We now have eighty-six days left until the end of the year. A long day, another week, and more progress to report.
Last week, our master builder Garland Wood and I met at the offices of Stemann Pease, the leading architectural firm here in Williamsburg, and our project architects. I have known David Stemann and Ed Pease for most of a decade, since we left the original California House. Ed is lately retired from a distinguished teaching career at William & Mary, where he hosted many Innermost House presentations over the years, including several in the beautiful Wren Great Hall, dating from 1695. Ed and David are now engaged in such a wide variety of projects that I wonder how they can possibly find time to volunteer their valuable work to Innermost House. I can only thank heaven that they do.
Among their many projects over just the past few years have been two that particularly touch us at Innermost House, one representing our outreach toward Society, the other our inreach toward Solitude. Both are aspects of our work that strives for a harmony of spirit between the community and the individual soul.
The first concerns an initiative here at William & Mary called the Lemon Project of Memorialization, which grew out of a course taught by Ed in partnership with his longtime friend, Dr. Jodie Allen, Assistant Professor of History here. The course was called "Memorializing the Enslaved of William & Mary," and attracted undergraduates, graduate students, professors, alumni, and members of the community. A design competition for a memorial structure was conceived, and the winner proved to be one of Ed's many past students who have gone on to practice architecture as a profession. The design is called "Hearth," and ground was broken on construction a few months ago.
The second is a project recently undertaken by Stemann Pease and colleagues to research and restore all the cabins in the state parks of Virginia, many of them dating from the golden age Civilian Conservation Corps era of the 1930s. This required David and Ed to visit, document, photograph, and redesign all the nearly 300 cabins across the state, giving them a uniquely thorough architectural knowledge of what the search for solitude has looked like in Virginia for most of the last century. Every one of those cabins shares much of its genetic material with Innermost House.
David and Ed are now in possession of Jeff Klee's beautiful drawings of the historic frame for our Virginia House. Jeff began by investigating all that is known about the earliest Virginia House structures still extant. Though such structures once numbered in the thousands here, very few are left, and none dating from before the early 18th century. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has led the country in early architectural research for nearly a century, and, through Jeff and Garland, we are the beneficiaries of that vast body of knowledge.
David and Ed have taken Jeff's historic frame and are now in the midst of putting it to a host of structural, legal, philosophical, and aesthetic questions. They are assisted in their work by Garland's rugged practicality, on the one hand, and by a computer aided design program (CAD), on the other.
I had never seen a CAD program in action before last week. It permits David and Ed to perform a wild series of perfectly miraculous manipulations of the design, stretching this here or shirking that there, measuring and calculating, introducing or removing elements, pulling out pieces altogether to examine their shape and dimensions, or positively turning the whole thing upside down. While such assistance does not permit us to answer any substantive questions conclusively, it makes the asking of them a world easier without falsifying the process. I have included another still image below.
The work that is occupying us now concerns the reconciliation of the Virginia House frame, which grew out of a complex of circumstances in early Virginia that would come to characterize much of the expanding nation, and an Innermost House function, which developed from the proportions of the individual human body. This is not so simple. Everything must fit together perfectly or the thing fails to function entirely. Just a few inches of reach in this direction or that, and the gears do not mesh. It is almost more like putting together a very large clock than it is like building a very small house. Stemann Pease, Architects and Clockmakers.
Jeff and Garland, Ed and David have worked together on many new and historic projects. As October unfolds and the work progresses, I'll try to give a picture of what such a harmony of past and present looks like.
Yours with pleasure,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
