AR:B4d1.7, P&E 197. "The Parabiographies": House for Edna S. Purcell [aka Lake Place] [Minneapolis, Minnesota] (1913)

Text by William Gray Purcell

Parabiographies entry, Volume for 1913

[Note: The format presented here replicates (more or less, given the

different medium) a typographical layout created by Purcell in a draft date

October, 1952. The original manuscript was composed between 1938 and 1940.

The version here is taken from the 1952 draft. Some minor editing for

clarity in reference to other P&E work has been added.]

Own home

Sold in 1917 for $17,500

Early

window-wall

9'' x 28'

"Relation between building and site

is half of Architecture," say the Chinese

Where

new ideas

germinate

See our plans for Babson Estate (1915) and Bennett gardens

"The Little Joker was a term of affection which George Elmslie bestowed on

this, the second of six homes I have built for myself..." (Lake of the

Isles [Catherine Gray house], Lake Place; Moylan, Rose Valley,

Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Banning California; and Pasadena

[remodeling]).

For this project Mr. Elmslie developed a wholly fresh and original idea

for a small dwelling. It did not stem from any of the sequences which we

had been cultivating, nor is there any building in the post-Columbian

Exposition world to which its plan or forms refer. It was a brilliantly

successful project in every way and stands today perhaps the most complete

dwelling we ever did together.

For one thing, there was enough money spent on it (about $14,000 at the

pre-war $ value) to do it right, and these new world machine age forms

needed beautiful materials, perfect

workmanship, and very complete details to tell the story with

satisfaction. Indeed, there has always been a yearning within me to design

a full equipment of furniture for this house. Some day I have thought I

might even buy it back and do this very thing, one of those dreams, but at

that, more reasonable than restoring an old Colonial, for this house

is in step with the best of today, indeed watching the non-functionalism

streamlinism [sic] of 1940 now on the zoom, it is not unlikely that "The

Little Joker" will come into its best days another quarter century hence.

The house was handicapped by a very narrow lot. We discounted this by

locating it on the rear of the property so that its various significant

front lines, of pool, sunken walks, and great decorative front window were

from fifteen to twenty-five feet back of the two adjoining houses. The

rear overlooked Lake of the Isles with a view between old

houses in broad lawns facing the Park Boulevard, so that the prospect from

the rooms, north, south, and west, was unimpaired.

This question of correctly locating buildings on conventional city

property had received practically no attention from anyone.

Householders, like automobile drivers who will not allow anyone to pass

them, were so eager to get out in front of their adjoining neighbors that

they never realized how they were really getting in the way of their own

best interests.

A few years before,

our warm friend Walter Burley Griffin had produced a plat plan for a

community of low cost houses on narrow lots, in which he paired the houses

in groups, with the service sides close to that lot line which was common

to each pair. The alternate group of pairs was pushed forward on

each two lots and well back on the next two lots, so that instead of 11

feet maximum space between houses and each one looking into his neighbor's

windows, he secured 105 feet between houses, with living room windows

looking into adjoining gardens, -- one pair looked over the front gardens,

the next over the rear. We were eager to put this idea to work, and

made it part of the studies for a number of projects, but this house of my

own was the first one to materialize. In 1923, in Portland, this

principle was applied with gratifying success in locating the Campbell and

Bergeron houses.

The current interest in town planning leads the younger generation to

believe that they are the first to have given this science serious

consideration, in this country, at least. They know about Port

Sunlight and other planned cities of the 1900s, but the serious student

should know the work of Walter Burley Griffin because it was his practical

experience in city planning which provided him with fully integrated ideas

for his brilliant solution of the Canberra, Australia, Capital

competition, thus enabling him to win First Prize in this international

architectural competition in 1912. Winning a competition is, of

course, dependent upon the intelligence of the jury, or lack of it, and,

therefore chance is likely to be a large factor in any decision.

Regardless of how the element of chance may have affected the remainder of

the awards, Griffin's winning design demonstrates, with competence and

justified self-assurance, a new world of planning which not one of the

other 130 architects had envisioned, and which was not generally explored

for another quarter of a century.

Along about 1910, Griffin got in touch with the owner of a subdivision

which had just been laid out by civil engineers on the northwest side of

Chicago, now part of Trier. It was the conventional grid, laid out

on a rolling terrain, which resulted in many practically unusable lots.

Griffin told the property owner that he could replan the same area with

more lots, none of them of smaller area. Further, he could reduce

the sidewalk, curb, sewer, paving, light, water, services and cost by 20%,

and could eliminate practically all of the unsalable [sic] lots amounting

to some eight or nine percent of the whole. He assured the owner

that the increased sales of lots would cover all the loss occasioned by

replatting and the necessary repurchase of some few lots which had already

been sold...

[more to come]

Text by William Gray Purcell

"Own House Notes"

Undated [probably circa 1915]

[Note: the original manuscript is in the form of a rough, annotated draft. Corrections in the hand of Purcell have been entered in this transcription; however, revised sentences sometimes contain grammatical misconstructions.]

In so far as this house represents a departure from customary forms it does so because in designing it a conscious attempt has been made to first establish a real modern American family life, and then give it expression in real forms.

This is indeed a departure. The standard type of house - the "style period" house, is planned on a jumble plan of daily life within the house and an essentially aristocratic view toward the community. The element of honorific waste is present everywhere. In plan, material, finish, all decisions are based primarily upon what contemporary fashionable "society" is going to think about it, rather than upon the fitness of things.

In the modern dwelling planned by habit we have seen the parlor disappear and the living room disappear; we have seen the sun room arrive, and with its advent we have seen the function of the living room pickup and move into the sun room; and completing the circle, we now have the old parlor idea - now called Living Room - back with is again in slightly different dress, but still the same unlived-in zone. What we needed to do was to lose, not so much the parlor as the parlor idea of life - and when that went the resulting change in form bore witness to a very definite occurrence.

In this dwelling the useless division between recent sun room and living room quietly slipped away. A new place appeared within the house, all free and open, filled with soft light, tributary to all parts of the hearth; all parts invite one to exercise the various functions of everyday living. One can live all over the single room of the entire lower floor according to the time of day or his mood. The room even merges into library function. The books and desk work are serviced by a development almost separate in feeling for use but still articulated room-part. The cubic content offer flows into and around this department, up to the common ceiling, over and on with perfect naturalness.

The daily use of these rooms reflect very definitely the background against which they were framed. On fine Minnesota winter mornings when the first level sun rays come slanting over the snowy house tops just at breakfast, this table time and again is laid in front of the Living Room fire. The electric toaster sits on the end of the hearth and the coffee and cheese and jam come down from the kitchen at their leisure. On Sunday evenings the great chairs and the littlest chairlets [sic] are drawn up around the hearth; and the bread and milk, cookies and apples are had with stories and chatting, and with the firelight for company.

The writer recalls one extremely hot August day - sticky and dusty downtown - coming home to some fresh clothes - but still the heat - and then down to tea; and there in the end of the Living Room, all open toward the east with the little pencil stream of the fountain puttering away among the pale yellow water hyacinths, was the evening table so cool looking, with two cool colored chairs. The house had begun to show its desire to say things at the right time. The coolest looking tea table in town, I'm sure -- most of them that night sitting in the same surroundings that felt good last winter.

But in what way do these very commonplace and familiar occurrences indicate any special architectural qualities in the design of the house? Because variants in the daily program are really done only in books, in life possibly discussed. Ten thousand times ten thousand American families dine in the same spot, facing food in the center of the room with their backs to the windows while all the poetry and splendor there is flows by inviting as the still small voice of beauty but with no response.

When what we eat and how we eat it become so important that we can't move the ceremony of it near the window or outdoors, something in life has become unreasonable. But if the dwelling by refusing to be fixed in habitual forms makes easy the mechanics of such variations then the free forms have begun to express themselves in a vital way.

It would seem as if the playfulness of life never had a chance in our rigidly planned American homes. Think of the freedom from unreal conventions in the countries we think of as so very conventional. The supper table everywhere upon the sidewalks and pavements of Paris - the outdoor gardens for music, refreshment and grown-up play - and the possibilities in every country from Italy to Norway for suiting the action to the sentiment of the moment. What hotel in the "Land-of-good-hotels" is not prepared to set its tables out in the yard if the evening is fine, where one can see the Alps - and what hotel in America is prepared to do so.

Houses should not be clamps to force us to the same things three hundred and sixty-five days in the year; they should not be ordering us about regardless of breeze and sunset, but they should be backgrounds for expressing ourselves in three hundred and sixty-five different ways if we are natural enough to do so.

The customary Dining Place in this house, still within and a part of the family room, is eight steps above the Living Room, excepting on that in summer the Dining Table spends practically all its working hours out on the porch. In this connection another detail might be mentioned. The rooms are noticeably free from an overcrowding of furniture and its practical absence is taken account of by a group of very dainty folding chairs, stained blue, red, green, yellow, violet and orange. The coming into the room of these chairs as they are needed brings a festive character to the room and any occasion. Another festive character that comes to the room quite naturally is the result of the general basis of the illumination in the evening. A reading light that burns generally and the five pendants give an extremely soft light of a cool rather than a warm quality, and this as a basis rests whatever local light that may be required for reading, writing, or looking at pictures and prints. When the guests come and all parts of the rooms come into quite active use at the same time, several dozen candles are placed around. The house is such a perfectly natural and effective answer to each everyday living requirement as it arises that it is continuously suggesting things of itself and it furnishes a perfectly quiet background.

The daytime light in the room is in many ways equally surprising. Under the seven foot eave projection over the great East windows the sun comes in the first things in the morning, and in the winter time since in Minnesota it stays close to the horizon all day, it slants into to the room until noon. On summer evenings I have seen the orange red squares of setting sun sending ribbons of light down the while lengths of the fifty-odd feet of Living Room and flecking rose colored spots of ruddy color on the window mullion of the East window - shadow and sunshine basking against he lavender light of evening climbing up the Eastern sky.

One cannot pass the astonishingly lovely light effects that are continuously surprising one without mentioning the effect of the pendant electric lights, inverted semi-domes of pinky lavender moonlight color as seen through the hanging fronds of the fern. The flecks of pale moonlight color between the fronds, scissor snips of light picking up the curve of the light form, in a Chinese phantasy [sic].

All these effects while not apparently of the architecture of the building are so in fact because they are incidents and situations which if seen at all in average houses are so confused with the jumble of color, furniture, and material possessions that the effects are spoiled and lost. The diffused daylight and high ceilings make possible the great shower of fern and the pale sienna walls shot gold and green and lavender and margined with warm gray oak with a lavender filler, form backgrounds for fern and lights.

The house has no facing as of front and rear but accounts for conditions as they exist in all directions. The house is set back some thirty feet behind the general property line which throws the Dining Room windows and porch quite free of the actual rear of adjoining houses. The porch faces the Lake of the Isles a hundred yards to the west, and although on a narrow lot the prospect from each point at which the house opens out is broad and free, where adjoining houses come close the plan is closed tight.

Note the long horizontal window near the writing desk. The floor of the Living Room is slightly below the level of the ground outside and to the west the ground rises a couple of feet which brings this window very close to the ground, with a little garden of small sorts of wild flowers just inside the window and almost at one's elbow as one writes.

The second floor in its principal plan feature shows a similar attempt to solve the problem of living in generous quarters and still providing for such division as occasional necessity may demand. The principal bedroom may be separated into two rooms by screen like doors covered with a greenish gray grass cloth. But ordinarily they stand day after day pushed back against the ends of the chiffoniers--the portions of the rooms not merely joined as by a door, but one room, in fact, with the little boy's corner with its little fireplace where, please imagine, next winter each cold and snowy night, two little rosy checked lads with milk and waiting for Father to come home, listening to Robin Hood, Autumn Fires, Songman's pack. The convenience of doing it makes the charming occasions the habitual occasions.

One does the beautiful things because it is easy to do them. Fireplace seats will not be sat in if they are uncomfortable. Hot and cold day-meals will not seek special cool or cosy places unless it is both easy to do it and delightful to the senses after one has done it. The fireplaces here begin to twinkle at the slightest occasion because they are raised and accessible, because the hearth is dished to keep the ashed within bounds and the floor tidy, and because fuel is handy and the hearth decorative enough to let the charred log ends die out and lie there without a sense of confusion or neglect.

One must not pass the little lad's "sleeping car" bed all panelled about and with two tiny windows just at the pillow and a regular "berth light" and rolling cloth shades just like the real ones. Underneath are great drawers for toy things and the footboard is a bookcase with a folding desk tucked away inside.

The sleeping porch is just the length of a bed and outdoor sleeping is done when the weather invites as always with the modern sleeping porch - the departure in this case being that when the weather does not invite instead of pulling down a lot of sash which have all the time been making the average sleeping porch a tight little box even when opened, the beds are rolled back into their places in the bedroom.

And the bedroom itself is about all windows, twelve windows and two outside doors, but when all are closed one still has outside fresh air for all the air in the house is fresh warmed outside air which has been brought to sixty-five per cent relative humidity with an automatic humidifier in the heating plant.

A spring day atmosphere at sixty-eight temperature and plenty of it, and one can sleep or sit in all day in the sort of indoors climate he prefers.