Of the hill

Norman Lykes House, Palm Canyon, Phoenix, Arizona, 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Upper photo courtesy of Toptenrealestatedeals.com. Lower photo by Steve Hoge, courtesy of Flickr.

I knew well that no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and home should live together each the happier for the other.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

In his lifelong quest for an organic architecture that did not dominate the land as its Classical, Gothic and Victorian precursors did but integrated itself with it to become one with the Mother Earth that originated its materials, Wright combined site with structure in many of his designs. This allowed each to benefit from the other. The building mirrored and abstracted its environment's natural forms in its architecture while conserving its site to preserve nature's ecosystems and offer the picturesque natural views many a homebuyer would desire.

Photos courtesy of L'autre carnet de Jimidi.

The Norman Lykes House near Phoenix, Arizona, realizes his goal fully. Begun before his death in 1959 and completed in 1966, it seems to hibernate in the hill, curve with its contours, crag with its cliffs, and swoop with its sweep, affording its owners a wraparound panorama of Palm Canyon's mountainous desert country while providing fluid spaces that reflect human circulation patterns.

In the following images the house is so "of the hill" that it resists the urge to be "king of the hill." It defers to the hill's earthly dominion by not only letting its pool-users and porch entrants enjoy hill views but also not letting them forget the nature that originally created the house, as if it were a logical continuity of the hill.

Photo courtesy of Alexandru Luca of Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of L'autre carnet de Jimidi.

Notice how "on the hill" its neighbor is compared to the "belongingness" of the Lykes House. The neighbor diverts our attention from the nature onto itself with a white façade that counters the warm earthtones the Lykes House borrows from its rocky environs. Also, the neighbor's linear geometry, clearly man-made, clashes with the nature-made feel of the Lykes House's organic curves.

But Wright did not originate the "of the hill" ideal. Civil Engineering Discoveries, a New York-based "learning platform for all over the world," often posts images of hill-bound housing from all over the world that show us how diverse cultures have used the hill and mountain to best advantage for views, natural resources, health, remoteness, and unification of their homes with nature's majesty.

For example, these one-level houses on the Faroe Islands, a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, have roofs sodded like the grass of the hill they stand on, bringing them closer to the ground than the Danish tradition of earth-hugging low-scale homes. This also enables the peaked gables to pay homage to the peaked mountains in the distance.

An earthier example: a Welsh house that reprises the Faroe Islands' sodded roof and one-story stature but takes its belongingness to the hill a step further by mimicking the hill's contours. It slopes up from the ground and slants slightly down to become more hill-like, allowing for a patio and hot-tub, though that mars the "eyelid" effect that would have made the house even hillier. But the fieldstone walls augment the house's earthiness by honoring its natural resources.

This residential community on the Amalfi Coast in Italy is arguably on the hill, built in the Classical, Italianate and Renaissance architectural traditions that Wright deemed notorious for counteracting nature's spontaneously organic fluidity with monumentally manmade pretension. 

Yet I think they're of the hill in their own way. For one, they sit precariously on a steep elevation, mirroring the craggy rocks of the adjoining cliffs, appearing just as vulnerable to nature's meteorological disruptions as nature is itself. But this siting is beneficial, too, stacking them down the cliff, which affords generous sun and sea air for all concerned. Also, their wide variety of colors reflect the diversity of flora that grows in those parts. 

Here is a more unified example of Italian hillside development, in Gangi, Sicily. 

Here the rowhouses are of a more uniform design and are more consistent in height, and the slate roofs are colored to reflect the terrain of the neighboring mountains. This makes them even more "of the hill" than the previous example. 

Furthermore, the variations in the roof heights seem to imitate the unevenness of natural mountain curves and undulations, while the roofs resemble the unified hue of the mountains, and the steep slope of their hill allows all of the houses the generous sunlight that pours onto the mountains, baking them into a golden brown.

Hobbiton, Matamata, New Zealand, built for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. Photo by Jackie.lck (CC BY 2.0).

Bilbo Baggins' hobbit-hole, Hobbiton Movie Set. Photo by Tom Hall (CC BY 2.0).

What would most delight Wright regarding of-the-hill habitation would be Hobbiton in Middle-earth (as constructed in Matamata, Waikato, New Zealand, as a movie set for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films), the location of Bilbo Baggins' earth-tunneled hobbit-hole, as J.R.R. Tolkien himself described it in The Hobbit:

The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

Now that's hill and home living together, each the happier for the other—and for Bilbo, to whom this marriage granted the luxury of one-level living and, as far as the earth could stretch, mansion-quality space he didn't have to build high on the hill to attain. Happy, that is, until the day Gandalf appeared at his perfectly circular green door...

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