William Morgan: Sensing the soul of winter
The search for New England postcards recently produced this scene of a snowed-in village from a bin in the Red Chair shop in Hudson, N.Y. The Red Chair specializes in French antiques, linens, glassware and silver. But this undramatic townscape curiously appeared amidst a box of slightly naughty belle époque cards.
In the Red Chair
— Photo by William Morgan
This could be any town in northern New England, back when we had more major snowfalls than we do now. The giveaway that it might be farther north is the church, clearly not your wooden white Congregational meeting house, and so my guess was northern, francophone Maine. There was no legend on the back side, just a cryptic identification in pencil: “Canada’’.
The picture that this postcard evoked for me was the opening image in a slide presentation by the brilliant Canadian architect Peter Rose. He was one of three noted designers invited to interview at the Speed Museum, a limited competition to see who might to chosen to craft a master plan for the Louisville art museum. The other two were Robert Venturi, the guru of Post Modernism, and his opposite, the neo-Corbusian “white” architect, Charles Gwathmey. Both the rumpled Philadelphian and the super-slick New Yorker spoke about their work, that is, mostly themselves. The Montreal native showed several pictures of his native city and the Quebec landscape blanketed in snow.
Rose, who gave up a spot on the Canadian Olympic ski team to go to Yale’s architecture school, described how a downhill racer has to read the snow, “experiencing and understanding space and materials – snow, ice and trees, effects of light and contour–while hurtling through space as fast as possible.” Buildings, too, Rose noted, are experienced through motion as well; successfully reading topography, he declared, played an important part in his role as a designer.
Peter Rose in a private house in Manhattan in 2008.
—Photo by William Morgan
As Rose spoke of suns low in the sky and ice-covered farms and streets, one of the members of the Speed selection committee whispered to me that he did not understand why the talk of winter. While Rose prevailed over his more famous competitors in Louisville, that misunderstanding of the quiet yet passionate soul of America’s northern neighbor was sadly typical.
Providence-based architectural critic and historian William Morgan has written a number of books that deal with architecture in northern climes, including Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter and Peter Rose: Houses.
His recent books include Academia — Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States and his updated edition of The Cape Cod Cottage.