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Manhattan Townhouse Houses by Peter Rose As the recent houses by Peter Rose are part of a continuum, it is worthwhile to understand a little more about who Peter Rose is. Nominally, he is a Montreal-born, Yale-trained, Cambridge (Massachusetts)-based architect who has practiced for more than three decades and taught at Harvard for two. His work has ranged from museums and art studios to a master plan for the Montreal waterfront. Rose may be best known for his brilliant design for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. This premier repository of architectural drawings and documents was a dream project. Rose's client was the architect Phyllis Lambert, who convinced her father to hire Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. Lambert was equally determined to create a landmark with the new home for the CCA. The young Rose was allowed to experiment with a variety of materials; he constructed full-scale mock-ups of wall sections in different stones to observe how they responded to light in all seasons. Interior finishes, too, were accordingly lush — John Hejduk referred to the small auditorium there as "like the inside of a violin," where sound, materials, and space created the complete container. Built at the same time as Paris's Centre Pompidou, the CCA was the opposite of that contemporary art museum. It was dedicated neither to public entertainment nor unlimited accessibility. The very nature of collecting valuable and fragile works of art primarily on paper meant designing a mostly private repository based on a concern for light and humidity; large areas of the museum would not be open to the public. The new museum's classical forms and formal character were shaped by the fact that it was wrapped around an 1874 Second Empire-style mansion Phyllis Lambert had bought to save from the wrecking ball. Since the mansion core of the museum was unsuitable for exhibitions, Rose transformed its rooms into spaces for Montrealers to gather for cultural events. His connection to an earlier Montreal became a touchstone for Rose, and the house was integral in creating progressive degrees of entry into the institution. Rose understood the house's symbolism in Montreal, and was able to insert the new museum into the city in a seamless manner. "The size, its placement, the materials, the classical language of it," Rose remarked, "the use of those axes are part of the way the city is organized, the lines that go through all the way from the river to the mountain — it's all part of a sense that I have acquired from looking at the house site for ten years." The thoughtful exploitation of the glimpse of the outside or the next room is equally developed in a 1918 Beaux-Arts Manhattan townhouse that Rose recreated for Phyllis Lambert's nephew. Edgar Bronfman and his Venezuelan-born wife Clarissa wanted a family home, a place to display their art collection, and a grand space for entertaining. An entirely new house was constructed behind the Paris-in-New York limestone facade. The New York house is as equally well choreographed as the earlier CCA, while it continues the exploration of housing masterworks within an existing classical framework, here in a looser, less formal manner. The house is built around a museum-like sky-lit atrium. The staircase clings to the walls, while the balconies that overlook it are like a stage set for an opera — a street turned in upon itself. The court ought to dominate the visitor's attention, yet it is the seemingly axis-free space, what Rose calls a "meander in the park," that enthralls. One has to climb a few stairs to reach the strikingly vertical court, but before one can look up, the eye is drawn to the dining room, and through it to the Dan Kiley-designed city garden beyond. Even the dining table was designed so that its narrow profile forms a line across the view. The Bronfman house is purely about the shaping of space; the historical references seen in the CCA are left behind. Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Peter Rose practices architecture from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His projects have varied from large-scale urban design, such as the Old Port of Montreal Waterfront Master Plan (1983), to smaller renovations and additions. Rose is also an adjunct professor of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and has taught at Princeton University, McGill University, and at the University of Toronto. Architectural historian William Morgan, an expert on New England architecture, is the author of Yankee Modern: The Houses of Estes/ Twombly and The Cape Cod Cottage. He teaches at Brown University, and has also taught at Princeton, the University of Louisville, Roger Williams University, and Wheaton College. This article is excerpted from Peter Rose: Houses by Peter Rose, copyright © 2010, with permission of the publisher, Princeton Architectural Press.
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