If I may go back aways, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday drives my mother used to like to take back in the late 1930s and early 40s to look at the great houses at Newport, RI, or the massive summer cottages of the rich on Cape Cod or the mansions on the shore north of Boston. My older brothers hated the whole idea of such gawking, so I was her driver. I still like driving around looking at what is going up in the better neighborhoods. You may ask, what about the ordinary neighborhoods, the less well off, or even the poor ones? The answer: nothing's going up, so no need to look. There are, indeed, some pretty glitzy doctors' offices appearing in numbers in the increasingly medical, central (and poorish), part of town, but they are not dream houses, they are places of business meant to impress the halt and the lame, and no doubt do so.
I chose to concentrate (meaning "major") in architecture my second year at Harvard and had an eye-opening time of it, because the Harvard School of Design had just been given over to the Bauhaus folks, who had recently fled Germany. I was among the earliest undergraduates to benefit from their disciplines, or lack thereof. I was a babe in the woods for sure, but you have to start somewhere. By my junior year I had shifted to engineering to get a year's deferment from my draft board, which they gave because I was my widowed mother's third son; the other two were already in the Navy. This was 1942. I finally went off to the Navy myself in January 1944.
Of all the classes I took at Harvard in my three years there (because of the war that's what it took me to graduate), the architecture classes have most tended to stick in my mind as a meaningful and cohesive experience. The rest of my Harvard days were a sort of intellectual grab bag, a term first used to characterize Harvard as an educational resource by George Santayana, who had been a professor there for many years around the turn of the 20th century.
Odessa (Texas), where I live now, is having a boom at present, and I understand that housing prices have started finally to rise – this just as they are beginning to fall in the "hot" U.S. markets. All apartments are full, and there is plenty of building going on where builders are offering sites in "good neighborhoods."
You can see from this picture of a house only a couple of years old that the Bauhaus and its stripped down rigorous modernism have had strikingly little impact here on people with money enough to build something like this. As for Mies van der Rohe's gnomic statement that "less is more," forget about it. This pocket-castle sits on a couple of acres but looks rather as if it ought to be in a park of 20 acres, surrounded by a couple of hundred or even thousands of acres plentifully peopled with merry peasants treading out the grapes now that the harvest is here.
I worry that this next house that I have dubbed the "House of 77 Gables" may be in some distress. Work seems to have been stopped for quite a while, a chain-link fence has been put up to fend off vandals or perhaps just nosey parkers like myself, and a sign declares this a private property to be kept out of. It is presently a bit of a mystery and needs some watching by us dedicated house mavens.
For the last 15 years at least, the kind of house well-off people have put up hereabouts has been something I call "Dallas Style," although I can't prove Dallas is to blame for it. Its chief feature is a strong preference for showy two-story entranceways and multi-level steep-pitch roofs. Pitched roofs are thought entirely appropriate for places where much snow falls. The pitch of the roof allows the snow to slide off and the ice crust that often forms closest to the roof and clings to it will melt in the sun and quickly run off, again thanks to the pitch. All more or less true but, prithee, how does that account for the extraordinary prevalence of pitched roofs where very little snow ever falls? Another mystery.
Lately another trend: builders buy a sizeable chunk of former ranch land on the east side of Odessa, the side nearest to Midland, give it a classy-sounding, Englishy name like "Emerald Forest" or "Stony Ridge Manor," etc., etc., parcel the land up into a number of house sites, say a couple of dozen. (Not, to be sure, a zillion sites; these are not Levittowns for hoi polloi.) In some cases much the same thing is accomplished by some investors, who decide on a builder whom they will back to do all the houses so as to get some uniformity of – not design, exactly, but "feel" and "look" – so that, while the houses are quite disparate in design, they will all seem related as to – how to say it? – social status or at least social aspiration.
What's sought is a kind of homogeneity of costliness, at a pretty high level. Lately such pocket communities – gated communities they would be if one put a locked gate at the often quite ornamental entrance ways to them – have been more and more employing sites for houses that will take up to 80% or even more of the entire site for house and garages, leaving only a tiny area for lawn and garden. This seems to be what older, well-off couples and widows want: minimum yard maintenance, and within the house quite high-tech living that means a further easing of work, even if a maid is brought in a day a week, as one often is for such houses. Here is a recently finished example. Note that it is hardly set back at all from the paved street.
The metal roof, stuccoed exterior, and slender wooden columns supporting a roof overhang are "Santa Fe" touches, I'm told. Santa Fe itself has apparently become one of those places where ordinary people can mostly no longer afford to live.
My enthusiasm for this sort of thing began when I was in high school and living in a 1920s apartment house in Arlington, Massachusetts. We had a wonderful library in town named for the wealthy Robbins Family, which supplied me with all kinds of reading. In particular, I got onto Frank Lloyd Wright, not just pictures of his buildings, which seemed to me spectacularly right and beautiful, but his writings, which were more or less in the Whitman-Emerson tradition, with all that upstanding democratic thinking applied to architecture. I remember well how Wright fulminated against what he called "grandomaniac" designs: everything symmetrical, heavy, and utterly inappropriate for a people dedicated (so they said) to a shoulder-to-shoulder advance into the brave new world that was certainly coming. Wright's marvelous prairie houses were getting famous; Weimar Germany had already written about them; even if American beaux-arts architects were a little slow in appreciating the buildings and teachings of the pushy but brilliant chap from Wisconsin. My impression was that the Bauhausers respected no architect in America but Wright, but viewed themselves as a little nearer than he to the Pierian spring of right thinking about any art.
I've now gone on much too long. If "events" hold off, as I hope they do, I may continue this look (Part II) at Odessa's dream houses. I perhaps should begin where I here leave off, with some more talk of Wright's influence or lack of it out here on the Ultimate Prairie, or the Held-back Desert, however you want to call our West Texas surround.
This is an unusually hilly section of the Monahans Sandhills State Park near Odessa, a quite magical place where I set a little novel about West Texas that I intended to be a sort of salute to this whole region, which I have come to love.
October 10, 2006
