Richardson's regression...and reinvention

Photo by Tim Engleman (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The Richardsonian Romanesque style of the Newton Corner Worship Center, originally Immanuel Baptist Church (1886), in Newton Corner, Massachusetts, was unmistakable from the moment I first noticed it from the bus window. All of its features were straight out of Henry Hobson Richardson's much-emulated pattern-book: random ashlar rock-faced walls, thick-arched windows and doorway, stocky columns, pointed but squat lantern tower, cruciform configuration, and heavyset massing that stresses structural solidity and earthen solidarity. Yet it never crossed my mind that this was a work of the Master himself, due to its scarce mention in books on him, due in turn to its simplified and clunkily proportioned design.

An apparent reworking of a proposal for Pittsburgh's Emmanuel Episcopal Church (1886) rejected for its $25,000 price tag in favor of a simpler $12,000 job, Immanuel Baptist shows its share of cost-cutting, hence corner-cutting (as a recycled design built in brownstone to save money), that renders it less complete and coherent than its Pittsburgh predecessor (right).

Though it may suggest a fire station with its triumvirate of large front arches and red-brick uniformity, Emmanuel Episcopal is more unified as one composition. Its apse gently semicircles around the rear, carrying the peaked roof with it in a conical fashion. At the front the roof forms a spire-like gable, with a slot window and stone finial emphasizing its heavenward verticality.

By contrast, Immanuel Baptist pops out all over the place, as if assembled from a kit of parts derived from a patchwork of patterns. The "witch's hat" spire thrusts up pompously from the lantern's crowning pyramid. The tapered structure below the lantern is too self-expressive, making the adjoining stone mere filler. The west front's unfinished stonework protrudes as if pining for carving. Its central window dwarfs the window-pairs with over-authority. The transept wings frame their window trinities agreeably but lack side-wall definition. 

Photo by Tim Engleman (CC BY-SA 2.0).

In fact, the nave and transept's side walls form a prison-like presence as they cross, which is more foreboding than inviting—or should I say more purgatorial than ecclesiastical, as if making a pact with the witchy tower.
 

Photo by Tim Engleman (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The side entrance adds to the bulk, interrupting the continuity of the transept-to-apse transition with a wart-like protrusion. It clearly expresses its function as a circular stair-shelter, but in a way that knocks the building's symmetry lopsided and, with its oblong shape, lacks the grace of the cylindrical turret that enriched many of Richardson's buildings. Yet its conical roof is somewhat redemptive, and it is hidden from view on the church's main street, preserving the symmetry from there.

 

Photo by Tim Engleman (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The apse has no clear exterior expression, being a hierarchy of diverse window carousels that lend few clues about what goes on inside. The chimney jarringly transitions from brick to stone (unless the brick part is a reconstruction) and sticks out like a smokestack, further reminding us of the cohesion the church lacks. 

 

In short, the church doesn't seem to know whether to grow up or out. Richardson's work as a whole is marked by an earth-bound attachment to the ground, occasionally contrasted with a sky-borne tower. But Immanuel Baptist is just as vertical as horizontal, as if the forward-thrusting, steeply gabled nave is competing with the tower and transept for street prominence rather than working in concert with them to form a Holy Trinity. Also, the walls are more fortress-like than church-like—an agreeable nod to Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," but one that lacks the exuberance of...

Trinity Church, Detroit Photographic Company, c.1897-1924, courtesy
of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

...Trinity Church in Boston (1872-77), Henry Hobson Richardson's masterwork of masonry majesty, where quarried, striped, checkered and carved stonework and statuary augment the articulation of each individual part in a way that logically cohere the parts together into one massive whole that celebrates God's works on earth in form, finials and fine art. Even the stair steps lively, being cloistered, not closed.

Immanuel Baptist's main entrance is its fullest realization of the Richardsonian Romanesque ideal (despite the uncarved column capitals and the 2011 removal of the original oak doors for replicas) for its stone sunburst of concentric semicircles, the lower one recessed to guide you inside, offering you a radiant invitation...

...into a surprisingly well-kept sanctuary with a swooping proscenium arch, vaulting hammer-beam trusses and a Roman-arched altarpiece that all appear to fall mathematically in line with the entrance as its axially logical destiny and open welcome to all. What's more, this boldly theatrical gesture acts as the symbolic genesis of...

...diverse congregations of Arabic, Brazilian, Filipino, Greek and Russian Jewish origin, as the home of the Arabic Baptist Church, the New England Brazilian Baptist Church, the Philippine International Church, the Hellenic Gospel Church, and the Beth Yeshua Messianic Congregation. According to Rachel Lebeaux of The Watertown TAB, this interfaith tradition began when a Greek fellowship acquired the church, by then known as the Newton Corner Baptist Church, for $1 in 1990 and renamed it the Newton Hellenic Gospel Church, agreeing to open it to parishioners of other faiths lacking home places of worship. Rechristened the Newton Corner Worship Center in 2007, it is a gathering place for faiths of all forms, each congregation holding a service on a different day but many of them coming together at Christmas and Easter. 

This image from Lebeaux's article shows not only how well a diversity of congregants from a broad spectrum of faiths bond with each other in this universally sacred space, but how well the congregations have cooperated to preserve the artistic stained-glass windows, a hallmark of a Richardson church, simple or sublime. 

Which means I ought to cut the Newton Corner Worship Center some slack, even though it isn't considered exemplary of Richardson. After all, he was serving a congregation not as deep-pocketed as Trinity's, with a budget that reduced the architecture to the bare-boned basics of nave, transept, apse, tower, stairwell and chimney. Also, as these archival images show, Immanuel Baptist Church did have more distinction in its heyday, thanks in part to ivy, which will raise any masonry edifice to a high academic level. Perhaps this rejected church proposal might have been better reinvented for a university. Yet its interfaith reincarnation has given its simple towered cruciform design a universality that people of many faiths can relate to, whether from Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or whatever corner of the Earth they came from to come to Newton Corner.

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Little boxes on the hillside...

...but Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds (the song's original writer) would be wrong to say these ones are "all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." No, this time the topography defines the boxology, in proper Roxbury fashion. 

This contemporary condominium on Fisher Avenue in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood is the closest thing to a "Roxbury style" I've ever seen, taking full advantage of the area's characteristically hilly terrain to evolve as a series of stepped dwelling units leading up to a "lookout" tower room at its pinnacle. Thus each level's setback along the upward bound hill yields each unit (or story, in the uppermost unit's case) a terrace from the roof of the lower unit or the ground-level garages, which comprise the first floor so that they don't intrude upon any unit's living space with exhaust odors or car motor noise. This multilevel arrangement allows each unit a great hillside view, and each level is jogged out in a zigzag form to allow it multiple sides of exposure, hence more light inside.

This creative configuration gives the entire complex a jagged, asymmetrical form that emerges as a geometric abstraction of the randomly craggy Roxbury puddingstone that characterizes this neck of the woods. This conglomerate stone, seen here in Roxbury's preserved Rockledge Urban Wild, is an aggregate of many different kinds of rocks, stones and pebbles bonded together by prehistoric volcanic and glacial action, forming the bedrock underlying the bulk of Roxbury, as well as parts of Brighton, Brookline, Canton, Dedham, Dorchester, Dover, Jamaica Plain, Milton, Needham, Newton and Quincy.

'Of the hill'

Of course, the greatest hill-house of all is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Far from the run-of-the-mill of little boxes on the hillside, this nature-inspired masterpiece of organic architecture comprises big slabs on the cliffside, cantilevering over the waterfall below them in a visually precarious posture — albeit in a geometrically ordered programme that reflects the machine age as well as nature's way. 

Man and nature are both at odds and in détente here, and the structural assuredness of the balcony slabs is counterbalanced by the unpredictability of their built-to-last claim, appearing ready to cascade down the rocky waterfall on a moment's notice as the water gradually erodes the rock into the soil from which all came, and to which all shall (theoretically) return. 

The stair towers are built of local stacked stone as a monument to the nature that made all things and a contrast to the man-madeness of the concrete that cast the slabs. The verticality of the towers also emphasize the upward climb of the hill the house is perched on, while the thin horizontality of the stones contrast this with a reminder of the earth the house rests on, as the prime giver of its building materials. Rarely have lodgings and land been so seamlessly unified, to the degree that both are respected in our eyes as we gaze at this architectural spectacle.

Fallingwater, built in 1934 for business tycoon Edgar Kaufmann, epitomizes Wright's prescription for all houses: 

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

— Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932)

On or of the hill?
 

Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill.

One wonders what Wright thought of Beacon Hill during his brief stays in Massachusetts, as a child in Weymouth and while designing his Amherst Usonian House. Though scornful of historical styles, he hopefully appreciated the way the Mount Vernon Proprietors let the hill shape a cohesive neighborhood with a rhythmic progression of brick rowhouses.

Acorn Street, Beacon Hill. Photo by Ian Howard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beacon Hill's homes forge a visual unity that evokes the close-knit community the developers had intended, while visually referencing the hill's contours as the homes ascend and descend the slanting streets in a consistent curve, which their general uniformity of height gives rise to. Thus they are more of than on the hill, belonging to it, since the hill was the nurturing mother of their collective design, and they are not freestanding on the hill but supporting and shoring up one another's structure with abutment, like a hill's firmly packed soil and strength-bracing rock. This is especially true of Acorn Street, the way the cobblestones allude to the natural rock and soil of the hill the community grew on.

Windowboxes on Beacon Hill.
Photo by M2525, courtesy of Wiki.

Chestnut Street, c.1869.
Photo by Philip Bergen.

And the diversity of door elements, cornice heights, fenestration, and decoration—particularly windowbox flowers and yuletide wreaths—makes Beacon Hill homes not "all look just the same," expressing the individuality of the occupants in a composition that epitomizes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's definition of beauty: "unity in variety." 

Cutting Down Beacon Hill, c.1810.

This is how Beacon Hill became a prototype of hillside development. Which would not have been possible had the hill itself not been cut down from 1807-1828, for landfill to fill in the Mill Pond and to level the hill to a comfortable live-on height. This made the neighborhood even more "of the hill," as steep inclines wouldn't have made the hill or its residents "each the happier for the other."

Right, Wright?

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The Great 'Pieramid' of Tampa

Photo by Texx Smith, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For Pete’s sake!

What’s that at the end of the pier?

A Key West-bound cruise ship?

A Disney theme park?

Alien spacecraft?

Expo 2011?

No, it’s The Pier itself.

Pete's Pier

Courtesy www.terraceparksuites.com/about-st.-pete.html

The St. Petersburg Pier, that is — Tampa Bay’s signature icon, a monumental gateway to (and getaway from) its namesake city. Anchoring the end of a mile-long wharf approach from downtown St. Pete, this colossal inverted pyramid combines shopping, dining, fishing, boating, an aquarium, festivals, live entertainment and much more on five floors of Florida family fun.

Sittin' on the dock of the Bay

Courtesy www.planetware.com/picture/st-petersburg-st-petersburg-pier-us-fla393.htm

 Courtesy www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g34607-w2-St_Petersburg_Florida.html

The fun begins right on the dock, where you can take in the Tampa Bay view, go on a boatride or dolphin watch, pedal a surrey bicycle along the waterfront, take a horse-drawn carriage ride into the city, feed the pelicans, or fish for amberjack, flounder, sea bass, shark or snook with poles and bait from The Pier Bait House (right), a roof-tiled remnant of The Pier’s 1926 predecessor.

Canopy to culture and cuisine

Courtesy www.gourmetgirlmagazine.com/casualdiningspotlight.php

The Pier’s grand entrance canopy introduces a tourist information desk and 16 specialty shops selling candles, collectibles, crafts, fashions, jewelry and more. 

The Dockside Eatery food court offers a smorgasbord of fast food, including Burger Bay, Cara’s Pizza, Hong Kong, and 41 ice cream flavors at Cones on The Pier. 

Al's alcove

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

At Captain Al's Waterfront Bar & Grill, you’ll be sittin’ on the dock of the bay enjoying all-American cuisine in your choice of indoor seating, the outdoor patio or the tikki bar area, hearing live bands on the Waterside Courtyard every weekend. 

The Dockside Activity Room holds an Oldies But Goodies Dance the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month, and hosts such local acts as the SunCoast Band.

Fish tank, fish taste

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

Upstairs is the Pier Aquarium, where a $5 admission ($4 for students and seniors, free for children under 7) lets you gaze at a colorful collection of native and tropical fish in a 2,000-square-foot tank. 

Restaurants for all tastes comprise the pyramid’s upturned “base,” which cantilevers outward for the ultimate on-the-bay dining experience at:

• Cha Cha Coconuts Tropical Bar & Grill, featuring Bahamian conch fritters;

• Columbia Restaurant, where the Tampa Bay panorama complements the Spanish/Cuban fare;

• Fresco's Waterfront Bar & Grill, serving Mediterranean cuisine in a suitable seaside setting. 

Pier's precedents

The Pier originated in 1889, when the Orange Belt Railway built the Railroad Pier on Tampa Bay, three years before St. Petersburg’s incorporation as a city. An immediate success, the Railroad Pier was replaced in 1906 with the Electric Pier, which extended 3,000 feet into the bay and dazzled tourists and locals with its theatrical night lighting. This gave way to the Municipal Pier in 1914. When the Hurricane of 1921 damaged it, the city appropriated a $1 million bond for a...

Million Dollar Pier

Inaugurated on Thanksgiving Day in 1926, this Mediterranean-style palace boasted an open-air ballroom with rooftop terrazzo floors, an observation deck, and a grand central atrium for all sorts of community events, including card games, fishing tournaments and singalongs. Its grand portico became WSUN-TV’s studios, from which “Captain Mac” broadcast his children’s show in the 1950s. Fallen into disrepair, the Million Dollar Pier was razed in 1967.

Tubular!

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

The St. Petersburg Pier, opened to the public in January 1973, was designed by William B. Harvard Sr., founder of Harvard Jolly Architecture, with a tubular steel framework to create large windows for copious sunlight and bay views, and an inverted pyramid form to maximize the top floor area and observation deck.

Southern nights

Courtesy www.flickr.com/photos/rvs3designs/4203478639/

This offbeat design enables The Pier to continue its predecessors’ traditions of providing plentiful space for private and public functions, offering Tampa Bay’s most breathtaking observation point, letting patrons dance the night away, and electrifying the bay’s night sky and clear waters with colorful lighting and fireworks.

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Snow: architecture's arbiter and advocate

The Big Blizzard of 1/11/11 clearly demonstrated a characteristic property of snow: its ability to give buildings new form. It does this not merely by leaving its snow-white imprint on them, but by accenting and accentuating the distinctive forms the buildings already possess as it brings their reliefs into further relief.

By outshining its burial victims with its sheer whiteness, snow prompts us to take fuller notice of them in the context of the familiar visual beauty of the White Christmases we dream of and the Winter Wonderlands we're happy to walk in. Thus snow can be three things to architecture. It can be a standard by which to judge a building's innate architectural merit, an enhancer of an edifice's existing merit, or an awarder of new merit to a structure easily overlooked in the off-season.

Take, for instance, the Greek Evangelical Church (1902, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, left) and Trinity Episcopal Church (1916, George W. Chickering, below) in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Their snow-blanketed landscape heightens the holiness their architects intended them to convey to the public, given the color white's association with purity, holiness and cleanliness in the Bible: 

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

— Psalms 51:7                                

His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.

— Matthew 28:3                         

O how glorious is the kingdom wherein all the saints rejoice in Christ.
Clothed in white robes they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth...

— Revelation 7:9,12

Architecturally, the snow's accumulation on the churches' prominent Gothic elements forces us to see them in a more monumental light.

Newly cloaked in white, Battlement, Buttress, Crocket, Finial, Lady Chapel, Lancet Arch and Ridge are now brought out in full force, as the architectural symbols of God's followers, perfectly regimental, not straying from the flock.

Here are more examples of snow falling afresh on buildings in Newton:

Baptized in snow

The blizzard brought out the Richardsonian Romanesque features of the First Baptist Church in Newton (1888, John Lyman Faxon). As it accumulated on and in the crevices, fissures, pits and promontories of the craggy granite blocks, the rose window mullions, the sandstone relief carvings and the buttresses and gargoyles, it highlighted them, in the vein of the bare suggestions of bricks, stones and ornaments that were typically drawn in a turn-of-the-century architectural rendering. We thus see the trees for the forest more clearly and get a rudimentary architectural education in the process. The white spots also add a fourth dimension to the already three-dimensional effect of the church's asymmetrical composition. As the snow melts, it becomes the true fourth dimension — time — that causes the parts to diminish into the whole once again when winter passes into spring.

The Polar Express

"Eyelid" dormers, high hipped roofs and deep eaves characterize the Newton Centre MBTA Station (1892, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge), according to the master plan set forth for all such stations by the architects' predecessor, Henry Hobson Richardson.

However, the blizzard's "snowbrow" effect gives the eyelids actual eyebrows, the roofs a snowy mountain presence, and the eaves the feel of a cozier shelter from the snow. Therefore, the Richardsonian roof form is stronger and bolder.

Alpine altitude

Here the snow has encrusted thickly on the Queen Anne house's super-steep roof, as well as its towering evergreen, its high hillside terrain and its surrounding tree branches and bushes. Even its telephone wire has caught some of the white stuff, in the tubular fashion of a corn dog.

All of these elements give the house's high-pitched roof gable the suggestion of the steep soar of a ski slope in the Swiss Alps. The snow-wrapped wire adds the tensile "ski lift" or "cable car" effect that is most familiar in the Alps.

With the enrichment of snow, the house's architectural, natural and utilitarian features collectively convey the mixed emotions and effects of scenic serenity, mountain awe and fear of heights we may experience while traveling, skiing or chair-lifting in the Alpine mountains. 

Queen Anne is truly the "Snow Queen" and the "Mountain King" here.

River deep, mountain high

Just when the geometric modernist style of the inverse hipped roof of this 1960s Brimmer and May School building was no longer hip, along came the snow to cast it in a fresh mold. Now the gym's up-cornered eaves and central pyramid crown abstract the triangular forms of a range of snow-capped mountains, enabling the building to spread its wings and soar again on the skyscape. The frozen downspout at the "river valley" adds a waterfall effect to the building's new-found naturalism, which is enhanced by the original pebble-pressed skin and the newer forest-green paint job.

Medieval mystique

The snowy landscape, the snow-seasoned evergreens, and the bulbous snow-topped bell tower give the Chestnut Hill School the wintry wonderment of a medieval clockmaker's village. The mountain-peak gables express the spirit of the surrounding woods in their half-timbering, and the clustering of buildings articulates the interactive community nature of the school's program, according to its mission: "Within an active community of students, faculty, and families, The Chestnut Hill School promotes respect between individuals and involvement with the larger community." Snow magnifies this community spirit by making the buildings seem more closely huddled together for warmth from the cold.

Get a horse!

Clearly modeled on the carriage barns of yore, this gabled wooden garage with iron-hinged exposed-wood doors seems to call for a horse, rather than a car, to complete the Currier-and-Ives image of a quaint old New England barn the snowfall has given it, in the vein of Jingle Bells: "Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh, o'er the fields we go..."

Fire and ice

This brief detour into Cambridge shows how snow can clarify the use of a particular building, here the fire station in Central Square. By clinging to the bell tower, the snow not only makes this Italianate campanile more monumentally visible at night — like the headlights, siren and white hood of the fire engine dashing through the snow — but also broadcasts the intent of the building's occupant: to freeze a fire. Thus the tower stands as a symbol of the clarity of cold water quenching the brick-red of hot flame.

Hot spot

Likewise (back in Newton), here the snow amplifies the advertising and the awning, which are to this eatery as the bell tower is to the fire station in terms of the most prominent, self-promoting elements. These contrasts of cold snow with hot pizza and snowy awning with dry shelter entice us to come in out of the cold for something hot — that is, if we can get past the white mountain that blocks the way. 

Furthermore, here is an example of how snow ornaments an ordinary building to give it more visual depth. By accenting a common sign to give its black relief lettering another dimension, the snow creates a black-and-white contrast that fittingly symbolizes the hot-and-cold one that will hopefully lure business in the colder months. Also, the dark canopy is encloaked in white for a kindler, gentler invitation into the warm shelter of a pizza shop.

White-bread blandness

But snow has limited effect on a building of limited architectural distinction to begin with. White-upon-white lacks the contrast necessary to produce the tension of opposites that creates visual interest. Also, this mid-20th-century split level's functionalistic, built-on-a-budget design has no ornament for snow to enhance and make prettier — unlike the elaborate Italianate Victorian in the background, where the mansard roof, the elaborate dormers and other ornamentation become "snow-peaks" as they catch the snow in the open air.

White beauty

But snow has a more enlightening effect on this late 19th-century white house. The wood shingles, bay window, bracketed hood, and roofed porches with exposed rafters and cross-stick rails animate the facade to contrast the uniform whiteness the snow has brought, which itself stands out with angelic purity against the ominously dark trees and deep blue sky.

White House

Of course, the white of the snow augments the White House image this grand Georgian Revival mansion projects with its classically columned, balustrade-topped porch-in-the-round similar to the one on James Hoban's famed Washington creation. 

Earliest known photograph of the White House, taken c. 1846
by John Plumbe during the James Knox Polk administration.

Furthermore, the snow's clustering on the trees gives them the fluffy fullness and lily-white luster of the lilacs that blossom in springtime in Washington. 

And both, like the fame of most White House residents, are fleeting. One melts, the other sheds, and both are gone at the height of their appreciation.

White planes

This newcomer to Newton demonstrates the planar power of roofs when snow casts them into pure geometric forms. Now they are exhibited as a solid entity of shelter from the snow, not an aggregate of asphalt shingles, a run of rubber or a turf of tar-and-gravel.

Winter weathering
 

Snow can bring out the rugged and rustic as well as the rich and refined. This image epitomizes the quintessential New England barn in the winter, where the snow creates the same contrast between bright white and dark brown as it does on the tree bark on which it accumulates.

This makes the barn's wood shingles seem woodsier, more in the context of the source of their material. The effect also conveys the hardship of winter, the necessity to gather firewood for the warmth the unheated barn cannot give on its own. The quirky asymmetry of the barn allows the snow to form odd shapes as it falls on its diverse surfaces, just like on the trees. The snow also gives the barn the sense of decay it goes through as winter upon winter, snow upon snow slowly returns its materials to the source from which they came.

Winter cottages

Here are examples of how snow can make sizable medieval-style houses appear more intimate by bringing out their iconic recollection of half-timbered cottages in the German or Swiss Alps or the Nordic regions of Scandinavia. Here the wooden timbers evoke the fuel that keeps us warm by the hearth in the winter, as well as the structure that supports and solidifies these shelters. The snow signifies the cold the woodburning fireplace protects us from, and the high gables symbolize the snow-peaked mountains of the European regions in which this style originated. Thus the houses appear warmer and more human-scaled when snowed upon, and even tempt us to seek shelter inside them.

Added value

Here the snow adds to the old-fashioned character with which the architects attempted to mollify the mall monotony of this chintzy chain-store — namely Consumer Value Stores (CVS) — and give it the feel of a friendly neighborhood drugstore and grocer. The pseudo-medieval aesthetics of broad hipped and humped roofs, deep bracketed overhangs, a crowning finial, red brickwork and Queen Anne-ish transoms try to recall Richardsonian depots like the one above, but come off as Howard Johnson's roadside kitsch. However, the snow and icicles make the fakery a shade better by masking the asphalt shingles with a temporary winter-cottage charm. And this does entice the consumer in from the cold to stock up on the Campbell's, the Contac, the Kleenex and the Vicks for the winter. Like Café Nicholas above, snow has advertising power here.

Snow sculpture

Snow can add to a house's ornamentation and thus draw more attention to its style. Here the snow happened to melt in the form of the "broken pediment" that's common in the neo-Georgianism this house typifies. The new "ornament" lines up almost centrally with the peaked dormer and curved pediment, for a fuller Georgian effect from top to bottom.

As it melts and detaches itself from the balcony rail of this Queen Anne home, the snow becomes a decorative "banner," like the white part of the red, white and blue banners that emblazon house railings on July 4. Here's how architecture sculpts snow with no helping hands.

Likewise with these "snowballtops," which needed no hands to add this touch of colonial class to common picket fence posts. Part of this class is the contrast between the roundness of the balls and the squareness of the posts the snowfall has created.

In addition to adding sculpture to structure, snow can augment the sculptural qualities a structure already has. The "humping" of snow on this unusual octagonal stone wall sets up contrasts between white snow and dark stone and between rounded and flat, squared surfaces. Like a round scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of a brown wafer cone, this effect animates the wall with a higher third dimension. This contrast also brings out the stone octagon's linear geometry by making its darkness more visible to us against the white of the snow, whether in light or in shadow.

Clapboard clarity

Here, snow collects in the pattern of a house's exterior treatment and puts it in higher relief. At sundown, when the sun no longer clarifies the clapboards through light and shadow, snow takes over that role. 

Sun and snow may be hot-and-cold competitors, but here they perform compatible roles in bringing out a facade's architectural attributes.

Mansard magic

Icicles dangling from gabled or hipped roofs are nothing new under the sun, but the mansard roof isn't hip to that trend. Invented by the French to reshape the roof into a full level of living with no attic rafters to bump your head on (and no taxes to pay on that level, according to theory), the mansard intercepts the icicles as the snow melts off the upper hip. This forces them to run down the steeper slope, freeze on it in interesting patterns (here the ice congeals on the fish-scale shingles, giving them some of the metallic sheen of actual fish scales when the sun hits them), and thus disperse on their way down so the icicles thin out at the bottom eaves. In this way, the mansard's steep slope acts as a safety shield against icicles getting too long and heavy and posing a hazard to unsuspecting heads. In both headroom and heads-up, the mansard is the best headgear since the hockey helmet.

Time of the season

This image of Crystal Lake on the cusp of the Winter Solstice (my holiday e-card this season) shows time's passage from the colors of fall to the cool of winter. The houses and their occupants enjoy their last impressions of bare-bones building and their last breaths of milder climate before Old Man Winter engulfs them in a cloak of cold such as the one on 1/11/11.

Homeward bound

I'll conclude my saunter through snowstyles with this image of my snowbound home. The snow accents the eave and gutter lines, the roof planes, the porch edges and the stone retaining wall, making each element more distinct and noticeable.


So, what can we conclude about snow's effect on architecture? In general, as oxygen supports combustion but does not burn, and as clothes and blankets contain body heat without actually giving us any, snow brings out and augments a structure's existing, inherent and unique qualities without giving it any quality it does not already have. With few exceptions, snow can't give what architecture hasn't got.

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