AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT CARPENTER OF CASTLEONE DESIGN
Many noted architects have struggled with the challenge of low-cost housing throughout the years. Chief among them was Frank Lloyd Wright, whose 70-year career gave him several opportunities to try and tackle this fundamental question: How to design a system of affordable architecture based on principles. Robert Carpenter of Castleone Design has proposed a design for multi-family housing that looks to the principles of Wright's Organic Architecture as inspiration.
Eric: How did you become interested in architecture and what type of work does your firm, Castleone Design, specialize in?
Robert: Oscar Wilde stirred my interest in Victorian England and in a book on the subject [Design and the Decorative Arts - Victorian Britain], I learned of Gothic Revival architecture and its great advocate A.W. Pugin. Pugin I discovered had written an influential book [Contrasts] in which he declared Gothic the perfect architectural expression of the sacred and traced its origins, development and ultimate suppression under the Renaissance. In [Contrasts] he makes the case to revive Gothic principles not just in church architecture but also secular and was hugely successful in the magnificent design for the British Parliament House of 1851. From this exposure to Pugin and Gothic my interest in architecture expanded to the point where I eventually encountered Frank Lloyd Wright. Both Pugin and Wright incidentally sought to restore to architecture the sense of the sacred, both reacted negatively to the rising tide of Neo-Classical architecture, both wrote prolifically and polemically against neoclassicism and shared a similar sense of humor.
Either could have said of America for instance, that “its the only country ever to have gone from barbarism to decadence without any civilization in between” although the quote seems most likely to be original with Wilde. In any event this encounter with Wright and his ideas about architecture inspired me to try to apply his principles and to an eventual collaboration with Castleone Stone, a manufacturer of pre-cast concrete blocks similar to the type used in the iconic California Block Houses of the 1920s. As designer for Castleone Design, I try to apply Organic Architecture principles to the design of buildings using the specialized Castleone concrete block system.
Eric: How are you inspired by the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Organic Architecture?
Robert: Wright always pays particular attention, so Grant Hildebrand tells us, to endowing his buildings with the characteristics of prospect and refuge. How can the space be made to enhance the sense of protection, the sense of being partially concealed (refuge) and at the same time heighten the sense of an expansive view (prospect). In the case of Cheney House, Wright accomplished this with a raised, semi-private terrace on the street bounded by a low parapet wall. I’ve tried to provide this same feature to row houses only turned ninety degrees with garden terrace placed between houses.
Additionally I’ve drawn on Wrightian principles and devices such as inclusion of plenty of shelving for both storage and decoration, low ceilings and ceiling decks to emphasize the high ceiling and establish interior areas of “refuge,” built-ins around the walls to free up center space and “make a narrow house work like a wider one,” breaking up of open space by having shelving and counter space flow around corners, carports on an alley for off street parking, raised planting boxes, raised terrace large enough to serve as an outdoor room.
Eric: Describe the ideas and design behind your “Terraced Housing” project.
Robert: The box I’m trying to think outside is this: it seems to me that at the moment in the United States, we can identify exactly two residential layout patterns. One, the individual house which works fine given sufficient land - but what’s being built more and more especially in urban areas are bulked up houses crammed onto shrinking plots resulting in diminished if not lost private areas outside. Second, the town house whose residents seem to be perfectly willing to live between party walls. [The condo is of course a third pattern adding in party ceilings/floors but need not concern us here.] The individual house and the townhouse are our two possibilities. The question arises as to why there aren’t more. It’s not because of aesthetic considerations or want of imagination - architects could surely be expected to conceive many additional possibilities. The problem exists in the fact that architecture is the purview not so much of architects but the real estate industry and its deep layers of regulatory bureaucracies.
In any case, the idea I propose roughly split’s the difference between the town house and the individual house. That is, I would incorporate in an individual house a party wall on the other side of which is not another house, but an outside garden area belonging to another house, which is just this little courtyard sanctuary with prospect and refuge outlined above.
Eric: What is the biggest challenge you faced in designing this particular project?
Robert: What to do with the TV? Once you’ve worked out where the TV goes the rest seems to take care of itself. In this case the idea was to be able to watch TV from the dinner table. The table faces the TV and in front of the table goes a built-in bank of sofas. The table, sofa bank and one kitchen wall form the core around which, along the surrounding exterior walls, runs the kitchen, various space-saving storage spaces, a little office, and a little corner window seat. The bedrooms are laid out according to standard Usonian patterns, and viola! You’ve got a "Microsonian."
Eric: What other projects of interest are you currently working on?
Robert: We are at present attempting to perfect a 16” x 16” cast-block system similar to the iconic California concrete block houses. This process gives concrete a delicate beauty and managed to adorn it with a jewel like collection of patterns not seen in the material before or since. Yet, they are strong and light enough (approx 40lbs) to be easily assembled as a dry stack structure by a single individual without special lifting machinery. It’s an ideal system for D.I.Y. types looking for a beautiful, economical, storm proof, fireproof building system. The problem with the original system found in the California houses was that none of the blocks could be made to exactly the same size--to be perfectly true and square--the one indispensable requirement of block used in dry stack construction. Castleone is now at work designing square, true, precision steel molds for several kinds of blocks for an updated version of our own concrete block process. pm
:: CastleOne Design's website
:: Learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright
Images copyright of Robert Carpenter, Castleone Design.
Eric O'Malley is a co-founder and contributor to PrairieMod. He lives in the Little Red House, a Mid-Century Modern ranch in suburban Chicago. You can email him at eric@prairiemod.com.
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