MICHAEL FEIN
From the Editor
Enriched by Time and Change EVOLUTION AND ADAPTATION HAVE BEEN ON MY MIND OF
late. Not because of any particular newfound fascination with Charles Darwin or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but because I’ve been reading Ronald Knapp’s Chinese Houses: The Architectural Heritage of a Nation, concurrent with work on this, our fifth anniversary issue of New England Home. One particularly appealing quality of the buildings featured in Knapp’s book is how they developed gradually, over the course of decades or even centuries, in response to the needs of generations of occupants. Some Chinese house complexes grow to be quite large, and while even the most rambling examples maintain a fairly rigid order and hierarchy of spaces public and private, the way that pattern is implemented is often delightfully ad hoc. There’s something about this combination of systematic intent with opportunistic, contingent or simply odd execution that strikes me as deeply human and beautiful. Design at its best can improve over time, acquiring depth and complexity through use.
Chinese building traditions too, although incorporating elements common to architecture throughout the country, were heavily influenced over time by local culture, geography and weather. Construction materials came largely from the immediately surrounding area; much of the work was (still is, in some regions) done by local craftsmen schooled only through apprenticeship and experience. Does this sound familiar? I hear distinct echoes of early New England architecture, developing out of East Anglian and Kentish practices to suit the harsher climate of the New World. Fortunately, when it comes to architecture and building, unlike the ongoing evolution of living creatures, learned behaviors are heritable. Sensible historic building practices and the creative reuse of existing structures are invaluable adjuncts to emerging green concerns today, and those practices can be combined intelligently with new technologies to get the best of both worlds. On this subject I’ll be moderating “The Greenest Building is Already Built,” a half-day symposium with several notable experts in sustainable design and historic preservation, at the Boston Architectural College on October 16. [For more information, contact the Boston Architectural College at (617) 547-3355 or visit www.frankshirleyarchitects.com/about-symposium.html.] The houses you’ll see in this issue, as it happens, are all new. But each of them was created for a particular family with the kind of care that makes me wonder what we might see in a 2110 issue of New England Home, showing the way they too will weather, adapt and be renewed for future use. The magazine itself is likewise still quite new (as long as five years of hard work may seem when being lived through!). Yet it also has already evolved. I like to think of it, like a welldesigned house, being remade piecemeal, over time, to continue to nurture and delight each new generation of family.
Kyle Hoepner, Editor-in-Chief khoepner@nehomemag.com
Corrections: Rosbeck Builders Corporation (www.rosbeckbuilders.com) should have been credited as the builder of one of the homes featured in our July/ August issue (“Bashful Beauty,” page 52). We regret the oversight.
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New England Home September/October 2010