INTRODUCTION:

BUILDING ON THE EDGE

I live on the coast of Maine and spend whatever time I can sailing along it, and since I’m an architect, looking at the architecture as much as the scenery.

I have to report back to you that the news about recent architecture is not good.

Most of the houses built since the 1920s seem strangely awkward and orphaned from their surroundings--ill at ease on this glorious coastline.

But if you picked up this book, perhaps you are dreaming of something different--of living in a special place that does feel like it belongs in its setting. Perhaps you are dreaming of a piece of land on the edge of the water that has some personal magic to it and you want to build something that is more than what my wife refers to as another "missed opportunity."

Land at the water’s edge is different--it’s where two worlds meet, and you can’t really go beyond that edge without some kind of machine to carry you. It’s a place where weather systems collide, where views are longer, where you can feel a bit like you own a piece of infinity.

This difference at the water’s edge can help you build a great house that enhances its site and your life--but it also is something of a public trust. Just as building on a beautiful street has its obligations, so building on the water’s edge is building on the edge of a public space. It gives great rewards, but it demands care in return. The water seems private--seems to be yours--but it’s not.

In 1974, Charles Moore (with Gerry Allen and Don Lyndon) wrote a book called "The Place of Houses." It is a wonderful book that distills the four years I spent with Charles Moore in architecture school.

In their introduction the authors observed:

"The main premise of this book is that anyone who cares enough can create a house of great worth--no anointment is required. If you care enough you just do it. You bind the goods and trappings of your life together with your dreams to make a place that is uniquely your own. In doing so you build a semblance of the world you know, adding it to the community that surrounds you. This is not at all to minimize the importance of expertise, only to discredit its mysteries.

The crucial ingredient is concern, care for the way that a house is built and the shape that it gives to your life. Pattern books had helped in the past by setting out the range of decisions to be made, directing attention to the several aspects of the house deemed most critical: roof, floor-plan and window types, usually, and the general stylistic trapping of the whole. For the nineteenth century this may have been, and for some people still is, enough. But our experience as architects leads us to believe that houses can and should be more completely suited to the lives of their inhabitants and to the specific places where they are built. No simple or even complex set of house patterns, however ingenious and skillful, would do."

Part of designing buildings by the water is dealing with unique construction difficulties that come with being on the margin--sloping sites, high winds, lots of moisture in the air, corrosion from salt, and different impacts from the sun than are experienced on inland sites. Good houses on the coast deal with these issues successfully and the solutions to these technical problems enhance the quality of the design rather than forcing compromises in it.

There are themes that run through all these designs--not stylistic themes, because we have many "styles" here--but design ideas that deal with siting, scale, massing, room layout, and use of materials that apply to every style of house.

Good design is mostly an intuitive act and is perhaps a bit mysterious when viewed from outside the process. But once the design is done, and there is a building to see, you can learn why the building works.

I believe architecture is something to be seen with the eyes, to be lived in, worked in, and walked through, rather than theorized about. Since I can’t take you through these houses physically, I will take you on a photo and drawing tour. We will "reverse engineer" them, abstracting the design ideas that were used to make them feel right in their setting so that you can help make your own house work this well.

My hope is that you will come away from this book with a sense that you could take the "trappings of your life" along with your dreams and find an architect that will help you create a house that belongs in this book. Great architecture does not happen without clients who have the vision to reach (and get their architect to reach as well) for something that they can’t quite see. Good luck and have fun.

RWK