2+3 | Two Houses and Three Intentions

Matthew Knox
Kansas State University

These two houses are the result of an interlude with three intentions: placement, frame and type. The houses are each set in different conditions located at opposite edges of Manhattan, Kansas. One is located in an agricultural flood plane adjacent to the Kansas River. The other is located on a hill overlooking a new golf course on the western fringe of the city.

The three intentions are simple and common in the discussion of architecture and its relation to landscape. Still, they continue as rich sources offering depth both for historical research and usefulness in the deliberation and action of design. I would like to give a brief overview of the three as considered here and then speak briefly of their impact on the two houses. 

Placement

Malcom Andrews in Landscape and Art speaks about a poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ from Harmonium of 1923[1] whereby allegory is used to show relationship between two things, a round gray jar and the wilderness of Tennessee. By placing the jar in the wilderness a landscape is made. Nature is seen differently—the land becomes landscape. A comprehensible order becomes apparent similar to Martin Heidegger’s bridge causing the banks of the stream to lie in relationship to each other. The banks are no longer indifferent. The banks draw the land beyond to the bridge. A landscape is brought into being. Or as Caroline Constant, in reference to Palladian villas, stated, “Without the building, we would not see the landscape in the same terms; the architecture gathers the land( or landscape) into its domain and re-dimensions it.”

Yet, there is something more going on. The relationship between the two things is not dichotomous, each thing, the landscape and the architecture, become dependent on the other. Andrews uses Derrida’s language to expose the interconnectivity of this placement of one thing into or alongside another. If you consider the jar or the building as ergon, or work, and parergon with its root par meaning alongside or against, parergon can be construed as being by-work. What this means to us is that the two terms suggest a porous relation between the work—the jar or architecture—and its par, the alongside land (now a landscape). Derrida compares this to Immanuel Kant’s partially nude statue. The body of the statue is the ergon (the work) and the drapery is its par (the alongside). They are interwoven, the nude needing the co-presence of the draping to understand its nudeness.[2] This can also be seen at the temple at Stourhead needing the alongside to fulfill the composition—the temple is so present because of the landscape and the landscape is clear because of the temple.

For example, Christo’s Running Fence lets us see the land as a landscape and the landscape lets us see the cloth fence. They are beside and along each other, each co-present. More connected to my intent but similar, actually an inversion of Christo’s fence, is the ha-ha. The ha-ha emerged in 18th-century England as a way of fencing the livestock without seeing a fence from the house. Sunk into the ground, the ha-ha brings the near and the far into a composed whole by placement—inside and outside fade as distinctions. The apparently uninterrupted land is actually an architecturally constituted landscape.

Frame

If placement is considered an initial act of architecture propagating landscape—the frame seems a probable act of development. Andrews describes landscape as what the viewer selects from the land, or what is framed. The architectural frame makes the landscape and draws our vision to its presence--the presence of an ordered world revealed by the framed gaze within architecture.

He goes on to describe how the “landscape is mediated by an interior, where that interior intrudes into the picture to define boundaries of the chosen scene or scenes.” [3] In other words, the architecture is not a single frame but is composed of many nested frames of interiority contiguously conjoined with landscape. This framing of pastoral views was so important it was simulated if not actually there as in Palladio’s Villa Barbaro.

This is, I think, commonly understood. There is, however, a second, more interesting reading of frame—a frame delimits the larger expanse, it constitutes a specific landscape but such an act also establishes awareness of there being more beyond our delimited view. Gilles Deleuze in an essay, “Cinema and Space: The Frame,” describes the “out-of-field as referring to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present.”[4] Things within frame extend to a much larger set making us aware that the frame is only showing one part of a larger set—a continuity of sets, or landscapes, is understood such as the King’s Road House by Shindler.

So, while the wall delimits interior, the frame selects and establishes landscape,[5] It concurrently provokes an out-of-field condition whereby the architectural frame is far more pervasive in its role. It actually forms continuity from interior, to the framed landscape to the extension of that landscape beyond itself. They become a contiguous whole

Type

The last intention is type. In his book, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, James Ackerman considers two models, the compact-cubic and the open-extended. The former is often a foil (a useful or interesting contrast) to its site but also can engage that site by placement and frame, a simple mass altering nature in subtle ways becoming in effect, a belvedere (Villa Savoy).

Differently, the open-extended extends materially into its site. The building actually becomes a bounding edge defining or implying exterior space by extension and containment such as the Barcelona Pavilion.

This approach relies less on placement of simple objects. Instead, it relies on an extended architectural frame containing and appropriating its alongside landscape. Such a relation was prevalent in the walled -adjacent gardens of the Renaissance Italian villa but the English garden of the 18^th-century often removed the remnants of such connections, a fact Laurie Olin attributes to so many modern formless gardens. He mentions how Russell Page felt such actions left house and garden displaced:

 “Most houses need anchoring to their setting, and for a traditional house some formal extensions of the straight lines and rectangular shapes of the buildings is usually the most effective way of doing so. The shapes and even the volumes of the interior of the house should find some echo on the larger, outside scale. Curved or straight walls and hedges, a line of clipped trees, a more or less formal pattern of flowers, a change in level with a bank or retaining wall are all useful devices to this end.”

Such literal or apparent echoes of projection contain the unbounded and extend the closed in spatial overlaps. In other words, invoking Deleuze one last time, “the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior.”[6]

•           •           •

House One

This house is for a surgeon who is an avid reader and writer of short stories. He lives alone in Manhattan, Kansas in an apartment at the top of an old hotel on the main street of town. The house is intended as an escape during the day or weekends to read and to write apart from his everyday life.  

The house is based on the closed-cubic type to the point of stridency—actually being a perfect cube. The cube, by placement alongside the road running north south proposes a new compositional order. The site beside the house is altered only below the existing horizontal ground plane. A rectangular horizontal plane extends the footprint of the house south toward the unseen river. The edges of the plane form a double ha-ha that composes the site beside the house while extending the ocular site. The flatness of the river plain location is re-emphasized by striking a strongly framed level pad that grounds the house initiating a formal order outside the house.  

As it is located in a flood plane and actually sits on the river side of the flood-control berms, the first floor is essentially a void with only the pool, some storage and an open garage. The main areas of the house are located on the second floor or piano nobile. The main spaces are a series of simple cubic volumes one or two-stories in height variously enclosed. The core of the cube is a glass-sheathed box containing the kitchen on the main level and the library above. The horizontally moveable skin is made of layers of clear, frosted and tinted glass. Its varied states of transparency imitate the furniture-like study of St. Jerome—his cabinet mediates with the interiority of the room in which his cabinet is placed but also to the landscape beyond seen through the windows.

These inner frames establish relation to the outer frames at the perimeter of the cube. Made of louvers and a double-glass ventilating wall, these elements are not simply windows but spatial frames. The frames establish a series of deep and shallow spaces that give depth to the flatness of the exterior site. With each frame stating an out-of-field condition, the view unfolds out from its core to the larger sets within the cube and alongside landscape and beyond to the river and the city. The primitive form evokes nautical comparisons similar to the passage in Polyphilo by Alberto Perez-Gomez, “Without leaving the vessel I can inhabit the streams and ravines of a completely rectilinear landscape.”

In summary, the house explores using few means to generate a landscape. The placement of a specifically clear closed-cubic mass rising vertically from a horizontal site, the subtle articulation of the negative elevations of the earth and the nesting of box within box to frame a landscape, obtain a co-presence of the material house and the beside-ness of its landscape.

House Two

This house is located adjacent to a new golf course. The house is intended as a weekend house for a couple who flies into town for weekends to golf and see friends. They often bring guests with them to golf. 

This house sits in a rolling landscape on the edge of a relatively flat plane and a slight upslope. Using an open-extended typology the house extends east and west along the change. The north edge of the house is literally defined by a concrete retaining wall that is flush with the grade above to form a ha-ha—a real but visually seamless separation. The expanse of the complex is a series of spaces enclosed, implied and extended by walls and ha-has. The house itself is an L-shaped box with the shorter bar open at its base where an alley flows linking the two near landscapes and the house. The land is thus appropriated by the open-extended house. Its frames form interiority by selecting from the exterior but open forms and the ha has let such containtment project back out and in to form a blurred distinction of outside and inside; architecture and landscape. 

The bedrooms of the house are on ground level. A small reflecting pool adjacent is the frontal frame of view from the bedrooms that look into an exterior volume formed by a wall on the south. This south wall is sheathed in glass to reflect the north sky into the bedrooms and also to diffuse the views obtained by cuts into the wall.

The kitchen and dining area are above the bedrooms. The dining area has a large window viewing the crown of the hill to the north whereby the landscape itself suggests an out-of-field condition beyond the hill. The kitchen is linked to a two-story void that serves as a spatial hinge to the two bars of the house.  A grotto at this juncture grounds the house to the earth. Here the many projections of the house coalesce in the reflective surfaces of water and glass. The grotto described at Alexander Pope’s house in Twickenham comes to mind:

When you shut the doors of the Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous room, a camera obscura; on the walls of which all the objects of the Rivers, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible radiations…

As in House One, this core is sheathed in varied glasses that form interior frames. These core frames install spatial depth by placing interior space in the foreground and the exterior window system into the middle ground with the background of the landscape sets beyond. Views to the west are composed by the pool house and folded ground plane adjacent providing depth cues that spatially connect the actual edges of the house and its alongside landscape.

Floating over the alley is the main room of the house screened from harsh light to the east and west but partially blocked on the north and south to frame a moment between the spatial flow east and west. The screening creates a diaphanous skin composed of louvers, and a double-thick glass ventilating wall. The spatiality of the skin mediates the shallow space of the near landscape courts--courts defined by the exterior wall and ha-has to the interior frames of glass and concrete.

In summary, House Two takes the frame and uses it to extend and blur interior and exterior. The connected whole of the architecture is bound into a projective camera obscura whereby the projection of the image is not collected and delimited but reversed to project its rays beyond its frame blurring any dichotomies of architecture and landscape.