Goethe called architecture “frozen music,” but the AIA MN honor-award-winning
Marlboro Music Cottages also show how much music can “thaw” architecture.
Designed by Joan Soranno, with John Cook and Doug Gerlach of HGA, the five houses
have a warm, inviting quality in keeping with classical music emanating from
them, home to the musicians and their families who attend the world-famous
Marlboro Music festival each summer in Vermont.
Standing
along a former logging road near Marlboro College, the gable-roofed residences recall
the region’s “Cape Cod” houses, which Soranno, who grew up in Boston, knows
well. “The typical cape,” she says, “has a 60/40 roof-to-wall relationship, a
center chimney, and windows up against seven-foot-high eaves. We adhered to
those intimate proportions, while trying to reinterpret Capes in a fresh way.”
In this,
they have succeeded - brilliantly. Like the fresh interpretations of the
classical repertoire by the musicians of Marlboro Music, Soranno and Cook have
made a 400-year-old form feel new and alive with possibility. They did so, in
part, by recalling the spare quality of the first Capes, with their unpainted surfaces
and local materials. The Marlboro cottages have naturally stained wood
exteriors and unpainted interiors, with Vermont slate roofs and floors,
local-stone foundation veneers, and native white-pine walls and ceilings. “The
client wanted minimal maintenance,” says Cook, “so we used long-lasting
materials and finishes.”
The design team minimized the
details of the cottages as well. Although built of thick, structurally
insulated panels, the energy efficient residences have narrow roof edges, untrimmed
window and door openings, and exposed timber rafters and joists – all of which
recall the thin walls and unadorned features of early Capes. “We don’t come
from the residential world,” says Cook, with Soranno never having designed a
residence before this project, but “our institutional experience taught us how
to do a thin roof edge, for example.”
The architects’ background in
institutional buildings also enabled them to question some of the traditional characteristics
of Capes. Instead of the small openings in the typical Cape, they used
floor-to-ceiling windows to connect the cottages to the surrounding woods and
fields, and instead of low ceilings, they opened up the living spaces and
master bedrooms with gabled ceilings to provide better spaces, acoustically,
for the musicians. “A strong connection exists between nature and music,”
observes Soranno, and that comes through clearly in these cottages, so much so
that AIA MN honor-awards juror, Dan Rockhill, said that the pine-clad, timber-framed
interiors reminded him of “being inside a wood instrument.”
The composition of the cottages’
forms and fenestration recall aspects of musical composition as well. Their
rectangular, gabled shapes, for example, “just kiss,” as Cook puts it, barely touching
each other as they slide past one another, like variations on a theme moving
across a musical score. The same theme and variation occurs on the cottages’
end walls, where large-and-small, square-and-rectangular windows play a lively
visual game within the confines of the gable shape, and along the side walls,
where the regular rhythm of windows sometimes align – and sometimes not – with
the same-sized openings on the opposite side.
“I always
try to find ways to make a composition more dynamic,” says Soranno, “and yet I also
am attracted to calm, primal forms,” and much of the enormous appeal of these
cottages lies in the rich tension between those two sensibilities. “I like the
way these cottages recall how most children draw a house, with a gable roof and
center chimney,” she adds. But these structures also show how great architects,
like the residents of these cottages, can collaborate in the making of beautiful
music.
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