THOMAS BARRIE ARCHITECT

A Studio for Two Artists

The Berkshires, MA

Completed: 1997

Square Footage: 600

Contractor: Undermountain Builders, Sheffield, MA

Photographer: Michael Janeczeck, Steven Rost

This small vacation house and studio for two artists and their children is located in the lake-dotted and mountainous terrain of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. The project focused on the broader context of its rural setting, and explored ideas about site, orientation, center and path, spatial sequence, geometry, materials, and time. A forty-foot long, ten-foot high concrete block wall, aligned precisely to geographic north, marks and transforms the site and serves as a giant sundial. The studio, clad in rough-sawn western red cedar, rests on top of this wall, and is capped by a bright, galvanized steel roof. In this manner, the architecture recreates and expresses a fundamental act of architecture -- the mediation between earth and sky -- with the wall firmly grounded in the earth, the roof reflecting the sky, and the studio located in-between. (A triad that recalls the formal organization of traditional New England barns, which typically have a stone foundation, a rough wooden building, and a metal roof.)

A small gateway is aligned with a lake to the east and a mountain to the west and marks the threshold to the private domain of the house. It initiates a spatial sequence: a journey from west to east; earth to sky; outside to inside; public to private. The owners have watched the sun rise over the lake during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and observed its alignments with the wall, threshold and path as it circled the horizon to set behind the mountain. And so the wall mediates between the earth, the sun, the mountain and the water, in a manner that establishes a broader context for the architecture (and its inhabitants) and dissolves the confines of the site.

Geometry and proportion were applied to further articulate this simple dwelling, while suggesting its relationship to the larger orders of the world. The materials have aged naturally, an authentic rendering of their inherent qualities. Thus, the studio also aims to transcend the confines of time, changing and maturing as it ages: the wall carrying vines, the roof dulling to a variegated patina; the cedar turning shades of gray and ocher. In this way, though the studio was carefully designed in response to the client’s needs, it also transcends these and occupies a broader historical context. Hundreds of years from now, when the house has long-since been eaten by insects and its dust blown away, perhaps part of the wall will still remain -- casting a shadow as mid-day turns to dusk.