Me & The Duke Lacrosse House, Part 2
Why two Midwestern preservationists brought Prairie Style to the Piedmont
Ten years ago, my company built the house that replaced the Duke Lacrosse House. It ended up being rated LEED Platinum and is believed to be the first net-zero energy home ever built in Durham. The project’s origin, design, and execution are one crazy story. Read part 1, here.
1-
Building a home, even an extremely ambitious one, should take no more than a year.
The new house was finished in 2015, more than nine years after that fateful night. Such is the recurrent motif in Durham. Things that should take less than one year often take a decade. Why? Because they just do.
In this post, you will see the end product of the design. It has a unique origin story, as do all parts of the Duke Lacrosse story.
I am from St. Louis originally. Both sides of my family have long roots there. I have not lived in Missouri since I was eight years old, but for most of my life, I have been back to visit family at least once per year.
St. Louis has the best architecture per capita in America. Mostly, this is attributable to it being built later than the great traditional cities of the Northeast and heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Large swaths of its streetcar suburbs were constructed between 1910 and 1930, the heyday of the best American architecture.
All of this was influential on what was built at 610 North Buchanan.
Frank Lloyd Wright peddled a new approach to architecture that he labeled “Prairie Style.” Its designs are characterized by:
bold horizontal lines
open floor plans
emphasis on natural materials
low roof pitches with broad eaves
bands of windows
asymmetric, intentionally informal floor plans
interior wood banding, with little or restrained ornamentation
Now, there are few things me and the rest of America agree on, but Frank Lloyd Wright is one of those things.
Wright designed all over the country, most notably in Chicago, Pennsylvania, Buffalo, Arizona, and California. His disciples spread far and wide, and even today you frequently run into stories of “this house was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright”.
Being inspired by the open prairies where the Midwest turns to the West, the Prairie Style was ever present in Saint Louis, which was nicknamed “The Gateway to the West”.
So, how does it end up in Durham, North Carolina?
There is a lot of dogma in the church of historic preservation. 610 North Buchanan is in the heart of historic Trinity Park, a nationally listed historic neighborhood, mostly characterized by Queen Anne Victorians and Four Squares, with a smattering of Craftsman Bungalows.
There are no Prairies here. Prairies do not really exist in the South. They are ahistorical. In pure preservation dogma, they are “untrue to their place and time”.
But to hold to that rule absolutely is also ahistorical. Saint Louis is filled with fabulous French and German architecture, neither (quite obviously) originating from Saint Louis.
People move. People bring their knowledge and skills with them. Architecture is, and should be, an honest account of such migrations. Those migrations include information sharing and cultural evolutions. And I adamantly believe that this tradition should not have stopped in 1930 and should not stop now.
2—
One of the many talented designers I’ve worked with is Gwen Ronsick. Gwen had a deep background in historic design and preservation consulting. As it happens, she was from Washington, Missouri, just outside of Saint Louis.
We both loved Prairie Style. I told her that I believed that the Chicago School was effectively American architecture, that the Prairie Style was the residential embodiment of those values, and that (rather grandiosely) I would like to start a Prairie Revival movement.
Gwen said, “Great!” and we got to work. Knowing the project was going to pursue a LEED Platinum rating, we named it “Casa Verde” or “Green House”.
A few points on what you will see in the final photography below:
Casa Verde has way more natural wood than any comparable new home.
As detailed as it is, this is still way less detail than Wright would have ever done, even on most of his (relatively) modest Usonians.
We had to think long and hard about what wood to use because the budget did have limits, and (as you can see) we needed a boatload of Select #1 finished wood. We chose poplar, a relatively inexpensive softwood, which worked great. (FWIW, Wright preferred heart cypress).
The cabinetry was formally integrated into the base and chair railings, which is uncommon today, especially with natural wood. It gives a warm, alive feeling, ties the entire home together, and keeps the indoor occupant perpetually connected to nature. It is humanistic.
The stained glass at the entryway is actually a false window. This part of Trinity Park is relatively dense, with close proximity to its neighbors. This window would have been all up in the northern neighbor’s business. By bizarre coincidence, the neighbor was one of my late mother’s best friends- both of them professors of early childhood education. Partially, as an effort to be neighborly and partially because it is probably what my late mother would have wanted, we worked hard to protect this privacy through the use of this false window. From the outside, it is continuous stucco. From the inside, it is an artificially backlit piece of custom-stained glass. It works both ways.
The house has too many green features to name. LEED Platinum does not give you much flexibility and choice, and you end up having to chase points (I suspect it is better now, but this was done in the very very early days of LEED). The home has geothermal heating and cooling and a large PV solar system. The PV panels, which preservationists prefer you hide, are barely noticeable from the street because of the low slope roof natural to Prairie styles.
The final product is below. I sure am proud of it. I hope you like it too:
Above is the false window adjacent to the entry.
