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]

Sununu Wasn't So Great Either

Former New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, newly back in the headlines as chair of the state’s Republican Party, has something in common with me, a lifelong Democrat. We’re both proud and dedicated dads.

So when someone thwarts the hopes and dreams of my seven-year-old or my three-year-old, I get feisty. So, too, with Governor Sununu, as to his 44-year-old – John E. Sununu, recently defeated for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Parents everywhere should forgive the elder Sununu for lashing out in the wake of his son’s disappointment, as in the former governor’s recent public declaration in Hanover that New Hampshire “is going to hell because we have Democrats who know how to win elections and have absolutely no idea how to manage and govern.”

But it’s worth remembering that managing and governing also had its rough spots during the Sununu era in Concord, which ran from 1983 to 1989. An excellent example is a certain gathering of the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce that took place on June 29, 1984.

On the evening in question, a fellow named Paul McQuade gave a speech on a topic of keen interest throughout New Hampshire: the still-unbuilt Seabrook nuclear power plant. The controversy and delays associated with Seabrook had pushed its lead owner, Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH), to the brink of bankruptcy. Four years later, PSNH went right over the brink, becoming the first electric utility to seek bankruptcy protection since the Great Depression. The aftershocks of that dismal event persisted well into my own tenure on the legal staff of the NHPUC from 1999 to 2008. But on that early summer night in 1984, hope still flourished at PSNH, which had recently arranged a new $425 million financing plan from Merrill Lynch.

McQuade said the new PSNH plan “appear[ed] to be in the best interest of New Hampshire.” He said he was “pleased” with the changes PSNH had made “so that Seabrook Unit I can be financed, completed and operated,” adding: .“Public Service Company will be with us for a long time. We must put past events behind us and look to a bright future working together with Public Service Company to serve the people of New Hampshire.”

The above excerpts from McQuade's speech come from the 1984 opinion of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in a case captioned Appeal of Seacoast Anti-Pollution League. The speech -- and the Court's ruling about it -- were bits of New Hampshire history that came to my attention during my nine years (1999 to 2008) on the legal staff of the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the last two as general counsel. Why did the Court care about an otherwise random stop on the rubber chicken circuit? Because McQuade was no random fan of nuclear power. He was Governor Sununu's chairman of the PUC – and pending before the PUC, on the nightin question, was the very financing plan that McQuade found so publicly praiseworthy.

In overruling McQuade’s refusal to disqualify himself in light of his remarks, the Court noted that New Hampshire’s utility commissioners are quasi-judicial officers whose pay scale resembles that of judges. Quoting an earlier decision, coincidentally also involving the PUC, the Court memorably quipped: “To be paid as a judge, one must act like a judge.”

Before you write this off as obscure history irrelevant to Governor Sununu’s new post, consider the nature of his recent comment that his state is headed to a warm spot that might reasonably be analogized to the core of the Seabrook reactor. His contention is that the state is being fiscally mismanaged because New Hampshire has a Democratic governor, executive council and legislature. A reasonable rejoinder is that New Hampshire is in deficit mode because it refuses to tax itself adequately so as to provide essential government services.

But one could also reasonably contend that a utility regulator who could stand up in a public forum in June of 1984 and envision a “bright future” for PSNH had, in Governor Sununu’s phrase, absolutely no idea how to manage and to govern. And that leaves aside the utter impropriety of the PUC chairman uttering such remarks in the first place.

Don’t misunderstand – New Hampshire, and the nation, need a Republican Party that is vibrant and even feisty. But, as to the question of capability to govern, Governor Sununu ought to judge not, lest he be judged. Or, to invoke another scriptural aphorism recently injected into public discourse, it is time to put aside childish things. Even when you’re defending your kid.

[From the February 5, 2009 CV Spectator]