How trees shape context

POP QUIZ: Where do you think this is?

(a) Arber, Germany

(b) Bergen, Norway

(c) Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

(d) Watertown, Massachusetts, USA

Stumped? I don't blame you. Looks can be deceiving when trees shroud enough environmental details to frame a building in a new context that obscures its original one, as if Photoshopping out the extraneous to capture the essence, or doing nature's duty to bring out beauty. 

Photo by Cristo Vlahos. License: CC BY-SA 3.0.

That's how trees bring fresh form to architecture by softening its edges and extensions with serene green. This harmonizes it with the nature that created it and enriches its sheltering capacity with shade to block or diffuse the sun, evapo- transpiration to supplement the shade by cooling the air, and photosynthesis to reduce the building's carbon footprint. 

BTW, the answer is (d). The house pictured above is viewed from my bedroom window. The chalet at right is in fact in Bernese Oberland, showing how trees and other greenery create appealing scenery that brings out the chalet's woodsy character, complementing its honest expression of the origin of its building materials.

Here's another instance of tree-trim from my own experience. When I went up a steeply inclined avenue to look at a room for rent at its summit, I was stunned by the scene before me. It looked and felt as if I'd just stepped into the flatlands of Denmark, the way the avenue suddenly leveled out and the trees seemed to highlight the European aspects of the architecture through their international arboreal language.

This was the house, looking Scandinavian in its clean-lined simplicity, bolstered by backyard and street-lining trees that crispen its appearance by contrasting it with the heft of shade, as well as the complement of the archetypal white picket fence of suburban America.

Which gives it away that this is not in Denmark. It's at the crest of Summit Avenue in Brookline, Massachusetts, a block or so from Corey Hill Park. That hilltop oasis also testifies to the power of trees in space-shaping and sight-softening, without which the rocks, furniture, turf, paving and background buildings would seem as barren, hard and dry as a rocky desert or smoggy city (and the atmosphere would feel like either):

Photos by Maurene K., courtesy of TripAdvisor

Here are examples of Denmark's benchmarks of tree-effect:

Photo by Okin. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

This setting on the Coast of Skagen in Northern Jutland shows how isolated a home can look with no tree-neighbors. Trees connect a structure to the world around it by making the building and its occupants seem less isolated. Trees on a house's grounds also give a sense that the owners are receiving proper nourishment from the Mother Earth that provided the building material and their food and drink.

Image courtesy of Best-Wallpaper.net

This one's more like it. The trees and their lake reflection envelop the house in green, which pacifies its milieu, complements its half-timbering and thatched roof, and highlights its orange walls with color-contrast. A sense of 'cool' pervades the place: cooling of the air by the trees, cool water, cool-blue sky—contrasting the 'hot' effect of the deserted house above.

Photo by Dr. James Garner Williams (License: CC BY-SA 2.5)

Similarly, these trees halo the Academy Building at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, cloaking the clocked cupola of Ralph Adams Cram's 1914 Georgian Revival edifice in a festoon of greenery, affirming the campus as the "separate peace" John Knowles depicted the Devon School as in his novel of that name:

Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height until you looked above the familiar trunks and the lowest umbrellas of leaves and took in the lofty complex they held high above, branches and branches of branches, a world of branches with an infinity of leaves.

So, wherever under the blue sky you are—Arber, Bergen, Bernese Oberland, Watertown, or right in your own back yard—be sure to look between the buildings for that infinity of leaves without which any house, hall or high-rise would look like a son of the desert, rather than a child of nature.

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The best light

Dyker Heights Christmas Lights 2008, Brooklyn, New York, courtesy of Pinterest

That was the topic of this year's Christmas Day homily at Trinity Church in Boston, regarding "Christ's light pushing back the darkness, reaching out in love," in the words of Interim Rector Bill Rich. 

This theme was in sync with my musings on the best ways to light homes for the holidays, which I had been observing and photographing in and around my Watertown area.

Home-lighting comes in all colors, iconic as well as chromatic: Nativity crèches, Santas, snowmen, Snoopys, menorahs, wreaths, candy canes, tree- trunk spirals, fence- rim strings, etc...

The best light, to me, highlights a home's structure, running along doors, rails, porches, etc. It makes a home more welcoming, both by driving back enough darkness to help you find your door and insert your key and by warmly inviting people in from the cold with the architecturally genuine expression of "home" that plastic idols lack.

For example, this eave lighting sings out "home" by emphasizing the familiar home image of the gable. It also allows soft light to radiate over the façade, aided by the lighting of the evergreen and shrubbery in front. This effect yields a holiday-appropriate mélange of brick-red and tree-green.

Here the stringing of lights along the entire post, rail and porch structure creates an illuminated path all the way from front walk to front door. This radiates the steps with a cool, calming blue to make the ascent home both softer and safer. It also sets off the porch as an aedicula of warm, calming welcome by giving it a structural expression of the solidity and serenity of the home it introduces.

The reindeer sculptures avoid the frippery of inner-lit Santas, Snoopys and Frostys by directly lighting the building, signifying to the owners that they have, indeed, returned home.

Here the lights give a simple porch the more lavish Italianate character of dripping ornament, dignifying one's entry inside. To complement this, their diverse colors and extension onto the balcony and stoop rails lend the house some of the "painted lady" element common on Victorian mansions of that period by radiating rainbow hues onto the rails. The result is a more colorful, festive welcome home without excessive fuss in ornament, decoration or light displays.

This is one way holiday lights can be decorative and functional simultaneously. Loosely hung from the porch eaves, they take the form of icicles erratically dripping from the gutters in the winter, while at the same time they powerfully illuminate the entire porch enclosure as a "blue room" of sorts, courtesy of the house's blue façade.

This effect evokes both the icy cold of winter outside and the warm light to come inside, making the porch a smooth transition space between the former and the latter by truly driving back the darkness in advance of one's entry into the light of home.

I love the way these lights spill down from entrance eave to double-stoop-rail to trees, illuminating one's entire path from walkway to steps to entry and complementing the menorah candelabra in each window, as an honest expression of the structures of necessity for good living.

This marvelous string of lights brings to light the interconnection among many parts of the house—garage door, front stoop, yard fence, shady trees expressed by swirls around their trunks—as well as the continuity of the property along the road, in one graceful gesture of motion up the hill.

These swags deviate from the structural linearity of most of the lights above for a more ornamental, festive effect, but one that celebrates the Roman grillwork structure of the rails by shedding more light onto it, for a dual celebration of both the light and its upholder. The Tuscan columns on the porch and upper balcony are given their due, too.

This joyous celebration of architecture with light guides the homecomer along the stone wall up the steps to the porch, while dramatizing the bay window as a festive framework for the display of a Christmas tree. The picket fence, too, glows with the glee of the season.

This blends structural expression and ornamental accent in a light display of the winter solstice spirit. Dangling lights give the Queen Anne eaves the aura of an icicle-encrusted Swiss chalet in the Alps, while a rich variation of light color and sculpture make the grounds dance with diversity.

Though this display is more decorative than delineative, the candy canes and color-circuses are nicely contrasted by a blue strip along the gutter and white semi- swags along the fence, reminding us of the structure of home as "our shelter from the stormy blast" of winter.

I thought I'd end this walk in the winter wonderland of luminescence on the ecclesiastical note on which I began it. By spiraling the lights around the columns, lining them up along the balcony, and stringing them along the arches and in wildly ethereal whimsies, structure is expressed magnanimously as a manifestation of the light of Christ. The freeform curves of light swooping and swirling toward the sidewalk reach out to the public as a gesture of invitation from, in Rev. Rich's words, "the light that seeks to share that light with any and all who receive it," so we can "see the light, touch it, and find our way home. This is incarnation. This is Christmas."

That is precisely how structurally strung lights help us find our way home. They not only push back the darkness enough to remind us where our home is, but they also affirm and celebrate the structure of that which gives us shelter, comfort, security, sustenance, and pride of place. 

That is what makes them the best light for the holidays. 

A Happy New Year to one and all!

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