Architects' Awards Show How Vermont and New Hampshire Differ

For confirmation that New Hampshire and Vermont are fundamentally different from one another, however much they share an ecologic and cultural heritage, you need look no further than the awards for excellence in architecture recently bestowed in each state.

The Vermont chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) recognized something called the “Edge Ledge” Residence in Norwich with an honor award. A photograph of this remarkable home appeared recently in this very newspaper. Situated at the edge of a field in one of Norwich’s priciest neighborhoods (a picturesque hill with astonishing views, lavishly restored farmhouses, and luxuriously constructed fake farmhouses), the Edge Ledge House is like no other custom-built home in this or any other town.

For one thing, the house has only 970 square feet of space. Most people, particularly those with the means to hire an architect, prefer homes that are many thousands of square feet in size. Further, Edge Ledge is only one story tall – and there aren’t any gables, or dormers, or shingles, or porticos with fancy woodwork in sight. The house is in the shape of a triangle, with a nearly flat overhanging roof that gives the place something of the appearance of an arrowhead.

The master bedroom of the Edge Ledge House, at one of the points of the triangle, features a continuous band of windows that surely gives anyone sleeping there the feeling of dozing off in the forest itself. We’re in a different universe than the one in which windows are obscured with fake muntins – those stick things that fit over full-sized rectangular windows to make them look as if they are broken up into the much smaller panes that were the biggest 18th Century technology could muster.

In New Hampshire, the AIA chapter gave its honor award for residential design to something built on a similarly high-end bit of real estate: the shore of Squam Lake (of On Golden Pond fame). The project is a pleasant, shingle-clad compendium of Victorian-flavored details and proportions, the contemporary touch being its unusually tall, narrow profile. Toward the lake, beneath a pleasantly proportioned triangular gable, is a projecting alcove clad entirely in glass. But the picture windows are (of course) ponderously punctuated by those fake muntins.

Like Edge Ledge in Norwich, the New Hampshire project is small. But it turns out the Squam Lake award-winner is not, strictly speaking, a house. It is identified as the “Lakeside Library” and its functions, according to the New Hampshire AIA’s press release, are “guesthouse, library, tennis viewing pavilion, and boathouse.”

Tennis viewing pavilion? At the risk of wallowing in the class struggle, we have arguably seen in such a thing the apotheosis of the Gilded Age that was literally drawing to a close while the jurors were sitting around and deciding to heap accolades on this “perky,” “energetic” and “exuberant” outbuilding.

I mean no disrespect to the owners of this fine little structure. Architectural excellence always begins with residential projects created for clients with enough money and ego to underwrite experimentation. Then, with any luck, architects use what they learn on such projects to create buildings for the rest of us. It’s just that New Hampshire always seems to honor pricey, traditional, richly detailed residential projects on the shore of Squam Lake or Lake Sunapee, while Vermont seems to recognize projects that strive to employ state-of-the-art building materials and techniques in solutions that address the particular challenges of our times, sustainability chief among them.

Finally, it is worth noting that when the Squam Lake folks decided they needed a roof over their heads while watching tennis balls bounce around, they looked to a Boston design firm, Albert, Righter & Tittman Architects. The owners of the Edge Ledge Residence shopped locally, choosing as their architectural firm Watershed Studio of White River Junction. Watershed’s founder is architect Daniel Johnson of Norwich.

“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced,” writes Alain de Botton in his superb 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness. Johnson has done well by the field in Norwich on which the Edge Ledge Residence stands, on a hillside with a fine view of what is, in every sense, a very distant New Hampshire.

[From the February 19, 2009 CV Spectator]