He entered the poem through a long stairway of splintered wood worn glossy black where heels long ago chipped away the white paint and shoes dragged down to the concrete- floored basement. Heavy light dropped bars of metallic dust. He would have liked a poem of glass and plush white carpet, cantilevered over the Aegean antiquity perched on an island across a diamond-studded bay. But the poem he had entered was the only one open that day after a deafening sixth period class and a long walk through Vermilion Cliffs Trailer Court under the intense Arizona sun, poverty sweltering like puss. So he did what only he could do, which is not much. He added a stanza An aquarium of glass water, silver fishes swimming through soft light. He almost transcended.
I was through with architecture when I met the Douglas House. It was the end of a dream. I realized I didn't have it in me to be an architect. It had nothing to do with the forms. The play of spaces--light, air, volume--moved me, but I didn't like the people, the competition, the corporate mindset of the school of architecture. My decision came the day one of my professors gave us the assignment to design a Utopian city based on medieval military fortresses. The fortresses were beautiful if you only thought about shape, such as the example below:
But I couldn't get my head around Utopia being enclosed--even if only metaphorically. When I asked, "How can you design Utopia based upon a structure of war?" my professor thought I was a smart A, which is fine, because I thought he was a dumb A. Meanwhile, I'd been skipping classes half the time, writing depressing poems in my gloomy dorm instead of designing closed utopias for a school that proudly announced the first day of class that "50 percent of you will drop out before the end of year; our job is to weed out all but the best." I felt more at home in the English department, among those who questioned the morality of everything, even the family dynamics around the Thanksgiving dinner table. I quickly immersed myself in classes such as Psychopathology in Literature, Bible as Literature, Women in Literature and American Fiction as History. Everything was about connections, context, history and cultural dynamics. Nothing floated disconnected to the past. Nothing was beyond questioning. So, I never expected to have my breath taken away by a building again. As far as architecture goes, I was an apostate. I'd left the fold bitterly and had no intention of looking back. But, then it happened. I wish I remembered how, but I don't. What remains is myth. That is all there is. I believe I was looking through a magazine while sitting in a cold, dreary concrete block waiting room while getting the oil changed in my Plymouth Reliant. Maybe the magazine was Architectural Digest, but it could have been any magazine. I don't remember an article, so it was probably only an add. Yet, it must have included Meier's name. I knew of his work, but hadn't seen this house before. I was stunned. It seemed to cascade down the forested hillside like a waterfall of light and air, both tumbling down and soaring towards the heaven at the same time. The home is entered from the top level via a flying bridge from a street that runs along the hillside. You enter through the closed, walled private spaces that face the road. The house then opens and drops in a series of spaces thrown open to the wilds through the huge glass planes. The home perfects lessons learned from Meier's earlier design of the Smith House. (See video below)
For over 30 years, I've had a this Utopian dream: to live in the perfect white house in the middle of an alkali flat isolated somewhere in the American west. The house would hover on piloti, as would the long concrete drive, and during the spring run-off the home would float over the shallow, broad lake. The rest of the time, it would stand above the cracked, salt-crystallized flat. During the summer, the house would remain relatively cool despite its location due to its color and the color of the surrounding landscape--a modern beach house on a metaphorical beach. Beautiful. It doesn't look like I'll ever have the money to pull off such a dream, and even if I did, most alkali flats in the U.S. are located on B.L.M. land, which is just as well, so everyone can enjoy the isolation, one lonely traveler at a time. I have never bothered to design the perfect house for my dream site because that house was built between 1928 and 1931 in Poissy, France. It is the brain child of Swiss Architects, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. There is simply no way I could improve upon it, other than move it to the perfect site. As I doubt this will be last post on this masterpiece in white, I'll keep this short and share a wonderful video to let you experience it for yourself.
Why white? I don't know. Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier. Snow. The White Album. The architecture of Richard Meier. The Cliffs of Dover. Marble. Greece. Beaches. "Café at Night" by Paul Blackburn:
The men are white the wine is white Two women come in, they order hot milk. Everything is still white (white)
White. The word has amazing sound. Pure. Beautiful. Blanco doesn't cut it.
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But white is also ugly, dangerous:
K. K. K.
WHITE SUPREMECY.
W.A.S.P.
Straight jackets.
White Van with
DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS (black print)
Just seemed there should be a blog dedicated to all things white.
