Architecture Here and There

A couple of weeks ago, after my column applauding (with a couple of feints to the contrary to build reader interest) Will Morgan's book Yankee Modern, your intrepid correspondent got a pleasant e-mail from Shannon Horsley, who noted that Warren Jagger, the well-known Providence photog who'd shot most of the work in Morgan's book, had also shot the inside of a carriage house just completed by Mark Finlay Architects, the firm she works for.

Our e-mail exchange - in which I described the sort of architecture that could spur me to write a column - led to my writing this blog about the following commercial project, 1020 Post Rd., pictured above and to the left, in Darien.

Apparently, the site was vacant for 40 years after a dry cleaner went under, leaving behind a severely contaminated plot of land. Last year, Mark Finlay filled it with a sweet building that has so invigorated the western section of Darien's downtown, along Route 1 (Post Road), that it won recognition from the Connecticut Main Street Center for Economic Restructuring.

I think I may have zoomed right by the building on Dec. 6, 2009, on the way back from the annual party, at New York's Racquet & Tennis Club on Park Avenue (a building by McKim, Mead & White overshadowed physically if not aesthetically by a host of boring modernist skyscrapers), of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, on the board of whose New England chapter I sit. I was with its vice president for education, Sheldon Kostelecky, and neither of us recognized 1020 Post Rd. as a new building. That was one of the things that is so wonderful about it.

The carriage house by Findlay, about which Shannon had e-mailed me, is pictured here. From here you can click to the rest of Mark Finlay's web site. There's a lot of marvelous work within. Most of it is residential, the sort of thing I rarely write about no matter how beautiful. Private, single-family residences in the United States have remained almost exclusively traditional in style, even as modernism has ruined almost every other form of building in America. We don't need a revolution in the style of building homes because, to a much greater extent than every other form of architecture, Americans are still allowed to choose their homes themselves. (See my post on that subject here.) Other aspects of home design may cry out for change, but not that of their general stylistic tendencies.

As for the carriage house in Newport, it is a lovely building and nobody in his or her right mind would avoid living there if they could help it. But at 6,400 square feet, if this is a carriage house, then I am a nose tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

 Tags  Architecture Darien ICA&CA Mark Finlay McKim Mead & White Newport Sheldon Kostelecky Warren Jagger

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