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Architecture
Donald Maurice Kreis
Erik Esselstyn, the very pleased owner of a
brand-new, architect-designed, energy efficient and reasonably priced
Upper Valley home, knows precisely which aspect of his dwellingplace
he regards as the most distinctive and memorable: the shingles.
"It's like putting postage stamps on a
football field," Esselstyn says of the process of installing
the cladding on the outside walls of his new house. And he should
know, since he has spent the better part of this fall installing
every last one of those shingles himself.
There is nothing terribly unusual about that;
lots of homeowners add "sweat equity" to their real estate.
Nor is the adventure on which Esselstyn and his new Hartland neighbors
are embarking - the soon-to-be-completed Cobb Hill cohousing community
- so terribly revolutionary. Although cohousing is new to the Upper
Valley, cohousing communities were first founded in Denmark 30 years
ago as bofoellesskaber (meaning "living communities")
and brought to the U.S. in the 1980s when architects Kathryn McCamant
and Charles Durrett published a book about it and coined the phrase.
They use it to describe developments that are (1) created via a
participatory process by their residents, (2) designed specifically
to emphasize a sense of community, (3) include extensive common
facilities and (4) are run democratically.
Cohousing exists, roughly, at the conceptual
intersection of the condominium and the commune. The paradigm, McCamant
and Durrett wrote, "offers a new approach to housing rather
than a new way of life. Based on democratic principles, cohousing
developments espouse no ideology other than the desire for a more
practical and social home environment."
Today, the Cohousing Network's web site lists
nearly 150 such communities, including four in Vermont and one in
New Hampshire, that are either built or organizing. But only one,
Cobb Hill, will have Eric Esselstyn's shingles - and from that fact,
one can derive insights about how to create good residential architecture
in the Upper Valley.
"I didn't follow the manufacturer's suggested
exposure," Esselstyn confesses without hesitation, referring
to how many inches of shingle is left visible before the next row
is applied. The manufacturer recommended five inches, and so it
is at every other residence at Cobb Hill, but "I pulled it
down to 4.5," says Esselstyn. "The texture is just a lot
richer than if you've gone to the max."
Notice who did NOT make the decision about how
to space the shingles. It was not the project's architect, Jeff
Schoellkopf, whose "kit of parts" approach to the commission
was calculated to reconcile the competing demands of economy and
individuality, by allowing the original residents to pick among
certain standard features - dormers, projecting "bays,"
shingles or shiplap siding, floor plans, indoor and outdoor finishes.
Nor was it the community as a whole, which has sensibly realized
that not every choice a homeowner makes can be subjected to collective
scrutiny.
Notice, as well, that Esselstyn has chosen to
focus on his shingles rather than on the things that typically captivate
American homeowners - fancy cabinetry and countertops, an empire
of bedrooms and bathrooms, big garages, elaborate fenestration -
that sort of thing. It turns out that Esselstyn, a widower with
grown children, cheerfully gave up a four-bedroom, five-bath, 3,900
square foot mini-mansion to occupy 1,600 square feet of Cobb Hill
cohousing. He is sure that 30 years from now, folks will look at
the "amazing tartan of lines" formed by his shingles and
conclude: "Those guys had some flair."
As the architect, and thus the person whose
focus was on the design of the community as a whole, Schoellkopf
makes a similar point, but from a different perspective. "I
wasn't seeking to design architectural marvels," he confesses.
Indeed, there is nothing bold or unprecedented
in the form or style of the seven detached homes, the six duplexes,
one common building and one heating plant/woodshed that comprise
this community. One duplex - the so-called "shared house,î
features two units connected by a single, shared kitchen - a creative
arrangement but one driven by economy and, thus, yielding what is
actually the plainest building in the complex. Indeed, each of the
Cobb Hill buildings is a fairly cautious variation on traditional
New England forms - there are lots of dormers, roofs pitched at
an appropriate 45 degrees, rectangular windows, and outside colors
in a muted palate of earth tones.
Schoellkopf pauses at the foot of the south-facing
hillside on which the community is arrayed, each building oriented
to take maximum advantage of the sunlight while maximizing the privacy
of residents. "I've always thought," he says, "and
still think that the beauty of the place is in the landscape."
He's talking about landscape as opposed to mere
landscaping. Each building is sited so as to look as if it is a
natural extension of the hillside, in precisely the same way that
one associated with ancient villages on the Mediterranean or in
the Alps or even at Mesa Verde, the 1,000-year-old cliff dwelling
in Colorado. Cars are deliberately consigned to the periphery, to
keep the immediate areas around the houses friendly to kids and
gardens. The complex itself is tightly clustered on four acres,
leaving most of the 260-acre site to retain its historic use as
farmland.
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That, of course, furthers the objectives of
the Sustainability Institute, which founded Cobb Hill and which
was founded, in turn, by the late columnist and environmental activist
Donella Meadows, who died in 2001 just as construction was beginning.
It had been Meadows' intention to live at Cobb Hill - not in one
of the community's single-family homes or duplexes, but in one of
the three small apartments that are part of the Common House that
is at the conceptual and physical hub of the community.
This would have placed Meadows in the building
that is probably the most innovative and pleasing in the complex.
Stylistically, the Common House departs from the New England vernacular
and reveals something of Schoellkopfís secret affinity for
craftsman-style design. Think of the big, resort-ish camps built
in the Adirondacks a century or so ago, with lots of exposed structural
woodwork. Or, for that matter, picture the Bright Angel Lodge in
Grand Canyon National Park, constructed in 1935 according to a design
by America's first great woman architect, Mary Colter (1869-1958)
. The big, welcoming porch of the Cobb Hill Common House bears a
strong resemblance to Colter's façade, a quintessentially
American gesture of hospitality and community in the midst of nature.
Colter's many hotel designs generally featured
lobbies and lounges with giant hearths fashioned of indigenous stone.
Likewise, Schoellkopf's Common House prominently features what resident
Don Seville proudly notes is Cobb Hill's only fireplace, made of
local granite. "That was a strategic decision," he explains
- the objective being to get residents out of their homes and into
the community space, particularly in winter when most Americans
are hunkered down in their living rooms.
The world is full of failed architectural experiments
in social engineering, from the unsuccessful communal worker housing
in early Soviet Russia to the privacy-starved home that celebrity
architect Peter Eisenman designed in Hardwick, Vermont, which was
recently described in The New York Times. ("I don't design
houses with the nuclear family idea because I don't believe in it
as a concept," Eisenman told the Times. "I was interested
in doing architecture, not in solving [the clients'] privacy problems.")
But when architecture seeks to enable rather than determine the
aspirations of its occupants, success happens.
Since the Common House is the last construction
project at Cobb Hill and is only just nearing completion, it is
too early to tell if its hearth, its big communal kitchen, its cozy
eating nooks (decidedly un-cafeteria-like), its two guest rooms
(which allow residents to avoid the need for guest rooms in their
own homes), kids' playroom and its apartments (which will assure
the building is actually inhabited) will help Cobb Hill avoid the
pitfalls of less successful cohousing communities. Some such projects
have found that the ideal of frequent communal suppers doesn't work
in practice, however appealing it may be to have to cook dinner
only rarely and break bread with one's neighbors regularly.
Communitarian ideals aside, this residential
architecture, like all such design, is subject to the realities
of the real estate marketplace. According to Schoellkopf, the homes
in Cobb Hill have been selling in the $250,000 to $350,000 range,
whereas the apartments have run approximately $140,000. This makes
Cobb Hill not any more expensive than other newly built dwellingplaces
in the Upper Valley, thanks in part to having involved the builders
- Albee OíHara - in the design process so as to advise on
efficient construction. But selling these units at market prices
requires purchasers like Esselstyn: people who are willing to pay
for invisible architectural amenities.
Among these amenities is the value contributed
by Marc Rosenbaum, the dean of local energy efficiency consultants.
Cobb Hill features a centralized, wood-fired heating plant, composting
toilets to reduce water consumption, heat recovery systems to capture
energy from hot water as it goes down the drain, wiring to anticipate
future on-site electric generation, buildings oriented so as to
facilitate solar heating, and state-of-the-art insulation in walls
and windows - one result of which is that the buildings well exceed
the requirements for certification as Energy Star homes (the federally
approved gold standard for such things).
The insulation - along with careful siting and
window-placement decisions by Schoellkopf that allow residents to
glimpse fields and trees rather than other houses - addresses the
quintessentially American quest for privacy. One might think that
Cobb Hill's closely clustered 22 family units could get on each
others' nerves, what with shared walls and the inevitable human
tendency to make noise.
"They're so well insulated I don't hear
any," insists duplex dweller Seville.. He professes to love
the feeling of leaving his reclusive personal space, walking outside
and - "Boom! There's all these houses and, if it's a sunny
day, there are all these people milling around outside." A
lot of them are tending gardens, which delights Schoellkopf because
it confirms his hope that each resident would add texture to the
landscape of the design and thus help make the whole seem beautiful.
It is these experiences - the happy confluence
of privacy and community, the confirmation that value in residential
design is not always linked to size or superficial signs of luxury,
the commitment to allowing the geography of the site drive the design,
and the creative tension between tradition and innovation - that
make Cobb Hill an excellent architectural lesson, even for those
who aren't drawn to co-housing.
Likewise, here is proof that communitarian values in architecture
are compatible with good old human nature. How did Esselstyn get
permission to do his slyly innovative shingling job? Easy: He never
asked; he just went ahead and did it.
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