Copp House by ACC Art Books

CONTENTS 7 / FOREWORD 8 / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11 / ESSAY 23 / PHOTOGRAPHS 69 / DRAWINGS 77 / APPENDIX

Winnifred and Harold Copp

The Site “The site must win in the end” 8 was one of Ron Thom’s axioms, and it aptly describes how the Copp House relates to its setting. In siting the Copp House, Thom drew inspiration from Richard Neutra, the California-based Austrian architect and erstwhile Frank Lloyd Wright protégé. Neutra had been invited by B.C. Binning in the late 1940s and early 1950s to give a series of lectures in Vancouver. It was an era when such events were rare, and Neutra’s talks were major events, electrifying his audiences and galvanizing the design community.9 In the design press, at lectures and in books, Neutra was excoriating North America’s burgeoning subdivisions, where “dead-level lawns are now being shorn by clashing new-fangled mowers where only a few months ago characteristic hill slopes and ground swells gave a specific physiognomy to the site and granted it personality.”10 The message landed hard in Vancouver, where contractors were levelling hilly lots and razing magnificent trees to simulate a popular notion of the nuclear family’s perfect home, ideally centred on a rectangle of green, the shaggy foliage shorn away, the house itself projecting outward to the street, conspicuous like a castle. Instead of the house dominating or replacing the natural setting, argued Neutra, architects should harness the setting by designing “tentacles

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The Architecture The basic plan of the Copp House begins with Wright’s notion of a large central chimney as the nucleus, from which the two main wings of the house radiate (as does a third wing, added seven years later.) The dominant material would be cedar-board siding sourced locally. “Wood was one of the original materials to be considered useful in the making of a structure, and its appeal is universal; its colour and texture and warmth, the flower of the grain being close to the human heart,” he would write in 1960.14 Building in wood had been a principle of West Coast architecture for literally millennia, first in the longhouses of the region’s aboriginal peoples, and then, after European contact, in rough-hewn loghouses, simple painted clapboard, and the painted or stained shingle siding of Arts-and-Crafts kit houses. But in a refined, middle-class Canadian home of the 20th century, to leave the cedar cladding raw and unpainted, inside and out, on purpose—this was truly radical, if not heretical. Trained in the art of composition and shading, Thom conceived the house as a study of darkness and light, and of solids and voids. Its massing is relatively simple: a ground-level shoebox-like volume running east-west, with an elevated shoebox volume running perpendicular over the first to form a basic L-shaped plan. But the careful fenestration, textured cladding and positioning of these volumes within the site all serve to create a highly complex interplay of light and form. From the bright streetscape, you descend into the micro-valley that cradles the house. The house does not sit on the lot like a statue on a plinth—the conventional single-family-house siting mode, then as now—but appears to meld right into the site. The upper-floor volume— the bedroom wing of the house—sits quietly and conventionally over the lower floor at its north end, but meets the ground at the higher south-end of the site. The centre of this wing is elevated over the slope to create a tunnel underneath it that leads to a secluded outdoor space. There is no monumental front entrance. Instead, there are two understated entry points: at the bottom of the driveway, you may turn left towards the “tunnel” and knock at the front door in the shadow of the upper-floor wing, or you may park in the carport and proceed

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nonetheless took the time to correspond with Harold and Freddie about the colour choices for the living room’s built-in furnishings. “I am not certain about the deep blue couch,” he wrote to them. He feared that “the room might take on the character of a Danish furniture show-room. It owes much of its present quality to a fairly plain and singular use of colour and materials. I was thinking of something closer in colour to the leather, if not actually leather, for this seat, as it has been my experience that it is impossible to push the use of one material too far. You may remember how limited in this regard was the common room in Massey College.”15

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Building Plans C

Building Plans

7 9

A 2

1. 2. 3. 1. 4. 2. 5. 3. 4. 6. 5. 7. 6. 8. 7. 9. 8. 10. 9. 11. 10. 11.

Living Room Dining Room Music Room Living Room Kitchen Dining Room EntryRoom Hall Music Kitchen Washroom Entry Hall Boiler Room Washroom Underpass Boiler Room Storage Underpass Courtyard Storage Carport Courtyard Carport

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Book Credits Adele Weder author Adele Weder is an architectural writer, editor, curator and correspondent for publications across Canada and abroad. She is the author and co-author of several books and monographs on Canadian architecture, including B.C. Binning and Selwyn Pullan: Photographing Mid-Century West Coast Modernism. As well as co-curating several exhibitions with the Maison de l’Architecture du Québec, she curated and coordinated the exhibition Ron Thom and the Allied Arts, which travelled to museums and galleries across Canada during 2013–15. Adele completed her Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture in 2005. An honorary member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, she received the RAIC President’s Award for Architectural Journalism in 2011 and the RAIC Metro Vancouver Advocacy Award in 2015. She lives in Vancouver and Haida Gwaii. Michael Perlmutter photographer After completing his Master of Architecture degree at UC Berkeley, Michael moved to Sweden in 1989 to work as an architect. In the mid-90s Michael began photographing architecture instead, starting with two guidebooks on Stockholm architecture. Since then he has built a broad international photography practice with a focus mainly on the Nordic countries. In 2001 he produced a series of photographs of a 1930s chapel in Tallinn, which were awarded first prize in an international photography competition sponsored by the Museum of Estonian Architecture. In 2007 Michael was nominated for Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for his photography in the book Den Svenska Kakelugnen (Swedish Tile Stoves). In 2013 two of his tile stove images were issued as Swedish postage stamps. Michael has exhibited in Stockholm and teaches photography internationally. His work can be viewed at www.archp.com. Pablo Mandel gdc book designer Pablo Mandel is a graphic design consultant and book designer. He has worked with some of the most renowned contemporary architects, photographers, and publishers worldwide, helping them shaping publications and communication projects. His book designs have been published worldwide and won several awards, including the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects’ National Merit Award for Grounded (2011), and for YUL-MTL Moving Landscapes (2015) and the Bookbuilders West’s Certificate of Excellence (image-driven trade books, 2009, 2010, 2011). Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, he has traveled extensively around the world. Pablo graduated from Buenos Aires University in 1995 with a degree in Graphic Design and is a Certified Member of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. His work can be viewed at www.circularstudio.com.

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