Roman Sketchbook

-  PERSPECTIVES Magazine    Spring 2016

Leaves slopped into the gutters and crunched underfoot on the uneven streets of Trastavere. Night was coming on and the lights of Rome with it. Still no sign of her.

His sketchbook was filling in nicely. It would be a treasure for him, for his family. An heirloom for future grandchildren: a Roman Sketchbook. In his mind, he worked out the graphics for the cover of the published version.

Each page was site-specific, a loosely rendered line drawing of a place and a moment. He thought often of her as he drew. “The historian in her will love these drawings” he thought and the thought kept him going as he walked the darkening streets alone. “She has to love them.”

Still no sign of her. “Pick any ancient ruin and I’ll be there,” he’d said.  She’d been silent.  “Just look for the guy with the sketchbook, getting all Etruscan,” he’d joked. But maybe she hadn’t looked and maybe she never would. He didn’t know that she drew a blank on Etruscans. On Romans for that matter. It wasn’t her era.

He tried to remember where they had parted. It had been while sipping prosecco in Pizza di Santa Maria, hadn’t it? Or maybe it was long before that. He couldn’t remember. “Let’s split up for a bit and explore,” he’d said, his eye on an architrave.

She’d looked tired and hadn’t enjoyed the prosecco, the day or the view, but he hadn’t noticed that. Her hands were empty and she had a certain look on her face. She’d walked off without glancing back, down via Della Lungaretta, towards the Tiber. But his mind’s eye was on a broken pediment, something from 160 BC the guidebook said.

His phone was not ringing. The problem with smart phones is that they tie you to other people, to deadlines, to hassles, to the office. You can’t be in the moment, you can’t be really present. But he’d take those problems if it meant being tied to her at this particular moment. She’d stashed her phone because one between them (just for emergencies and airline check-in) would be enough. His sat like lead in his pocket, lifeless and refusing to vibrate.

He took a tiny street-side table; maybe he could think and try to remember what they’d agreed upon. “Vino rosso,” he told the waiter who looked impatient and queried him further: “Red wine?

 “Yes, si,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to say. Grazie.”

He wasn’t doing well with his Italian. Or, he thought further, with anything much. His sketches were actually crap. They were stilted and controlled, scratches on a page. They were all the same: frozen upper bits of ruined classical architecture. There was no life in them.

Still no sign of her.

It had been hours now. He couldn’t remember how many. Months really, he mused. Years. He sipped his wine, thought of the endless pediments he had drawn and how he now hated them all. They were heavy lumps of stone, burdening him by a gravity older than Rome.

He watched the Trastavere night fold in on itself, and with it his world.

Published in PERSPECTIVES magazine

Spring 2016       see:   http://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/OAAQ/OAAQ0116/index.php

A DIVINE CIRCUMVENTION
Stay in a spectacular monastery in Venice for what you can afford

The author's sketch from his balcony overlooking Piazza San Marco, Venice

DAVID GILLETT, VENICE     —     Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published in print  Saturday January 30, 2016   On line Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016 12:16PM EST


                       The curious instruction that bookings could only be made by fax should have been our first clue.
                       Our stay at the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice would be one to remember, akin to sleeping in the quiet eye of a tourism hurricane. And when I asked Dom Paulo, who met us at the thick oaken door in his brown monk’s habit, how much they might expect us to pay for a night’s stay, he bowed ever so slightly and replied: “As you wish.”
                       San Giorgio is one of the world’s longest continually operating Benedictine abbey, offering hospitality in this location since 982. It sits on a tiny island of its own directly across the Giudecca Canal from the famous square Napoleon is said to have dubbed Europe’s drawing room, the iconic Piazza San Marco. It has unparalleled views of this mother-of-all tourist draws, one it shares with the exclusive Belmond Hotel Cipriani on an island next door, scene of George and Amal Clooney’s wedding party. But rooms with a view at the Cip start at an eye-watering €1,650 (more than $2,500) a night. Our room? About €1,600 less, plus we had a hands-down better view from our first-floor balcony. And no zoom-lens paparazzi.
                        That master of Renaissance architecture, Andrea Palladio, designed what would become arguably his finest church in 1565. It is a cool, neo-classical dream in this very un-Italian city where ancient Oriental and Gothic architectures collide in a tumbling cascade of competing styles. Like a marble escarpment of pediments and pilasters, the church is the prow of a much larger ship that is the Monastery of San Giorgio, occupying most of the island with its cloistered mystery. Our private room, one of only five in the monastery’s hostel, was suitably spartan, with two single beds, a crucifix, a desk and a book for our reading pleasure: The Rule of St. Benedict. The floors were terrazzo, the ensuite bathroom was well equipped with shower and bidet and a large antique armoire served as a closet. This was not Cipriani luxe by any means, but spacious enough, cool and quiet; a room for contemplation and rest. It is also an undiscovered gem: During our five-night stay, we met only two other guests, and the hallways echoed with an eerie silence late at night, broken only by the sound of lapping waves and the occasional passing boat. It felt like a world apart – dreamlike. One morning, we flung back our wooden shutters and strolled out onto the balcony to find our building the subject for a group of painters from Florence – that is an experience not to be missed.
But this oasis of calm sits uneasily in a city that is a victim of its own success, a place literally sinking under the weight of an estimated 22 million yearly visitors. Massive cruise ships deposit as many 30,000 tourists daily at the height of the season, causing Silvio Testa, spokesman for Venice’s anti-cruise ship campaign to say a few years ago, “The beauty of Venice is undoubted, but the city pays for it like a prostitute that is too beautiful.”
                        Tourists outnumber Venetians by a ratio of 20-1 in high season, and the locals (an ever-dwindling population), grumble. But this is Venice, the Serene Republic, a city thick with art treasures; a city without cars, floating like a vision upon the Venetian Lagoon, supported by wooden piles made from millions of dead trees, pounded deep into the silt. So to discover this quiet place, one designed for contemplation and yet so close to the centre of action, is extraordinary. I spent an afternoon just sketching, drinking in the atmosphere and the surreal watery light of Venice. In the hushed nave of the church itself, a contemporary sculpture exhibition (part of the Venice Art Biennale) brought the ultramodern into the womb of the sacred and serene. Outside, attached to the church, is a bell tower that seems yet to have been discovered by tour guides, strikingly devoid of lineups for the quick elevator ride to its top. It offers breathtaking views out over Venice, the Lido and the Dolomite mountains that loom in the mainland distance. Unreal.


The writer's wife approaches the Monastery beside Palladio's Church

                     Food in the monastery is strictly DIY. (The monks keep to themselves and eat elsewhere.) A tiny refectory kitchen, stocked with basics such as dried pasta and olive oil, is available 24/7 if you are attempting Europe on €10 a day. The guest book tells of visitors from all corners of the globe who have cooked up their own Italian feasts, which can be eaten in an adjoining barrel-vaulted dining room, hung with portraits of eminent Benedictines. But the Venice of restaurants and cafés is temptingly close, so when it beckoned, we waited at the Giorgio vaporetto (waterbus) stop at the monastery steps for a quick ride to the action. We could take the No. 2 water taxi in one direction to the James Bond-movie set world of San Marco with its inflated prices, Prada shops and trinket hawkers, or in the other direction to the Zattere promenade and the much more interesting and less crowded Dorsoduro precinct with its crooked calli (alleyways) and hidden campis (squares).
In the maze of Dorsoduro, cozy restaurants, often with canal-side tables, abound. Fresh seafood is never hard to find. Al Casin dei Nobili, a lovely trattoria just off Campo San Barnaba, serves a mouth-watering tagliatelle with Adriatic shrimp in a nonna-friendly setting. Or just across the campi, beside the Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists) and next to one of the last fresh produce barges in Venice, which serves as a floating open-air fresh food market, is Pasta & Sugo. This restaurant is a welcome departure from touristy and overpriced “Olde Worlde” eateries with its bright, contemporary interior and menu of Italian street food. Mix and match the pasta of your choice with one of the mouth-watering ragus prepared at the open kitchen counter. A plate of pasta and glass of wine for a mere €8 ($12)? The city that invented inflated prices still has its bargains.
                             In the 1972 novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer, describes the many cities he has seen to a mesmerized Kublai Khan. But in fact, every city he described was actually Venice. It is still like that, a city that is the compact culmination of a thousand years of explosive creativity, a city with a thousand faces. And, in one quiet corner, still available to contemplative visitors, a city of dreamlike peace.
                             Our no-strings-attached monastery stay was refreshing and inexpensive. One does not have to be devout, or even male, to stay in one of the high-ceilinged rooms, or sit quietly in the shadowed church and drink in the ancient music of echoing chants. But a hunger for peace and quiet in the eye of the Venetian storm is a must. That, and a fax machine.
---------------------
If you go 

   Venice is always busy, but the summer months of July and August are the worst and best avoided if possible. We went in October and had nice weather, fewer crowds and plenty of restaurant choice. If you avoid the crowds at the Rialto Bridge and Piazza san Marco, you can even find some deserted squares and quiet alleyways.
Getting there
   Fly into Frankfurt and then to the compact Marco Polo Airport. From there it’s a quick bus ride out to the main island of Venice via the causeway, but take the Alilaguna water bus if you’ve never been. Arriving by water is the only way to approach the city for the first time. E-mail info@alilaguna.it.
Getting around
   Since Venice is made up of more than 100 islands, ACTV, the public-transportation authority, operates vaporetti and other water buses around the clock, with routes that extend out to many of the islands of the Venetian Lagoon. A single trip is expensive at €7.50 ($11.50), but a three-day travel card for €40 is a great deal, and you’ll use it a lot.
The monastery
   Inquire about a room by sending a fax to 39-041-520-6579. Or try calling calling 39-041-241-4717. The monastery has no e-mail or website. The monks offer rooms as part of their mission, so make a cash offerta of what you can afford upon leaving.
When you arrive on the main island of Venice, take vaporetto No. 2 along the Grand Canal to the San Giorgio stop (one past St. Mark’s Square). When you arrive, ring a buzzer marked Monaci Benedittine (Benedictine monks) on the heavy door to the right of Palladio’s church. There’s no checking in; you will simply be led by a monk up some worn stone steps to your quiet room. Rooms have no telephones, TVs or WiFi.

(Online see: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/destinations/venice-from-the-peaceful-balcony-of-an-island-monastery/article28431174/  ) or Google David Gillett Venice

Domini Clark - Travel Editor

AN ANCIENT SAXON CHURCH

The little Wiltshire town of Bradford On Avon is considered by some to be the most picturesque in England.

               

Maybe.  But the day we visited was cool and wet, a darkening sky rendering the narrow streets lanes of despair, relieved only by the ubiquitous tea rooms awaiting the bus tours that , on this particular October day, stayed away in droves.

                Undaunted, my Medievalist wife, Katy, had somehow convinced her husband and three young children to forgo the crescents of Bath for an afternoon and search instead for the tiny Saxon church of St.Laurence built by St.Aldhelm at the turn of the 8^th century. Lost for centuries, the small church served as a school, a house and then a warehouse before its resurrection in 1856 by a local curate.

                Sheltering from the rain, we found it permeated by gloom, cave-like. It exuded age, the most thoroughly ancient building we’d encountered so far on a month’s sojourn in England.

                My four year old daughter, Molly Claire, her eyes adjusting to the dim light, responded to the architecture of the tiny chancel by singing, her plaid skirt swinging as see twirled, lost in the mystery of the place. She was alone in a circle of sound that reverberated off the aged stone walls.

                Maybe it was a good thing St.Laurence was lost for a thousand years, consumed by the organic  build up of the town around it. It survived with its soul intact never having suffered alteration, its spare interior imbued with atmosphere, “whispering”, as Mathew Arnold said of nearby Oxford  “the last enchantments of the Middle Age” .

                Carved angels above us on a striking Saxon arch, we watched silently from the side stalls as Molly Claire’s voice rose and lost itself in the echoing shadows amongst the ancient oak black with years.

                No one had told her to sing, but the building suggested it and she heeded. She sang the only song that somehow seem appropriate, an old Victorian hymn her grandmother had used to lull her to sleep:  “This Is My Father’s World”.

                “All nature sings

                And round me rings

                The music of the spheres”

                I kind of doubt she grasped the meaning of the words, if indeed that even mattered. But I’m certain she did sense that some magic was happening,  that the architecture had elicited something from her that was real, and spiritual and beautiful.  The notes she sang rose and joined the myriad others, notes from 8^th century voices and a million songs and latin chants since then.

                She joined in and became part of something that day, like a part of the building’s very architectural  fabric.  Her response to the spirit of the place and the built form of the room were nothing short of exactly right. And really, she had such a cute little voice.

-David Gillett

(First published in PERSPECTIVES magazine, Fall 2015)

                

Letters to An Aspiring Architect

                I was where you were once, on the cusp of something really exciting, really big, really intimidating.  I had my own preconceptions and misconceptions, hopes, dreams and fears, and maybe I still do. There are a hundred things I’d tell my younger self, but I’ll begin with just three:

                Put that joy to work.

                Get your hands dirty.

                Look, look, look.

                You are heading this way not because you see architecture as a path to riches. You’re smarter than that. But you think you can make a living doing something you love; creating space, shaping community, building beautiful places.

                To begin with, design excites you and the prospect of dreaming it, planning it and seeing it built brings you a deep kind of joy. Hold onto that – keep that alive as you study the art form, as you learn the business, as you collaborate with others who may (or may not) have that spark in them.

                Nurture your joy by living a life, not just doing a job. Get involved in the community. Get to know and care about those clients and learn about their life. Study the ways of the city you live in. Truly become a citizen. And then the good design you produce will bring joy to you, just as it does to those who commissioned it. Design for fun. Draw for pleasure. Don’t let deadlines and building codes deaden your curiosity and  smother your enthusiasm.

                Secondly, always have a bit of dirt under your finger nails.

                Despite the comforting illusion that buildings are isolated forms on a screen in front of you, the reality is very much about weather, concrete strength, square corners and good drainage. There is nothing that can replace or replicate time spent on a construction site. And once on that site, there is nothing more instructive than climbing a ladder, nailing down shingles, cutting rafter angles, towelling concrete ...doing the coffee run for a bunch of fellow builders.

                It will pay off in the way you detail your buildings, in your understanding of the sequence of construction.  Perhaps even more importantly you’ll have empathy for the people who construct your designs and an understanding of what is most important to them (and it likely won’t be your design theory but rather the accuracy of your dimensions).  And when you eventually arrive on site as the designer, smack in the middle of the noise and mayhem of construction, you’ll be at home and  have some real credibility. Maybe even respect.  And you’ll have a chance to wear that ancient mantle of Master Builder and deserve it.

                  Lastly, look around you. Look at the pavement you walk on, the alleyways and broad avenues of the city you live in. Look at the ancient world where it all started and those places where great architecture has transformed lives, brought joy and created a culture.

                Don’t just see, but truly observe, as Sherlock Holmes would say. Pick apart the proportions of that temple. Think about why that great room feels  so right to you. Is it the light? The height of the ceiling? The sound of your feet as you walk through it?

               

Travel as much as you can. Around the block, across the city, across the country and  around the world if you can. There is so much to see, so much to absorb. And take a sketch book with you. Make that hand-eye-brain connection and stretch lines out across the page. Document the things that seem to work, feel those superb proportions through your fingertips. I had a professor who always carried a tiny 10’ tape measure in his pocket and wasn’t shy about pulling it out to measure the ideal doorway, the perfect chair or the magnificent proportions of a lovely archway. He had a whole notebook full of little dimensioned sketches, and he used them everyday while designing.

                Don’t worry that your first job might have you reading Building Codes and detailing stairways in hospitals. The Parthenon can teach you, an ancient cottage can speak to something deeper than those things, the width of a perfect street will stay with you ...and you’ll use all this knowledge someday. You will.

                To be a good architect you need to be a great observer, a competent builder, a person who thrills to good design.  But the tyranny of the urgent will try to subvert all this and soon you’ll only see balance sheets, deadlines and the wolf at the door. That’s reality.

                But the reality is also that you have chosen the path of design, of creation. Use that creative spark to keep the main things the main things. Stick with your gut instincts, push for that excellent design, stay true to the things that attracted you to this life in the first place.

 David Gillett    Published in PERSPECTIVES MAGAZINE Spring 2015

FIRMNESS, COMMODITY & DELIGHT

A story of Venice and the New Georgian Era

First published in Perspectives Magazine Spring 2014 edition and in the new Perspectives Anthology book

 

The sirens had sounded early in the morning signalling the impending aqua alta, and he’d put his wellies on just in case. He’d been on Accedemia Bridge when the Vaporetto loudspeakers gave the general evacuation order in four languages. A group of giddy art students from Prague left the dry arch of the bridge onboard a garbage scow, plastic bags taped over their shoes. They’d implored him to join them. He declined, waved, and smiled.

The water was now almost a metre high on the palazzo walls, and rising as twilight fell. Fish from the Adriatic were already exploring new avenues through the cafes of Piazza San Marco, coursing through emptied jewelry cases, hovering above upturned chairs in the squares of Venice.

The sky was growing angry again and it would soon start raining. It was only going to get worse: the confluence of extreme high tide and record rainfall. Was this how it ended? Not with a bang but a splutter? George flipped the page in his journal and started another sketch.

 

Like many men his age, George, had been born the same year as the British prince and then named after him. He’d hated his name as a child; it mocked him from check-out line tabloids and celebrity hoopla. But it grew on him and he grew into it: a solid, old-fashioned name. There were three Georges in his final year at architecture school. The other two were more serious than he was, and maybe more talented, but they became a brotherhood of sorts and eventually formed a partnership: George³ Architecture.

George³  made a name for itself landing a plum commission as the designers of Ikea’s new line of flat-pack houses. They were the go-to firm for plug-and-play country houses and George would sometimes even co-pilot the helicopters that delivered the injection-moulded creations to sites in the hills north of the city. It all had an envigorating Brave New World feel to it and the partners of George³ were riding the wave of success. They drank Manitoba Merlot and joked about the coming of the New Georgian Era.

 

More suddenly than anyone had predicted, the downturn morphed into the biggest recession in decades. The plastics disappeared with the oil and work dried up overnight. Despite their efforts to save it, George³ dissolved and, as the three Georges raised a farewell glass, the tractors carted off their mobile office. The property was quickly put under the plow for a new urban field of engineered canola.

George called in some favours and finally found a position with a skyscraper demolition firm in Toronto. He read and interpreted the old plans and charted strategies for pulling down crumbling 50-storey liabilities, relics of the heyday of the high-rise. Faded paper drawings cluttered his desk. He loved the line work, the cross-hatching, the deft hand of the twentieth century architects. It was all hieroglyphics to the technicians, adept as they were at animated hologram presentations and 3D printing suites, but to George the drawings were a link to a golden age.

He papered the galley of his wedge-plan condo with old vellums of foundation details and side elevations. He became a minor authority on traditional drafting techniques of the late twentieth century, amassing a collection that read like the DNA of Canadian Architecture. His drawn records were often all that remained of buildings that were largely forgotten. An exhibition at the AGO followed. And then, as he entered his fiftieth year, he was asked to curate the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

 

Borrowing from Vitruvius, he’d named the show “Firmness, Commodity and Delight: The Legacy of Architectural Drawing in Canada.” Archives had opened for him, rare drawings arrived by courier, foam-core models in crates. Old architects who had practised back in the 2020s and even earlier sent him hard-copy gems from their files. Using these curious old tools – models and drawings – George and his team put the raw seeds of his country’s built legacy on display for the world.

The newly crowned King, just turned fifty himself, was slated to open the British Pavilion and tour Canada’s show. George would meet George.

The king was architecture savvy as his grandfather Charles had been. He’d studied under Zaha Hadid’s daughter at Cambridge, campaigned for brownfield development, given lectures at the RIBA.

After the coronation, Neo-Georgian Architecture became the style-du-jour. Columns and pediments adorned re-charge stations along the Western Ontario Beltway. There was the usual righteous backlash by architects, but at least architecture was in the press.

King George was slated to visit the Canadian pavilion and review the legacy exhibition. As curator, George hoped he’d have a chance for a bit of royal small talk, maybe compare notes on their common first name. Could you ask a king for an autograph?

But that was before the most relentless scirocco in history started to pound the Venetian lagoon from the southeast. The Moses flood defense system, which had worked for the first half of the century, was overwhelmed. No one had predicted this.

The Biennale district was flooded and evacuated before the exhibition could be dismantled. There would be no opening ceremonies, no king, no autographs.

 

George stood on Accademia Bridge, looking east along the Grand Canal. An exodus of boats and barges streamed below him, a parade no one had ever wanted, heading for higher ground on mainland. The water rose so fast he could follow its progress up the facades of the ancient palazzi, drowning pilasters and pediments. George ignored orders from a passing fireboat to leave the bridge. He waved them on and they yelled something frantic in Italian, leaving him alone in the centre of the arch which now sprang from a turbulent urban sea.

The invading waters now lapped the tops of the ground floor windows, still rising. The twinkling lights of the Jewel of Adriatic went dark as the power grid finally gave out, sparking and fizzling into oblivion. George gripped his pencil tightly in a shaky hand. In the dim twilight he kept drawing, as if he could somehow hold back the water by recording things as they had always been: architecture as frozen music: firm, commodious, delightful – and immovable. But the Venice he’d known, the architecture the world had treasured, died quickly into darkness, wrapped in a mist of hissing rain and wind.

 

In the Arsenalle district, the old boatbuilding precinct where the architecture biennale was held, a new sort of procession was setting out to sea. Curled vellum drawings inscribed with the patterns of a thousand buildings spun slowly in the swirling eddies, taking a whole world to the bottom of the lagoon. Flotillas of white models drifted past, upturned modern villas, capsized works in progress, unbuilt cities of the future now destined for sodden graves. Venice had finally sunk below the waves – The Serene Republic, home to the last Architecture Biennale, submerged for the final time.

 

It was a show no one would ever see, not even the King, whose schedule was once again thrown into disarray by a wild world of extreme weather. And thus began the new Georgian Era.

 

 

See the published article in Perspectives digital edition: http://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/OAAQ/OAAQ0114/index.php?startid=14#/28

London,Oxford,Sam & Me

Travelling with an architects' eye (and a baby)

We knew not what to expect, my wife and I, when we set off for six long weeks of trekking around England. We'd been there before, but then it was just the two of us, a bit of loose change and an architecture guide book. This time, it would be an autumn trip with three children in tow, all under 9, (which meant six extra backpacks, a baby seat, a stroller, and enough gummy bears to drive toothpaste shares through the roof.) And as with the English weather, we had no way of predicting if things would be fair or foul, stormy or calm.

Yet we were fairly certain of one thing at least: Samuel would make life difficult for us. Sam is 2.

Nothing wrong with 2, of course; some of our nicest friends had once been 2. But Sam, being 2 and proud of it, was out to undo what he could of our adventure. He had just learned to run (sideways), was long overdue for some sort of life-threatening sickness (probably Ebola), and was developing an alarming fondness for anything edible (and sugar-coated) or toylike (and plastic-coated).

Well-meaning but heartless friends had smiled weakly and suggested meekly that perhaps we should consider leaving Sam at home. Rumour had it that we were taking nannies in sufficient numbers to post a round-the-clock watch on him and his habits of mass destruction. Yet in the end, we went it alone, ready to take whatever he could throw at us.

What he did throw at us (apart from masticated gummy bears and half-empty bottles of HP sauce) was the chance to take stock and ask some slow-motion questions of ourselves. Did we really need to travel at that old hectic pace, cameras blazing? Did two cities in one day mean as much as one city in two weeks? Were frantic flybys as rewarding as measured contemplation?

Sam was a bear without his afternoon nap, and it soon became painfully apparent that we'd either have to sit inside every afternoon, losing the best part of a day’s exploration, or he'd have to sleep while we explored. The choice was between Simmering Frustration (and British soap operas) or Travels With The Amazing Sleeping Baby. We opted for the latter.

We went on tour, baby Sam and I, during the afternoons. While Katy took Harry and Molly on adventures in search of dragons and elves, I pushed him in a peaceful sleep-walk through the landscapes of my own Grand Tour.

I'd been to Bath before and marched through its crescents and squares like any duty-bound student of architecture, but this time it was different. My pace was slow and the rhythm of my walking was measured, thoughtful. Sam slept in tranquil oblivion beneath his horsey-blanket, Curious George next to his blushed cheek. At such a pace, the nuance of the honey-coloured stone wasn't lost on me, and hardly a doorway in John Wood's Royal Crescent escaped detailed analysis.

I studied the serene Georgian proportion in complete silence under the October sky, walked the leaf-strewn side streets, chatted in hushed tones with doormen, followed the movements of the clouds as they hurried towards winter.

It soon became a habit, these afternoon strolls; quiet, thoughtful, introspective. Strolls that would once have been frustrated aggravation became walks of discovery. I began to see just how much I'd been missing. The tour books had lied: a city a day? Walking tours that cover the centre of Oxford in just two hours? Sam and I spent as much time just crunching through the russet leaves of a deserted  Botanical Garden, the shadows of Magdalen College growing long beside us. Nothing could give one the sense of quiet contemplation that can be achieved at the controls of a stroller filled with a sleeping two year old.

With time to observe, my pencil and sketchbook came back into play. On the banks of the Cherwell, punters passed silently as under the blankets, Sam sailed on plush waves to the land of nod, sung to sleep by the ancient stones around him that "whispered" as Matthew Arnold put it, "the last enchantments of the Middle Ages."

Weeks of such afternoons passed, the stroller wheels showing their age, axles squeaking. We passed through villages and small towns, ruined abbeys and walled gardens and arrived finally in the hectic bulls-eye of action: London.

We studied the vanguard of modern London’s construction boom, circled the Great Court of the  British Museum for an hour, studying details, soaking in the freedom of a slowed pace. We walked the paths of Regent's Park on a lazy Sunday afternoon, avoiding impromptu football games by a safe margin, lightly crossing the cobbles, greatly enjoying tranquility in the centre of the metropolis.

It would never have been like this without Sam and his annoying  need for an afternoon nap. I would never have slowed to this pace without the pace of a slumbering child to slow me. I wouldn't have noticed the frozen angels in the cathedral close in Salisbury without him, or had time to solve the maze at Hampton Court (twice). Instead, I would have rushed headlong, striking names from the list I had mentally prepared back in architecture school. Shooting photos, marching through history, missing the minute details, the quiet lanes, the glories of an architecture that took time to absorb.

“Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe”,  said Heraclitus in 500 BC. Heraclitus knew his babies, I'd say.

Katy and I had given our family a six-week trek through the heart of an autumnal England. Sam, his little blonde head oblivious to it all, had given the subtle shading of the ancient stones back to me.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ***

Originally published in the Globe & Mail and in PERSPECTIVES mag.

David Gillett

There and Back Again.....

Read "There And Back Again" in the December issue of the Canadian Builder's Quarterly. Oddly enough, this article came out the same month that the new Hobbit movie opened in Canada. For Tolkien aficiandos, the title couldn't have been better (or worse,depending on your point of view. However, as of this writing, I have yet to be comissioned to design an underground house with grass roof, round windows and doors and an excessively large pantry...

Read the article here:
http://canadianbuildersquarterly.ca/2012/david-gillett-design/

Coming soon: an article about David Gillett Design and my alma mater University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, in the most recent issue of.....



Why are (some) Buildings Ugly?

It may seem odd, but I'm happy to have one of my house designs featured on the cover of an architectural magazine whose theme for the month is "Why are (some) buildings ugly?"  Of course, I designed it to be ugly...but that's probably obvious. I had an email from a long-time client who said he actually likes it. But does he want to build it?

You can read the whole issue of Perspectives magazine(for whom I've done several illustrations) at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/naylor/OAAQ0312/

Am I a Graphite Luddite?

Primal Attraction to a Low Tech Tool

(first published in the Globe and Mail  LIFE section ....July 11, 2012)

               I don’t think I’m supposed to be drawing with a pencil. But as the digital universe eats up the worlds of art and design, I’m drawn to this low-tech tool with some kind of primal attraction.

            Today, in this cafe window seat, it’s a Staedtler HB, an all-rounder, an elegant wooden cylinder that falls comfortably into my grasp. A single black line on a crisp white page.

            Call it my analog drawing instrument. Call me a graphite Luddite. Or maybe its just another badge of hipster culture (“free  retro pencil with every MacBook!”). But its a habit I can’t kick, with roots in architecture school. It was the mid-80’s and I was part of that lost civilization of architecture students pushing pencils, running T-squares, bent over drafting tables. One stroke equalled one part of an architrave, one curve of a receding street. Artfully pre-digital, we sensed the wave coming but we couldn’t quite see it.

The ubiquitous AutoCAD drawing was still just over the horizon, a fantasy of some Jetson future. But it came soon enough and we were all swept up in its shining promise. Today, it’s the world we inhabit, a digital culture of design and drawing, manipulation and file sharing, virtual cut-and-paste. Productivity has blossomed exponentially and drafting tables have become must-have antiques.

            My digital camera records in high-def clarity, and I can shoot with abandon. But distilling the shape of a park bench calls for deliberation and careful observation; a hand-eye-paper connection. The furrowed bark on an ancient Maple is flattened as it spews out of my ink-jet printer. No number of megapixels imprints that nubby texture on my mind the way drawing it can: one line at a time, feeling the bark as the graphite rubs off on paper.

            So I fall back on an un-plugged media, going acoustic in a canyon of electronica. Maybe it’s an age thing.

            But I pause. A guy at the next table (an architecture student?) with very large glasses and black stubble, is working on his knitting. Fleet Foxes harmonize on the cafe speakers, singing in a barn, crooning away about the noticeably non-digital Meadowlark, their music distinctly hand-made, if that’s possible. “By hand” isn’t just some hipster catch-phrase, it’s something we crave, a visceral tie to something we risk losing.

            In an hour or so, I’ll be rotating a steel and glass box in 3D, entering coordinates, doing sunlight studies in the virtual world of computer-aided design. But even that glass box started life as black lines on a sketch pad one crisp autumn day last year. I sat on a  granite boulder, October clouds scudding overhead. A pencil, a pad, a place, an idea: it was a pared-down moment and it worked. There was something in the directness of it al – lines on paper recording my first thoughts about the shape and position of an embryonic building.

            And there was emotional connection too; the excitement of creation coursing from brain to muscle to pencil, the complicating  layer of mouse, keyboard and software absent for that moment.

            The English sculptor Barbara Hepworth said: “I rarely draw what I see – I draw what I feel in my body.” A pencil allows for that; it doesn’t try to re-align, edit or elaborate. It doesn’t flash warnings or second guess instinct. Frank Gehry has harnessed the power of complicated 3D software to render his titanium architectural confections, but his free-flowing, emotion-charged  pencil sketches are where it all started. And they are the things that sell in the gallery shop.

            The guy at the next table has set his knitting aside for a moment and is updating his Facebook status on his iPad. He’s a perfect picture of the modern man as he does so, giving me some hope for the future of pencils and drawing: an urge to make things by hand while immersed in digital culture. The two can co-exist and flourish.

            My kids are much the same, travelling with sketchpads and ipods, fascinated by Medieval ruins as much as SimCity. The world is their multi-faceted oyster.

            I realize that while I’ve been musing, I’ve been doodling on my pad, each stroke an aid to concentration. I focus on the cup in front of me, trying again to capture its roundness and how the shadow falls across the cafe table. I could let 3D software do it for me: and the shading would be precise, the diameter exact. But I’d miss the immediacy, the aroma, the warmth of the ceramic.

            Sort of like how I’m sure I could text the knitting guy and he could send me photos of his finished project. But I think I’ll take the old analog approach and just ask him.

“What are you making?”  I hope he’ll tell me it’s a pencil case. That would be perfect.

But in a minute. Right now I’m running another line out across a new page, starting another drawing, working the muscles of another part of my brain.

-David Gillett

(with thanks to Globe Editor Jane Gadd and Art Director Cinders McLeod)

Gathering Place for the Generations

                I had a toy farm when I was a child; a miniature homestead in enamelled sheet metal – barn and barnyard, chickens, cows  and a little red brick farmhouse.  On the barn’s tiny gable wall was the simple title that for generations has evoked vivid recollections:  “Grampa’s Farm”.

                To a farmboy like myself, it all made perfect sense:  this little play-world was the most natural of toy microcosms.  It wasn’t dreamy nostalgia; it was as real as the scene outside the windows of my childhood.

                But that was a generation ago, and the days of the family farm’s presence in the landscape – and in the memory – have faded.  In the process, we’ve been cut adrift from a tangible link to our past.  We’ve lost our ancestral homes and collect antiques to fill the void,  to give us some trace of heritage.  We read shelter  magazines that sell us carefully aged “heritage” by the roomful:  a reproduction past on every page.

                And yet the constant struggle to define a quiet place in the maelstrom of urban life throws us headlong into perplexity:  where to put the antiqued implements that will give our lives meaning?

                Grampa’s farm no longer cuts it because, for starters, Grampa was unlikely to have been a farmer.  And though many Canadians need only cast back two or three generations to identify their equivalent of the ancestral home, chances are the old place is now in strange hands, the solid farmhouse a ghostly ruin, the land subdivided beyond recognition.

                We are largely a nation of transplants, many with only the tenderest of green roots in this country.  We are also a predominantly urban people now, modern nomads following schooling, jobs and recreation.  We breathe portable technologies; we live portable lives.

                So what are we left with?  The family farm has lost its potency, but replacing it is a new manifestation of the ancestral home, a weekend summer place, a haven from modern life.

                The family cottage has become, over the past few decades, the gathering place for the generations.  Unencumbered with the complex realities of the rural farm economy, the cottage has not been squeezed from the grip of a struggling family whose livelihood depended upon its production.  Its image is not synonymous with work, quotas or barnyard smells – it is a summer place, a setting for dreams, the centre of a memory-world of dog-days, sunshine and docks.  The cottage looms much larger in the imagination than a city home ever could.

                One family I know, who live spread across the nation, own an island that is the scene of a massive annual homecoming.  Generations have built a carefree summer architectural continuum.  One family elder, in a moment of solemn reflection, told me:  “Catastrophe? Nuclear war? We’ll all head for The Island, no matter where we are; we have an ‘understanding’”.

                There is really nothing odd in such a notion:  every family would like to have a place to make the ultimate retreat.

                I have visited cottages on the Muskoka lakes that seem out of sync with the apparent needs of their owners – great, sprawling lakeside structures, many a century old or more, whose floor area is more in keeping with that of an Adirondack lodge.  “This is a family hotel for most of the season”, I’m told dockside as an antique boat rocks gently in the evening breeze.  “This is our summer base of operations.”  The family, coming home from Pittsburgh or Toronto, Los Angeles or Vancouver, throw their formality to the smog-free wind, put their feet up and sigh:  They’ve made it back home once again.

                For the architect, the phenomenon of “cottage as family seat” presents its own daunting problems and tests one’s diplomatic skills.  One such place, for which I was hired to design a large addition, is the summer home of one of Canada’s wealthiest families.  And even though expansion eventually leads to some sort of change, the most frequently heard comment when drawings were presented was “No, no – that would be changing it!”  The collective memory of an outspoken family was wrapped up in a certain configuration of wood, stone, water and vista.

                Other clans, such as my wife’s, built a tradition on a more realistic budget, but the “never quite completed” cottage, decorated with dog-eared castoffs, sits on a rocky outcrop as proudly as any baronial castle.  It once looked like the cottage would never be completed; the very presence of builders and architects in the family practically guaranteed it.  But that hardly matters.  The idea of retreat is what counts, the quiet place at the end of a hectic Friday-night drive.  Its pristine setting has been the nursery for my wife’s fondest memories, her family’s best times and the larger-than-life stories that come with days spent between water and woods.

                The fleeting summers of childhood claim a large share of our memory – summer places tend to underline that.  We are perhaps more honest and less guarded as we sit on docks together, half-naked in the twilight; we are less concerned with pretence and ostentation.  We are truly at home with ourselves.

                The cottage has given us that home-fire of refuge we thought we had lost, and has become in the process a guarded and cherished family seat – Grampa’s Farm for  future  generations.

                                                                (first published in The Globe And Mail)

David Gillett

david@davidgillettdesign.com

An architect falls from his Ivory Tower

(First published in The Globe & Mail)

In a suitably rustic frame, hanging in the hall of our old farmhouse, is a photograph of the raising of our barn, “July, 1904.”  It is a black-and-white shot of remarkable clarity, composed with beginner’s luck and peopled with farm neighbours from a distant past, men posing gleefully on narrow beams without safety harnesses or fear.  It is an artifact from another era, a glimpse of community spirit, collaboration and helpfulness.

                Things like that don’t often happen now.  We live in a world of specialists and professionals, of liability and regulation, of isolation.  And although some communities, notably the Mennonites, have kept the flame of community building alive, the days of such a neighbourly concept seem numbered.

                And just as well, I thought.  I looked at it all through my well-polished, one-way glass – leave the work to the specialists; let the pros do their job.  From my white-collar perch above the dust and noise of the work site, I was content to go by the book.

                And then my father had a stroke.

                He, a carpenter, had been building his retirement home, the crowning personal achievement of his career.  More out of a sense of good humour than necessity, he glanced every so often at a set of drawings with my name on them:  the plans.

                But he built with his heart and carpenter’s eye and his adjustments and variations on them were never wrong, often improving upon my initial vision.  Haphazard piles of yellow lumber went together like musical notes into a jigsaw orchestration.

                When his stroke came, work ground to a halt.  It was a discouraging and devastating time for everyone.

                The phone started ringing.  There were usually two questions:  How is he? and How can we help?

                Carpenters and builders, roofers and electricians called.  “Let’s put your dad’s house up,” they said, and their enthusiasm was genuine relentless and contagious.

                I wanted to react with flow charts, more drawings, specifications and detailed timetables.  I wanted to schedule the outpouring of generosity; tailor and enhance it, put some order to it.  But a farming neighbour shook his head.

                “What we’ve got here is a barn-raising,” he said matter-of-factly, sweeping my approach aside with his words.  “I think you’d best look at it that way.”

                And so, through my filter of construction protocol, I tried.  But I’d never been to a barn-raising before and I’d certainly never organized one.

                Work began at 15 minutes to 7 in the morning.  Within seconds, air hammers and power saws filled the silent morning with the ferocious music of productivity.  I left things in the hands of the skilled and took to the role of a labourer, pausing every once in a while to explain the plans.

                It proved to be a nerve-wracking business:  at one moment taking orders and the next, as designer, giving them.  Sometime around the 10 o’clock coffee break, it hit me between the eyes:   I was not the Renaissance man I had believed I was.

                I had become, like many of my colleagues in the design business, a specialist.  I could talk shop to the builders on site only to a point.  Invariably there would be a parting of ways on some detail:  they would pursue it to completion; I would look in the other direction on a tangent of theory.

                The ivory tower of the university had not prepared me for this.  There was nothing remotely resembling a hands-on course in building when I took my degree from one of the country’s pre-eminent architecture schools.  There was talk of nuts and bolts, but it was often of the esoteric variety:  the beautiful detail employed in some Miesian skyscraper, the earthy wonder of a tribal mud-on-mud technique or the high-tech, cutting edge intricacy of a micro-chip building system.

                Many of my fellow students graduated without ever having held a hammer.  They had certainly never been in the position of having to build from their own blueprints. 

                Contrasted with the medical profession for example, architects and related members of the design professions often dwell in a never-never land of white-collared detachment.  Surgeons at the top of their form still make incisions with a scalpel and deal intimately with the subject matter they have studied so long:  they may talk technicalities, postulate theories, and speak a scientific dialect but at the end of the day there will be real blood on their surgical gloves.  We designers, on the other hand, chisel out our constructions on paper miles from the job site, months from reality.

                We do so at our peril, and although we should not be jacks of all trades and masters of none, there are basic skills that we would do well to hang onto, relearn or acquire.

                “A HUMAN being,” wrote Robert A. Heilen, “should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, co-operate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.”

                Overspecialization in any profession can ultimately lead to a stifling of the creative spark.  There is great potential for intellectual cross-pollination and invention when architects and engineers roll their sleeves up and work on-site.  The designers of the physical spaces that shape our daily lives, give us shelter and add rich dimension to our existence, should, of all people, be able to at once both see the bigger picture and pick up a hammer with confidence.  Successful collaboration, which in some cases means dirt under the fingernails and sweat on the brow, can often separate great buildings from merely great ideas.  The ancient master builders knew it, and the people at my father’s house raising knew it.

                And by the time I’d carried my 15^th bundle of shingles up the shaky ladder, the architect on the rooftop had begun to learn it, too.  In the process, I’d become a little less insect-like and a touch more human.  And it felt good to sweat again.

First published:  The Globe and Mail    June 1, 1992