A book of speculative architectural drawings considering aspects of houses, towers, and cities drawn from a “dreaming pen”. Works, including sketches, illustrations, and poetry, are juxtaposed with ideas of Bachelard, DeBergerac, Calvino. Includes an original poem by Emma Sovich

available at the following address:   http://stores.lulu.com/rmsovicharchitecture

Green roof will be installed soon thanks to Green Builder, Polly Bart.

“At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth. The effect is miniscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was  known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on…high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.”

“…To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live the longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs. Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbor, he believes that neighbor will not become stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not lose his hair until later, will not wrinkle until later, will not lose the urge for romance as early. Likewise, a person looking down on another house tends to dismiss its occupants as spent, weak, and shortsighted. Some boast that they have lived their whole lives up high, that they were born in the highest house on the highest mountain peak and have never descended. They celebrate their youth in their mirrors and walk naked on their balconies.”

“… A small number of residents in each city have stopped caring whether they age a few seconds faster than their neighbors. These adventuresome souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under the trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie in the warmer altitudes, roll on the level ground. They hardly look at their watches and cannot tell you  if it is Monday or Thursday. When others rush by them and scoff, they just  smile…”

above passages from
Einstein’s Dreams
Alan Lightman 1993

New aging embodies the dichotomy in Lightman’s tale: taking every opportunity to extend youth versus taking every opportunity to savor the moments of life. Rather than wood stilts, these  towers are supported on their elevator and stair towers. The living spaces include private apartments and common areas, and recreational areas on the roof.

“we have some Ambulatory Towns, and some Sedentary; the Ambulatory, as for instance this wherein now we are, are Built in this manner: The Architector, as you see, builds every Palace of a very light sort of Timber; supported by four Wheels underneath; in the thickness of one of the Walls he places ten large pair of Bellows, whose Snouts pass in a Horizontal Line through the upper Story, from one Pinacle to the other; so that when Towns are to be removed from one place to another, (for according to the Seasons they change the Air) every one spreads a great many Sails upon one side of the House, before the Noses of the Bellows; then having wound up a Spring to make them play, in less than Eight days time their Houses, by the continual Puffs which these Windy Monsters blow, are driven, if one pleases, an Hundred Leagues and more.

” For those which we call Sedentary, they are almost like to your Towers; save that they are of Timber, and that they have a Great and Strong Skrew or Vice in the Middle, reaching from the top to the Bottom; whereby they may be hoisted up or let down as People please. Now the Ground under neath is dugg as deep as the House is high; and it is so ordered, that so soon as the Frosts begin to chill the Air, they may sink their Houses down under Ground, where they keep themselves secure from the Severity of the Weather: But as soon as the gentle Breathings of the Spring begin to soften and qualifie the Air; they raise them above Ground again, by means of the great Skrew.”

I came upon an excerpt of this book in the lobby of the Williamsburg Inn in 1990 and made the following watercolor sketches based on the passage above. I am thinking again about the idea of a house being ambulatory or sedentary–houses that adapt to and with their environment. How might our houses move to adapt to their environment?  I should have some new ideas in the coming weeks.

These are studies for a modest, single family detached house  on an inner city site.

This community began with a house drawn from my daydream memories. Like many people, this house has lost its roots. Unlike most houses it has neither cellar nor attic, no repository of memories, no history; it is a house for the present. The attic or garret is an open terrace and for that reason it may be a vacation house. In this exercise I have grouped the house with others to form a new community. The stone wall separates and connects the dream community from its context.