Haystack's Architecture: Vision & Legacy
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Participating architects: choose a name below to scroll directly to their exhibition statement
Toshiko Mori • Peter Hamilton • Mark Cavagnero • Elliott + Elliott Architecture
Edward Larrabee Barnes • Bruce Norelius • Studio Ma (Christopher Alt, Dan Hoffman, Christiana Moss)
Carol A. Wilson • Christopher Glass • Randy Brown Architects (Randy Brown, Andrew Conzett)
James Carpenter • Frederick Stelle • Bruce S. Fowle
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| Curator, Carol A. Wilson FAIA giving a Gallery Talk. | Haystack's Architecture: Vision & Legacy at the Center for Community Programs. | Participating architects were on hand for the opening. |
Exhibition introductions:
Stuart Kestenbaum, Haystack's Director • Carol A. Wilson, FAIA, Exhibition Curator
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Haystack campus, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1915-2004). Haystack as a school has influenced generations of makers in the various craft fields, but it has also influenced generations of architects. With this show, curated by Carol A. Wilson, FAIA, we wanted to explore that influence.
In addition to Haystack, Ed Barnes designed some of this country’s most notable buildings, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the IBM Building in New York City, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington. He studied architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and opened his own office in 1949. His lifetime achievements as an architect were recognized by the American Institute of Architects, when he was posthumously awarded its Gold Medal in 2007.
In 1994 the American Institute of Architects honored Haystack with its Twenty-Five Year Award, calling it “an early and profound example of the fruitful and liberating fusion of the vernacular building traditions with the rationality and discipline of Modern Architecture.” The award recognizes buildings that have had a significant impact on architecture and design in this country, and Haystack is one of only approximately 40 recipients. Others include the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the St. Louis Arch, the Guggenheim Museum, and Rockefeller Center.
At Haystack we worked with Ed closely on our building projects, and continue to follow his design principles. I think it is rare for an architect to have had such an extended relationship with a client, and I always looked forward to discussing renovations and new projects with him. He once said of Haystack (in Architecture Magazine in 1989), “I’ve always been drawn to making things as simple as possible, if you can do that without making them inhuman or dull or oppressive.” He had an incisive and sympathetic vision that was a perfect match for the school, and we are honored to have worked with him.
Stuart Kestenbaum, Director • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
CURATOR'S STATEMENT
I did not know Edward Larrabee Barnes well, but our paths crossed on several occasions. Not long before he died, he and Mary Barnes came to Haystack to meet with my architecture students and talk about the origins of the project, the direct conversation with the landscape, the respect for the site, and the ability to produce by hand, innovative architecture.
For this and a few other profound meetings with Edward Barnes, I was fortunate. As a Maine architect, Haystack's architecture sets a standard, not only for timelessness, but also as an example, even in 2011, of problems we should be solving and innovative ways of seeing and building.
Edward encouraged, or perhaps admonished the students NOT to copy what he had done, but to respond with the same sensitivity by questioning what they were about and considering the repercussions, to recognize their responsibility combined with their capability for architectural expression.
The inspiration and lessons learned from Barnes and his work at Haystack are the basis for this summer's exhibition, Haystack's Architecture: Vision and Legacy.
The projects presented, by models, drawings, and photographs, represent an extraordinary group of architects with the ability to bring together, the pragmatic with the poetic.
Carol A. Wilson, FAIA • 14 Longwoods Road • Falmouth, Maine 04105
Edward Larrabee Barnes’s architecture has simple plans and exquisite details. I was attracted to his work because there was something romantically American about his informal use of modern architectural language. To me, it was exotic.
My studies at Cooper Union had focused on formal European precedents such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and the work of John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman and Raimund Abraham in the late seventies.
By contrast, Ed’s houses in particular are like a bespoke linen suit: loosely constructed yet elegantly tailored with a comfortable fit. The materials he uses are often humble, simple materials - wood, stone and brick - but they are aligned in such a way as to produce tension. It resonates with a crispness and sobriety that stimulates the mind and soul of occupants.
His work represents generosity of scale and spatiality, as well as clarity of sequence. In proportions, one recalls the Greeks; his work is at once ancient and contemporary, grand and intimate. In the seventies, when the New York Five were the major trend, Ed’s work was not focused on abstraction. Instead, his buildings were embedded in their site, creating a careful contrast and balance with nature. I worked for Ed and Mary Barnes right after graduating from Cooper Union between 1976 and 1981 when I started my own practice.
The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is one of the most successful examples of Ed’s siting genius; the decentralization of program, distribution of small buildings along walkways and patios, and the usage of traditional techniques and materials all re-invent an agrarian village typology through modern architectural language. It inhabits the site in perfect harmony with the views, lighting, and nature of Deer Isle, Maine.
Toshiko Mori Architect, PLLC • 199 Lafayette Street, Suite 5A • New York, NY 10012
The most striking memory I have of the Mountain School of Crafts is how Edward Larrabee Barnes’s basic wood structures attach to the hillside in a village-like configuration that follow the site’s sloping contours.
Haystack’s deference to the local vernacular and landscape informs the design approach for Runaway Island on Parry Sound, Ontario. Rather than the rolling topography of Deer Isle Maine, the north-south striations of glaciated rock establish the island-cottages’ orientation. Geometric forms in balloon frame resemble the fishing huts that Georgian Bay fisherman use as home base.
Despite the open environment, the “bunkies” low profile makes them almost invisible on the horizon, maintaining a discreteness that is reminiscent of Barnes’s treed-in village.
Respect for site singularity is manifest not only in modesty in form but also functionality in plan. Runaway Island’s simple interior and exterior layout conveys a sense of easy movement across an otherwise bare and slippery terrain.
The resulting balance between reassuring order and protection on the one hand, and raw exposure on the other, is a hallmark of Haystack, with its network of straight-running boardwalks that encourage engagement with the outdoors.
www.peterhamiltonarchitects.com
Peter Hamilton ARCHITECTS • 67 Roxborough Street • West Toronto, ON, M5R 1T9
I visited the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts with Edward Larrabee Barnes’s son, John Barnes, in the summer of 1984. At this time, I was working for the Barnes’ office. Haystack struck me as a remarkable example of a design which was all at once purposeful, vernacular, rigorous, crisply modern, extremely delicate, and highly personal.
The delicacy perhaps struck me first. The way the buildings float above the ground plane, the way the siting allows them to weave amidst the mature trees and step down the hill without forcing the land or the vegetation to yield.
But the highly personal evocation struck me the hardest. I could hear Ed Barnes’s
voice in these buildings, exhorting us to find a balance, a way to build and live modestly but intelligently. These buildings, like Ed, carry an indelible tone of sincerity that is both luminous and timeless. They will never be out of style, as they carry no style, no affectation- only a delicate rigor that feels quite at home on the coast of Maine in the making of art.
Mark Cavagnero Associates • 1045 Sansome Street Suite 200 • San Francisco, CA 94111
Much like the work this project was inspired by, Edward Larrabee Barnes’s Heckscher House, Pond House explores the boundary between the sheltered and the exposed; the expected and the incidental; and questions the relationship between traditional vernacular formal expression and modern life.
Inspired by local fishing shacks and wharf buildings dotting the coast of Maine, this project borrows from the typology and its relationship to the water but inserts large glazed openings into a taut shingled skin. This skin is incised to open views to the ocean beyond and relies on light steel framing and thin braces to preserve the simple forms eroded to open views to the ocean.
The three gabled cottages and the sheltering courtyard they create conceal the sweeping views and palisade they are perched upon. This study in contrast is made more apparent upon moving through and around each cottage where entire walls dissolve into views of the site, the water beyond and the moss carpeted forest. Each cottage acts as a filter for perceiving the natural landscape, as in Barnes’ work, this juxtaposition can be at once sheltering and intimate while stark and exposed. Absent of detail the cottages rely on light and simple texture to render changes in weather, season and light.
The boundary Pond House straddles is one that Barnes explored often. Maintaining this balance requires an intimate knowledge of both conditions and a resultant architecture that amplifies the fundamental attributes of each.
Elliott + Elliott Architecture • PO Box 318 • Blue Hill, ME 04614
One of the happiest jobs of my career was Haystack—an arts and crafts summer school on Deer Isle, Maine. I remember first walking onto the site and looking down the rocky wooded slope to the sea. I wondered whether we should build at the top or down near the shore. Then it came to me: we could build on the slope, with a long flight of steps perpendicular to the horizon. Studios and sleeping units would branch out from each side.
The site is absolutely beautiful—tall spruce trees against the sea, granite slopes, moss, and lichen. The buildings, set on stilts, are interspersed with wood decks. The idea was not to disturb the ground in any way. There are two basic building types: sleeping units with ribbon windows facing the sea and peaked windows on the sides; and studios with tall windows for north light and, again, ribbon windows, facing the sea. (These forms were adapted from an idea I had had for a studio a few years before—a simple volumetric form combining triangular and square geometry.)
It became apparent that we were designing a village with a main “street” leading to the sea, dining hall and offices at the top, studios and decks branching out on the side streets, and clusters of living units nestled in the woods. The design provides separation for work and living. The cost in 1960 with only rough studs inside was about five dollars per square foot.
Haystack is now over thirty years old—years of hard wear, reshingling, additions here and there, including a foundry. One of the side streets was extended to add more cottages. In 1979 we build a visitors center and parking to direct the many summer visitors, and their cars, away from the front door. With all of this, Haystack remains a wonderfully poetic place to teach and learn. In 1994 Haystack received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-Five-Year Award.
Edward Larrabee Barnes from Edward Larrabee Barnes Architect (Rizzoli, New York, 1994)
HOUSE ON PUNKINVILLE ROAD
It is not possible to conscientiously practice architecture in Maine without questioning, time and again, the relationship of one’s work to the rich historical built context found here. How do we pay respect to centuries of architectural precedents inhabiting every nook of the state when we build today? Amidst an astonishingly beautiful natural context, 300 years of buildings stand as architectural totems: When read carefully and thoroughly, they tell the story of human habitation and its connection with climate, land, politics, hope, emotion.
Edward Larrabee Barnes’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has taught me several lessons about designing here. The most fundamental: the importance of first understanding, then expressing architecturally, a clear attitude about the work’s relationship to what has gone before.
Clearly, Haystack evokes the spirit of local (and quickly vanishing) fishing and pier structures, but by no means copies them. Barnes finds the most essential elements to push his metaphor, and he understands them in great depth. He does much more than simply use shingles and pitched roofs; the success comes from other elements, too: The “object” quality of the buildings, the proportion of big and small openings, the spirit of reduction, the aesthetic honesty arising from the construction method. And, most importantly, scale.
If I take one single lesson from Haystack, it is the importance of understanding scale when working to integrate with the historical fabric of Maine. Barnes broke down a program requiring several thousand square feet into multiple components that feel right for wood construction, feel right on a challenging, sloping site, and feel right amidst the simple, beautiful architectural heritage of Deer Isle. It’s a tool I often use, and Haystack is the precedent from which I draw.
Bruce Norelius Studio • 12450 Rochedale Lane • Los Angeles, CA 90049
CHRISTOPHER ALT • DAN HOFFMAN • CHRISTIANA MOSS
Whispering Hope Ranch is a camp for children with special medical needs located in the ponderosa pine forest in the Arizona Highlands. With its streams, meadows and views, the Ranch provides a welcome respite from the extreme summer heat of the Phoenix Valley. An extensive path system connects the many features of the forty-five acre site allowing children to wander freely and to have therapeutic interactions with the rescued animals that also reside at the Ranch. The site posed many challenges including poor soils, excessive slopes and overgrown forested areas making it vulnerable to erosion and fire. The combination of strong sunlight and summer monsoon rains also had to be considered. The program includes a dining hall, administration offices, single and double cabins and an infirmary. The camp’s many structures are organized through a sloping shed/butterfly roof motif providing large porches for camp activities. Natural materials such as western fir and pine are used throughout, cladding and framing the structures in a manner similar to barns and outbuildings used by local settlers.
Edward Larrabee Barnes’s design for Haystack was an inspiration for the project. With its simple sheds and terraced decks, it demonstrates how architecture can strike a balance with the natural environment; combining the rugged qualities of a forested New England coastline with abstracted forms inspired by the local, cedar- shake-clad fisherman’s shack. The linked, public spaces created by the decks and stairways at Haystack were also an inspiration for the porch/decks used at Whispering Hope Ranch. Connected by a looped path system that winds its way through the forest, the decks form a chain of public spaces that distributes activities throughout the site rather than concentrating them in a single place.
This project demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Ed Barnes’s idea of “responsive modernism” where formal clarity and clear organizational principles are juxtaposed with the rich complexity of the natural environment.
Haystack remains an inspiration.
Studio Ma • 130 North Central Avenue Suite 300 • Phoenix, AZ 85004
Edward Larrabee Barnes the architect is to me as the painter John Bauer was to the Swedes. The Swedes loved him and they believed that no one else knew how to paint a forest. The Swedish illustrator Tove Jansson wrote of Bauer:
“I walk through a forest drawn by John Bauer. He was the one who knew how to make forests, no one has dared try since he was lost. And those who try, we despise them . . . to make the forest big enough, you leave out the crowns of the trees and the sky. You just make straight and very thin trunks that rise straight up. The ground is soft hillocks, they continue farther and farther off, smaller and smaller, until the forest becomes endless. There are stones, too, but you cannot see them. Moss has grown peacefully over them for a thousand years. If you step on the moss, you make a deep hole that doesn't fill for a week. If you step on it again, you have made a hole that lasts forever. Step on it a third time, and the moss dies.
In a properly painted forest everything is roughly the same color, the moss, the tree trunks, and the branches; it is something gentle and serious, somewhere between grey and brown and green but there’s only a little bit of green.”
We think of the Maine landscape as rugged, but the mosses and lichens that cover the ledge are fragile. When architects speak of “touching the earth lightly,” Haystack is my benchmark.
Carol A. Wilson, FAIA • 14 Longwoods Road • Falmouth, Maine 04105
My architectural education began in the Washington Cathedral, where I went to the school intended for the choir. Growing up in a 14th century Gothic building under construction was a formative experience.
I went to Yale, primarily because of the thrill of Paul Rudolph’s A&A building, which was new and untried and offered dramatic challenges for its users. I loved it. It was as dominant as the gothic and as structurally acrobatic.
But there was another side to modern architecture that I came to love even more - the careful and rational use of pure form within the context of the real traditions of a place. This was the architecture of Louis Kahn, and, from what I knew of it from the magazines, of Edward Larrabee Barnes, especially in the clarity of the Haystack complex.
I was able to study Haystack at close range when my mother, who was the elementary school art teacher at the cathedral, spent part of a summer there and I had occasion to visit. I was in the process of moving to Maine myself, and later I taught at Bowdoin.
Haystack offered a brilliant model of a way to retain a modern love of rectilinearity and pure form with a deep understanding of the irregularity and irreducibility of the natural world. The platforms always followed the building grid, and the buildings occurred at nodes in the grid, in a way that seemed at once highly disciplined and thoroughly playful.
Though I never knew him, I regard Edward Larrabee Barnes as one of my more important masters.
Christopher Glass, Architect • 38 Chestnut Street • Camden, ME 04843
Every so often you come across a building that seems so effortlessly designed, so correct in its place, that it looks as if it has always been there – that it was simply meant to be.
In the Midwest, we find this beauty in the remnants of barns, corn cribs, and silos that silently dot our landscape. Engrained in these buildings is an authentic expression of architecture that can only be found in the vernacular traditions specific to its place.
These buildings were crafted with a farmer’s perspective: a strong connection to the land and a labor with your hands mentality, resulting in work that undoubtedly embodies its place. Their beauty comes from slow weathering of wood and steel, honesty of structure resisting its weight, strands of sunlight filtering through slightly scattered boards, clear functions and confident scales, and a sense of whimsy and poetic delight.
We are lucky enough to notice these qualities every day in the landscape around us, and we try to capture these same qualities in our own work.
Edward Larrabee Barnes understood these qualities as well. By resisting much of the frivolous and novel academic debate of the day, Barnes found greater depth in the world immediately surrounding him. He sought a quiet, lucid, resolute, and beautiful architecture.
Much of Barnes’s work, specifically his intervention at the Haystack campus, responded to its environment in a way that could be most simply described as profoundly silent. He allowed his architecture to organize and express the rituals of daily life in a way that transformed the pragmatism and purposefulness of modern architecture to a level of poetic prose. Barnes truly understood the essence of the vernacular.
Randy Brown Architects • 5550 McKinley Street • Omaha NE 68154
Having led a glass workshop with Dale Chihuly at Haystack in 1969, I was inspired by Edward Larrabee Barnes’s architecture and its deep connection to the landscape and site. His ability to weave the campus into the fragile granite and moss ecology while elevating it slightly above the landscape created this great sense of levitation amongst the trees. This synthesis of nature and architecture orchestrates the school’s activities within its remarkable and dramatic context. The visiting artists are presented with a heightened sense of observation of the natural surroundings and this is something that my own work, even in the most urban context, has been focused on for over 40 years.
In 1985 I worked directly with Ed, creating a window sculpture within the chapel of his Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. The simplicity of his geometry and the clarity behind it could fully engage with the cinematic traits of my work and the inherent complexity of the natural world. We created a structural glass window consisting of 32 foot high glass blades stabilized with horizontal panels of dichroic glass. The window’s simple geometry generates a remarkable complexity that changes over the course of the day.
The parallel between Ed’s Haystack and our recent expansion of the Israel Museum Jerusalem is self evident. Like the Haystack site, the museum features a dramatic rise in elevation, a dispersed arrangement of modules organized along a singular axis and remarkable natural surroundings. With this museum we added a stair-free belowground Route of Passage to moderate the incline while inserting a light slot along its length. A cast glass water feature above activates the light that penetrates the slot while etched glass panels along the passage capture the activity providing a sense of the extraordinary landscape above.
Ed’s work has been instrumental to my own design and architecture integrating the experience of nature through phenomenal light into every aspect of architectural design.
James Carpenter Design Associates Inc. • 145 Hudson Street • New York, NY 10013
I grew up on a dirt road near Edward Larrabee Barnes’s house in Mount Kisco. He and Mary had built on a piece of land bought from a farmer and my family lived at the other end of the road. Until I was in architecture school, I worked on farms in the summer and that experience, along with my internship in Ed's office, informs my work today.
There are a number of reasons I became interested in architecture, not the least of which that he was such a charming guy and lived in that cool house!
I tried to do a summer internship with him while I was in architecture school; he invited me to New York for the summer and offered his apartment to stay in when I didn't want to make the commute to Mount Kisco. The spring before I was to start, I was awarded a summer traveling fellowship. I called Ed in anguish over what to do and he told me that the fellowship was much more important. I took it and so it was.
After graduation, I moved to New York to work for him. I got to meet Bruce Fowle, Toshiko Mori and others. I worked on the Old Campus at Yale, IBM in Mount Pleasant, and an addition to his house which I built with his son John and my brother.
One day, Ed invited me into his home office to talk. He was working on a sketch that eventually became the IBM building at 57th and Madison. He wanted me to return to the office to become clerk of the works for the IBM Mount Pleasant Building. I was loaned to IBM, working in the field every day for a year and a half monitoring the work of hundreds of people. Lots of fun for a farm boy. When I left the office in the spring of 77, Ed referred me to a potential client who helped establish my career path, as he did for many others who benefited from his mentorship.
As I was designing Beach House, the most immediate reference was the simple summer houses by the water I had seen and in which I spent time growing up. In hindsight I realize that it has many references to what I absorbed during my time in his office.
Most prominent is the clarity of conception and the joy found in the realization of that clarity of which Haystack is a classic example.
STELLEARCHITECTS • 48 Foster Avenue • PO Box 3002 • Bridgehampton, NY 11932
SKY HOUSE
Edward Larrabee Barnes Influence: Ed Barnes’s high-rise projects are typically monolithic unadorned masses with one or two major strokes to create levity and sculptural interest. As in the IBM Building in New York City with its attached winter-garden, the low-rise appendages were often fully glazed with his signature saw-toothed roof forms. Sky House, an imposing 54-story mass adjacent to an ensemble of historic ecclesiastic structures in a garden setting, was consciously conceived as a minimalist and scale less tower to ensure its background presence and not be overpowering. Composed of three nestled volumes, each with its own identity expressed with Barnes-like ribbon, square, or vertical fenestration in iron-spot masonry, the building is a study in restraint. By setting the tower back from the street-line, the three-story parish house at the base was enabled to express its own identity and maintain a scale that links it to the church ensemble. The glazed saw-tooth façade and roof monitors were clearly inspired by Ed’s work.
ZIEGLER HOUSE
Edward Larrabee Barnes Influence: The Ziegler House was designed shortly after I left the employment of Ed Barnes (8 years) and started my own firm, FXFOWLE (formerly Fox & Fowle). The assemblage of simple barn-like forms with no overhangs was clearly influenced by the Heckscher House in Mt. Desert Island and other of Ed’s residential and private school designs. Minimal fenestration, triangulated clerestory windows, and all-glass connectors—all strategically positioned to maximize views and daylight and link interior volumes to the natural world—were moves that Ed had developed and mastered over his career. The clarity of circulation, pinwheeling, and interplay of spaces and light were his trademarks.
TAYLOR HOUSE
Edward Larrabee Barnes Influence: This project was designed several years before I joined Ed Barnes’s firm. Strongly influenced by Ed’s Righter House on Fishers Island and the stilted individual units of Haystack Mountain, the house is perched on the bluff as a singular shed-roof object directed toward the water and scaled to the island’s fishing-shack/beach-house vernacular of the time. The minimalist ensemble of fenestration elements, strategically placed for views, ventilation, and spatial enhancement through day lighting, are variations of the signature components of Ed’s houses. The clarity of the axial circulation that threads through the house is typical of an Ed Barnes parti.
Bruce S. Fowle, FAIA, FXFOWLE • 22 W. 19th Street • New York, NY 10011
From the essay “Replacement” by the architect W. G. Clark |
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