A Timeless House

Reflecting on Brent Hull’s Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age

Throughout Timeless House, Hull steers us back from the cliff formed by our lack of vision and respect for architecture and quality buildings. He denounces design-by-spreadsheet and implores consumers to demand more from their buildings and their builders. He wants quality materials, craftsmanship, and a design approach that carries a house from conception to execution. We all want a big house modern amenities: extra square footage, double ovens, master bathrooms, playrooms, three car garages, etc. But those things cost money and in the custom home segment often time the economics lead consumers to design with the goodies in focus; whatever remains will cover the vinyl windows and 2.5'’ colonial trim. Clients should want more and allocate their budget towards craftsmanship over quantity. If they choose to do so and construct with a holistic design philosophy they will have built a timeless house.

You will find no disagreement from me with the points above, but there a few elements that merit further unpacking. What exactly is a timeless house and when exactly it was that we lost our way?

Hull doesn’t explicitly condemn post-1930s architectural styles, but it’s evident from the sources he cites. His chosen models for historic and contemporary beauty are from the classical tradition with a termination point somewhere after the the Arts and Crafts era.

“A timeless house is grounded in building traditions. There is no more thoroughly detailed method for building that the classical tradition,” he writes opening chapter two. Modern and post-modern modes of architecture are not timeless in his view. While I do personally prefer these historic styles, I have to recognize that this is primarily a personal preference driven by an appreciation for history, but the Greco-Roman and Gothic traditions that undergird western architectural styles are not the only things out there. While they certainly establish our western building tradition, history is not done being written.

There is Bach and Beethoven, but there is also the Talking Heads and Megadeth. We can’t stop writing at Gilgamesh or we will never get Charles Bukowski. Year after year fourteen-year-olds are rediscovering Megadeth and Bukowski and getting into all sorts of trouble as a result, as I did when I was their age, and as many young punks did before me. I expect this cycle to continue endlessly.

Back to houses though:

The contemporary can be timeless. Classically inspired houses are pinned to a historical moment. When employing a Georgian moulding detail you are tagging the house to that era, pinning it to a specific period in time. Conversely, some contemporary houses are so unique, that they may exist ahistorically without referent, precedent, or antecedent, and in this way be truly timeless.

Fallingwater, the legendary house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is undeniably timeless, and in fact embraces principles of architecture found in writings by John Ruskin and Andrew Jackson Downing. In The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), Downing demands that we build houses that blend into and compliment their natural surroundings. In the Seven Lamps of Architecture, (1849) Ruskin admonishes us “when we build, let us think that we build forever.” Fallingwater’s structure balances carefully over the eternal waterfall, but the stone and strong timbers of its exterior assure us that it will not fall. The craftsmanship and quality in Wright’s structure are undeniable, yet it lacks a historic precedent, unless the waterfall itself sets the precedent.

Does the construction of something revolutionary like Fallingwater create a historic moment so powerful and immediate that it establishes tradition? Perhaps yes, and if so it might meet Hull’s own definition of timeless. Afterall in chapter one he writes, “a timeless house conveys a well-told story. The key to an enchanting story is historic precedent.”

I wonder if there is something innately timeless about human innovation and expression. Is revolution more of a timeless pursuit than rifling back through Palladius for our chair rail heights? Well if we are building a Palladian room than we have to pick the latter. However, if we want to build something special, we may pick the pursuit of revolution. The quality of timelessness can exist outside of the historical and the faux-historical, and revolution doesn’t need to burn everything down in the process. The arts and crafts movement was in many ways a quiet revolution.

Hull spends a great deal of time in the book saying that we have “lost our way” or “lost sight” of the things that matter in building. Is that really the case? If we look back through western architectural history, we find pervading a pernicious, romantic notion that there is something lost in the past that we must reclaim. (This notion is not unique to architecture: google “Atlantis is real” and you will find a whole subculture of pseudo-archaeologists claiming we have a primordial past lost in the waves.) Human beings are obsessed with the past and the secrets it (supposedly) held. I can’t be the only builder who looks at the pyramids and thinks “well, it really can’t have been that hard to build.” But don’t get me wrong, I am just as amazed and obsessed with our built past as Hull or any architectural nerd.

In Timeless House, Hull includes several contradictory voices from the past Architect Oliver P. Smith writes in 1854,

“A great proportion of our house… are but incongruous piles, rude and cheerless in external appearance, and ill-contrived and comfortless within…”

He quotes from critic John Ruskin in 1849,

“In the Gothic period they built to last, today we build to sell.”

So it seems that even writers from the Greek revival and Victorian eras were not satisfied with the quality of houses that were being built. When exactly were things good?

Hull tells us of the Grand Tour often taken by young intellectuals from America and England in the 1800’s to rediscover their cultural heritage (primarily Greco-Roman and Gothic) in the cities of Europe. These young minds came back with sketches of the Parthenon and the temple of Jupiter and declared that they had rediscovered what was lost and here is the antidote to moral and architectural ruin. This reinvestigation of Greco-Roman dimensions, forms, and orders lead to a mountain of books by Asher Benjamin, Owen Biddle, William Pain, and the like and naturally to neo-classicism and the Greek revival.

But before them there was Palladio (ca. 1530) who became obsessed with the newly “rediscovered” works of Vitruvius, a roman architect/builder (ca. 5 BC). Vitruvius himself looked even further back referencing buildings built some 400 years before his time in the Hellenistic world. In his day we were also lost.

So when exactly did we “lose sight”? Search Instagram for the hashtag “keep craft alive” and see that people still care and are still obsessing over the forgotten artifices of the olden-days. Before Instagram (yes there was a time…) there were writers imploring us to maintain craftsmanship over a reliance on technology exploding onto the market. This Old House has been one of the most popular shows on public television since 1979. Yes, keep craft alive (obviously), but it is not dead and it never died. Leave the poor tract home builders alone. They can exist along side excellent builders like, well, like Brent Hull. Five hundred years ago, or a thousand, was this dichotomy true then too? Were there good builders and not so good ones?

One of the most powerful pieces on the topic of technology comes from Frank Lloyd Wright himself, the progenitor of the modern, in his 1901 address “The Art and Craft of the Machine.” Wright knew that the machine would change craft forever, but that we would adapt to it and let our humanity shine through:

The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man’s life upon the earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!

Technology and the reaction to it are not new. The feeling that something is lost is in itself timeless. We suffer from survivorship bias. We are drawn to conclusions by our inputs, and our inputs are the buildings that survived. Those buildings were either exceptionally well-built or exceptionally well-cared for, and we only care for beautiful things. The tragic, horror show, hack-built houses of the 1700s have long since been welcomed back into the dirt, and those that were treasured and cared for were the finest built of their time.

Going back to Vitruvius, I wonder if he wrote De Architectura as a reaction to some incoming style of architecture he flatly rejected. Was he put into fits seeing wealthy Roman merchants spend their denarii on erecting a new bathhouse in the Germanic style? Did they skimp out on the Italian marble in favor of more square footage in the frigidarium? Or did he pull his hair out looking at the production built mud huts of the Gaulic tribesman?

Well, yes in fact he did. Echoing words that could have been written by Ruskin, Wright, or even Brent Hull himself Vitruvius writes:

“But when I see that this grand art is boldly professed by the uneducated and the unskillful, and by men who, far from being acquainted with architecture, have no knowledge even of the carpenter’s trade, I can find nothing but praise for those householders who, in the confidence of learning, are emboldened to build for themselves.