de la Bonde, our smiles, the tinkling of glasses, a touch on the wrist, or hair fluttering in the breeze seem timeless next to the still water of the lake.

And the haricots verts are not to be missed.

Click here for a view of Le déjeuner des canotiers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

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Back Yard to the City

What makes a great city? Is it the streets and avenues, the parks and shops, the storied mansions and splendid fountains?

I'd like to cast a vote for the alleyway.

This alley in Vancouver, BC, won't appear on a post card. But as part of a network of alleyways,  it helps to make Vancouver a great city. Step into the alley and you catch the mingled odors of samosas, urine, and dust. People come and go delivering socks and diamonds, potatoes and coffee beans. And you'll notice Vancouver’s intestines are located here: power lines, sewers, recycling bins, access for fire trucks, and pathways for the night watchman. Streets belong to the people, not to delivery trucks and power poles, because alleyways are there to serve them.

For composer John Cage, silence was as important as sound. Cage wrote 4'33" No. 2 for musicians who sat on stage for four minutes and 33 seconds without making a sound. Instead, the audience got to hear the music around them.

An alleyway is like silence in a city.  

So the next time you're in town, take a moment for the alleyway. It's worth a detour.

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The Huberman-Bromer Residence in the Uwharrie Mountains. 

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Oak Park, 1889 "Be regular and orderly in your life like the bourgeoisie so that you can be wild and original in your art," wrote Gustave Flaubert in 1876.

No artist was less like Flaubert than Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Creditors, divorces, scandal, and bankruptcy hounded Wright for most of his life. It could be said that the pure unfettered joy of his architecture was built on the ashes of his failed relationships.

He designed this small house for his family in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1889 when he was 22 years old. He and Catherine Tobin Wright raised their six children here before their relationship unraveled.

"The architect absorbed the father," he lamented.

Looking at Wright's house today, we can remember the turmoil of his family life but the real thrill comes from recognizing the young architect's incomparable boldness. Here are the natural materials, the bold geometry, the elusive entrance, the home rooted to the earth and open to the sky that would later personify Wright's style.

 On a Saturday afternoon in June the Wright house is dappled in light. Although it belongs to another century it has the whiff of modernism. A breeze shakes the trees and children’s laughter echoes down the street.

See also TC Boyle’s The Women, a biographical novel on Frank Lloyd Wright, told through his relationships with four women.  

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The Seven Sisters Residence on St. Helena Island. 

Seven Sisters rests lightly on the edge of the coastal marsh and is built on 14 foot pilings to protect against flooding. With a large southern overhang, the house is designed to maximize solar orientation and remain naturally ventilated 9 months of the year. Half of the square footage is open-air living area, most of which is protected from cold North winds by a sliding door.

The cypress rain screen and reclaimed heart pine floors were felled and milled within 50 miles of the site. The home operates on a whole-house tankless water heater and a mini split HVAC system is used to condition the interior space during peak hot and cold weather.

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The Huberman Residence http://frankharmon.com/projects/residential/huberman-bromer-mountain-retreat

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Standing Tall

Why are tall buildings starting to be forgettable? Twenty stories high, 300 feet in the air, and we don't give them a second look.

Here's a tall building you can't fail to notice: Christ Church Spitalfields built in 1729 by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor to serve the poor on the outskirts of London. His church soared above the squat buildings around it with a limestone tower shining through the coal smoke of London. Hawksmoor's tower was an expression of joy, pure and unrepentant.

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) thought that a tall building should celebrate its height. "What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, ‘It is lofty.’ This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect," he wrote in The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Sullivan's Reliance Building in Chicago is considered to be the first modern office structure to celebrate its height.

To Sullivan and Hawksmoor, tallness was an artistic treasure. Today our tall office buildings are often prosaic, little more than built density. Perhaps it's time to look up.

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Chimney Swifts                     

A chimney swift is a small brown bird that weighs less than a heaping tablespoon of sugar and flies from North America to Peru every winter. In autumn the swifts form flocks to migrate southward, congregating above city roofs at dusk when as many as 5000 birds will spiral downwards into a brick chimney to roost. 

Enter the US Navy.

Some far-sighted Navy scientists are trying to learn how these tiny birds can fly so close together without colliding. Why? Because the Navy has its own flock: not boats but drones.

 It is a splendid vision the Navy has -- unless you wonder how a sky full of drones flying close together might interact with a flock of chimney swifts.

 Another splendid vision 40 years ago was an herbicide called Roundup®, hailed as the farmer's friend. Now we learn that Roundup® may cause the extinction of another great migration -- that of the monarch butterfly.

As darkness settles on Nash Square in Raleigh, a flock of chimney swifts descends whirlwind-like into a chimney atop the Professional Building. Sometimes we may be better off appreciating the sweetness and wonder of nature without trying to grasp its secrets.