| NEWS | DESIGN | BUILDING | DESIGN TOOLS | ENVIRONMENT | CULTURE | PRODUCTS |
| CULTURE | ||
|
|
William Wurster - Houses | |
|
|
Postcard from West Potomac Park | |
|
|
Stanley Tigerman: Architect as Chameleon | |
|
William Wurster - Houses by Donlyn Lyndon Thinking back, an image that most endures in my mind is the white tower and compound of William Wurster's Gregory House (1929) in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Gregory Farmhouse, as it's usually referenced, is a misnomer: it is a country retreat designed and built between 1927 and 1929, a place of the soul, no doubt, for a very sophisticated San Francisco family. The tower, slim and upright like a beacon, suggests a reincarnation of the water towers still occasionally visible on Northern California farms. The tower anchors one corner of a beautifully simple, embracing composition, with two wings perpendicular to each other bracketing the opposite side of a tree-filled court. These wings are joined by a porch tucked under their eaves. The structures are beguilingly direct — yes, farmhouse direct — and narrow. They are mostly one room wide, the roofs low and unprepossessing, the interiors made with very wide whitewashed boards. Paned windows pace steadily across their sides and doors align strategically. Photographs of the house made a singularly enchanting impression of the site, which I now realize was steeped in the most effective ways of forming memorable places: claiming place with a marker set upon the land, surrounding and giving shape to a calibrated set of rooms, both indoors and out, and investing them with thought and traces of a consistent sensibility applied to the ways in which things are made. >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... This article is excerpted from The Houses of William Wurster: Frames for Living by Caitlin Lempres Brostrom and Richard C. Peters, copyright © 2011, with permission of the publisher, Princeton Architectural Press.
|
|
|
