Michela Povoleri

Research Paper Proposal September 22, 2014

Building relocation: Moving imagination

“The house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. […] The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. […]The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme.” 1

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“The thought of physically picking up a house, placing in on wheels, and rolling it down the street interests people to no end. If I were to describe the faces of onlookers witnessing a house being moved, I would have to say there is uncertainty, disbelief, and pure amazement. I have seen pedestrians, so stirred by what they are witnessing, that they stray into traffic without regard for their personal safety.”2 Peter Paravalos begins with this fragment his book Moving a house with preservation in mind. During the past summer I felt the same amazement he refers to, assisting to an house moving, happened half block away of my house in New Haven. The process of moving that house in Chapel Street lasted about two months. The preparation of the house took a long time and careful procedures, the actual move happened in two consecutive nights during the third weekend of June. I was passing by the house everyday, twice a day, it was extremely fascinating to follow the proces step by step.

Since late 1800s, Americans have undertaken the complicated and delicate process of moving buildings. The concept has no changed: however, the reasonsof moving certainly have. A house that rested on logs and was drawn by horses now rests on steel beams and is pulled by trucks or tractors. Historically, moving buildings was done for economic reason. Today, majority of building moves are carried out in effort to save them from destruction. Nowadays, it’s often easier and less expensive to raze on an old building and construct a new one in its place than to move and rehabilitate the old one.

After a briefly historic background on house moving in the United States I would like to focus on three specific case studies. The selection of these particular houses will allow me to observe and study the process from different perspective.

On Thursday, November 11, 2010, a single-family home got a 180 degrees structural rotation as key moment of the art project by the american conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Through this project, called Prototype 180, this house of the first ring subdivision of Sharpstown in Houston (Texas) turns its back to the street, drawing attention to the social context, as well as to our pre-established and usually uncontested architectural, urban, and cultural norms. The project has the unique condition of being situated in Houston, which is the only metropolitan area in the United States without formal zoning regulations. Carroll challenges urban planning guidelines with her (literally) ground-shifting project by, as she points out, “treating policy as a ready made.”

This project involved discussions about zoning, urbanism, architecture, and of course

1. Gaston Bachelard. The house, from cellar to garret, the significance of the hut. The Poetic of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.

2. Peter Paravalos, Moving a House with Preservation in Mind, AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD 2006.

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had effects on the art world too. In the press release related to it, the Houston population was invited to assist to the turning move and to assist to an opening talk at the Columbia University. But a much larger audience could watch the moving process through the streaming offered in a customized website dedicated to the project: www.prototype180.com. Two webcams were located on the house itself, installed in the two opposite facades (front and back) to make the two points of view meeting in the process of rotating.

One of the aspects that fascinated me the most was exactly the aesthetic of the process of moving. In this case the contemporary technology allowed every internet user to take part to the public art event.

I think that even house or building movings not considered art projects carry with them a visual and emotional strength and attraction able to amazed the general public.There is of course a visual odd quality in the view of a house standing on pilasters or on wheels. A magic or fairy tale aspect that triggers our imagination. Something as stable and protective as we are used to consider the house is shifted in a new fragile, un-functional, unstable state. I believe there is an emotional transfer of nostalgia and personal feelings about our house based experiences that get awake in the observation of this phenomenon. I meant to analyze the sociological value of house/home in order to demonstrate how this can effect the experience of observing and participating to a house moving.

“Our house and home, the place where we live, is a key locale that shapes and enables us to develop a sense of who we are. For geographers and sociologists, theoretical conceptualizations of ‘space’ and place’ have assumed central importance in interpretations of home, including the ways in which social activities and cultural practices are both formed by and from certain landscapes. For sociologists this has meant seeing spaces and places as more then context, and geographers engaging with the ways in which spaces and places are socially constructed.”3

The second and the third case studies that I plan to describe and analyze have in subject houses designed by two american famous architects: Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. Both of these architects, in a historic shift have influenced and challenged the ways to consider, plan and design building and houses.

The Winton Guest House was designed by Frank Gehry, built in 1987, and then moved to a new location between 2008 and 2010. The house received design awards from both Home and Garden and Time magazines when it was completed and it also made the list of “Most Endangered Historic Places” in 2003. The peculiar architectural project required a specific ad hoc plan for its move. The house is the harmonious assemblage of diverse shapes covered by disparate exteriors. Each different room, with its own function and shape was disassembled and moved, one piece at a time.The process was documented by the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota that received the house as a donation and transformed the building into a museum dedicated to the

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3. Harvey C. Perkins, David C. Thorns, Ann Winstanley, Bronwyn M. Newton, The Study of ‘Home’ From a Social Scientific Perspective: An Annotated Bibliography, 2002.

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architect. The house was disassembled and reassembled about 110 miles away. Every part traveled on the same path in different moments, mostly during the nights. This process, even without being a specific art project, appears to me as poetic and intense as the turn planned by Carroll. Another similarity is related with the complaint of Gehry about the new location. In its original position, the many sections of the house, each differentiated by geometric form and a unique exterior material, were barely revealed. In the current approach to the house most of the visitors walk up from the conference center’s parking lot and immediately see the full scale of the guest house. From this position, the brick, metal and limestone sections result all visible and what was supposed to be a humble guest house seems impudent. That’s the difference that a small rotation of a house can make — especially a house as sculptural as this one. This case, shows the difficulty of moving a house designed for a specific client in a specific place. The house was donated to avoid its demolition and Gerhy, at the end said: “I’m just glad it wasn’t torn down”.

The work of Lloyd Wright is also and especially site-specific based. The reality of a building —for Wright— was the space within, the space in which one lives. The room is the architecture, not the enclosing roof and walls. Through the subtle manipulation of space Wright could enrich the human experience. “As a house is built,” he would say, “so are the lives of those who live within it.” This architecture that he called organic (a word related to nature and natural growth), and by this meant “an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being, as distinguished from one that is applied from without.”4

In 1940–41 Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Pope-Leighey House, formerly known as the Loren Pope Residence in Virginia. The house, which now belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been relocated twice and sits on the grounds of Woodlawn Plantation, Alexandria, Virginia.

This case emphasizes, again, the importance of relocating a building in a similar site. In the early 60s, the owners were notified that the house was located directly in the path of a planned four-lane high way, Interstate 66, and thus would have to be relocated. After searching for the help of the National Trust for Historic Preservation the National Park Service, and other national and local organizations concerned with the problem, the owner decided to donate the house to the National Trust. This decision was based on the fact that the National trust was able to offer a well oriented site, from the standpoint of natural topography, landscaping and distance from public roads. Selecting the proper relocation site can always be an important aspect of the building moving but it’s even more crucial when a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house is involved because of the close relationship between his houses and their natural surroundings.

In this paper I would like to show a social and aesthetic perspective related to the practice of house moving. I imagine that a potential reader might find pleasure watching images and reading about the impact of building relocation of these 3 selected cases.

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4. Edited by Terry B. Morton, The Pope-Leighey House. The Preservation Press, 1983.

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Building relocation: Moving imagination

John O. Curtis, Moving Historical Buildings. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior Heritage Conservation and Recreation Serice, Technical Preservation Service Division, 1979.

Peter Paravalos, Moving a House with Preservation in Mind, AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD 2006.

Miwon Kwon, One place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity, The Mit Press, 2004.

Gaston Bachelard, The house, from cellar to garret, the significance of the hut. The Poetic of Space, Beacon Press, 1994.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

Roderick J. Lawrence, What Makes a House a Home? Environment and Behavior, 1987.

Peter Dickens, Human nature, society and the home, Housing Studies, 1989.

Mary Douglas, The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space, Social Research, Vol. 58, 1991.

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Holland Cotter, Prototype 180. The New York Times, March 25, 2011.

José Esparza, prototype 180 by Mary Ellen Carroll, DOMUS, March 8, 2011.

William Wiles, Structural daring, ICON, March 2011.

Joyce Wadler, Rotating a House 180 Degrees as Art, The New York Times, October 7, 2010.

Lauren Oneill-Butler, Mary Ellen Carroll—500 Words, Artforum.com, July 27, 2009.

Gavin Kroeber, This Is Not About a Building: Mary Ellen Carroll’s prototype 180, Afterall, Autumn/Winter 2013.

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Matt M. Johnson, Piece by piece: Moving Gehry house was no simple task, Finance & Commerce, October 2011.

Bette Hammel, Gehry’s Winton Guest House Moving to New Home, Architectural Record, February 21, 2008.

Paul Needham, Winton Guest House: A Frank Gehry Design Transplanted, Huffingtonpost, October 2011.

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Edited by Terry B. Morton, The Pope-Leighey House. The Preservation Press, 1983.

Beers Peter, Pope Leighey House, 2003: Mount Vernon, Virginia. http://www.peterbeers.net/interests/flw_rt/Virginia/Pope_Leighey_03/pope_leighey_03.htm

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Prototype 180. Mary Ellen Carroll.

Front side Back side

Exhibition at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall

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Relocation of Winton Guest House designed by Frank Gehry.( Youtube video of the moving process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXHq6oYdHl8 )

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Relocation of Pope-Leighey House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Falls Church Virginia, Washingthon DC. The house was dismantled, moved, and reconstructed on the property of Woodlawn Plantation, 9000 Richmond Highway, Alexandria, Virginia

In 1995, the house was again relocated thirty feet.

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