I was thinking about style the other day, while working on a new remodeling project. I was trying to create a sort of Hawaiian / country / mountain style house for clients whose house is on a forested hillside next to a creek. They wanted an informal plan that could be opened up to outdoor living areas but which would also shelter them from the heavy rainfall in the area. The project is in Los Gatos, not Hawaii, but as I thought of the classical Hawaiian house – walls that can be opened to the breezes on all sides, wide eaves to protect from the sun and heavy rainfall, natural stone and wood walls, metal roofing – it seemed an appropriate choice, at least as a starting point, for thinking about the look the house might have. Of course, the owner’s Hawaiian shirts, shorts and sandals might have had something to do with my thought processes...
Why do we need to think about ‘style’ for houses? What is a style? More often than not, our clients come to us with a desire to build a certain style house (and with many functional requirements also, to be sure), generally expressed by a well-known name and generally agreed upon characteristics. Tuscan villa (stucco walls with stone trims, clay barrel tile roof, simple forms), Craftsman (fine wood detailing and other artistic elements built into the home, horizontal lines, big porches), Contemporary (sharp angles, flat roofs, lots of metal and glass, clean articulation of forms) are typical examples. I think people use style names for the same reason that we put names to many things – as a quick, commonly accepted way to identify the characteristics of something. It saves a great deal of explaining.
We also use styles as a way to identify with places and times that have given us pleasure. I think most people, when they set out to create a new environment for themselves, think of places where they have felt happy, or relaxed, or particularly sheltered. Many ‘styles’ are grounded in a region’s historical methods of construction, based originally in local availability of particular materials and construction methods, and local climatic conditions. These local conditions ensure a certain consistency of design within the region; if these regions are heavily visited by tourists – think Tuscany, Province, the Sierras, Hawaii – the local style of architecture can become attractive to people who want to recreate the feeling they had while visiting.
On a more grandiose level, style can be used as a status symbol. Early on, the ancient Greeks used elements from Egyptian architecture to make their temples grand. The Romans copied Greek elements because to them, the Greeks were the class act of their world. Then Rome adapted the plebian arch, developed by military engineers for bridges and aqueducts, into their buildings and a new style was born. Starting in renaissance Italy, more recent Europeans re-created this ‘classical’ architecture in homage to the great Roman Empire, and it became the preferred architecture for the great and powerful for several centuries, eventually spreading everywhere European colonization went. A similar process took place in Asia.
Thus, some of our clients want classic Palladian villas, not because they enjoyed their stay in Florence, but because the rich and powerful have lived in such palaces since the time of the Medicis.
More later…
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