The return to origins is a constant of human development, and in this matter architecture conforms to all other human activities. The primitive hut — the house of the first man — is therefore no incidental concern of theorists, no casual ingredient of myth or ritual. The return to origins always implies a rethinking of what you do customarily, an attempt to renew the validity of your everyday actions. . . In the present rethinking of why we build and what we build for, the primitive hut will, I suggest, retain its validity as a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all building for people.
Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise
Dear friends,
Today it is a precipitous sixty-five days to the end of the year. The season slopes steeply away toward its conclusion, and still we have a very great deal to accomplish just to raise our modest frame. "The beginning is half of all." I keep reminding myself of that.
We sometimes speak of our building project as a comprehensive work of handcraft, which, of course, it is. Sometimes we speak of it as a complex work of art, and it is also that. In fact our project aims to bridge the modern distinction between craft and art, for we would represent an older tradition which largely precedes such distinctions. Nothing we undertake to build should be more than craft or less than art. Nothing we make should be otherwise than craft and art at once. The idea of "fine art" itself largely belongs to the category of latter-day things. In all our work at Innermost House, we are intent upon putting first things first.
Last Friday we gathered together the IH building team to discuss the drawings again. Architectural historian Jeff Klee, consulting architects Ed Pease and David Stemann, and master builder Garland Wood all were present. With Jeff operating the historical CAD drawings he developed last month, we proceeded to examine the entire frame, member by member from bottom to top: sill beams and floor joists, posts and studs and braces, plates and girts, rafters and collar ties and purlins. Every single timber was examined from a practical, permittable, historical, philosophical, environmental, and aesthetical point of view. Truly, there must be more thought per square inch imbedded in this structure than in the Library at Alexandria. Which reminds me to get fire insurance.
All our beginning dimensions were determined by Jeff to reflect strictly historical precedent. That historical model will remain an essential part of our record as an abiding point of reference. It is our way of always allowing Nature a place at the table. If we were building an 18th century building in the 18th century, or recreating such a building in an historical museum setting today, the work would end there. But we are doing something else, or something more. We accept that model as our starting point, then adapt it forward to meet minimum modern building code requirements, inward to gain access to the archetype that may in some sense be said to precede even the past. That archetype is referred to by architectural theorists as the "primitive hut."
Both the forward and the backward reach are necessary aspects of our mission. The forward connects us to the present-day world of outward circumstance, without judgement as better or worse. We simply are where we are, and that presentness is perhaps much more comprehensibly represented by modern building codes than by layer upon layer of intellectual or political fashions. And what if those codes are to some extent post-historical, or even post-natural? Then to that extent we live in a post-historical and post-natural world. It is better to know where one is, wherever that may be.
Our backward reach connects us first to the whole human past, to Nature and Place and Place-culture. Then, at some point in that reaching back, the past-in-time gives way to the inwardness-in-mind of myth, archetype, ideal, and spirit. That condition of inwardness, sought by saints and sages in all places and times, gives its name to our American Wisdom Tradition and to Innermost House itself. Both the forward and the backward, the outward and the inward, are poles of the cultural unity it is our mission to model and explore.
There is a term in the museum world called "experimental archaeology," which Jeff introduced to me a few years ago. It may be defined as "an academic field of study which attempts to generate and test archaeological hypotheses, usually by replicating the feasibility of ancient cultures performing various tasks or actions, based on archaeological source material such as ancient structures or artifacts." So, for instance, you might build a Viking longship based on archaeological evidence, then experimentally attempt to sail it across the north Atlantic to test the theory of Vinland settlement. But if you do, you better make sure you recreate a Leif Erikson to stand at the helm. Archaeology can get pretty dangerous sometimes.
In its less strictly academic form, experimental archaeology merges into what is sometimes called "living history," which is an educational presentation of past history as a living present, "that the future may learn from the past." The exhaustively researched restorations and reconstructions at Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown exemplify this educational process.
Beyond experimental archaeology, I should like to propose a new term for our practice at Innermost House: experimental archetypology. There is almost no aspect of our work, whether artistic, intellectual, or spiritual, which is not reducible to the experimental search for reanimated archetypes. Our Virginia Frame house is a past in search of a beginning, an old house in time in search of its original in the mind.
If our primitive hut does not require us to brave the north winds, we do have our methods. At the heart of our archetypology lies the practice of excavation-by-conversation. Yesterday morning it occurred to me that we might handle the roof boards and rafters in a particular way. I wrote to Jeff Klee, and in about ten minutes he answered me from the Richmond airport with a spontaneous dissertation on the subject. Then an hour later he wrote me from Logan in Boston, further expanding on his ideas. It is that way with so many of us. I have never known a deeper or livelier conversation.
Yours with pleasure,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen: The Gokstad Ship in the purpose-built Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway.
QUOTATIONS
”The return to origins. . .’ Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise