A HISTORY OF THE INTERIOR A HISTORY OF THE INTERIOR005
It was the Summer of 1921.
The American poet and newly minted stonemason Robinson Jeffers was out working on the masonry for a detached garage, and a low surrounding wall for his courtyard. He had just finished building his “Tor House” on an exceedingly remote part of the California coast called Carmel point. He was now contemplating beginning work on his next project, the Hawk tower, an ode to his wife Una, built at her request. These two structures, the Tor House and it’s adjoining Hawk tower profoundly shaped the life and verse of one of the greatest American poets and icons of the Environmental movement.
Robinson Jeffers ( 1887 - 1962 )
The Tor House and Hawk Tower Carmel Point, California
Jeffers was famous for being a tough, outdoorsman, living and writing in solitude at the remote Carmel point house he had built with his own hands. He spent most of his life there, on this craggy outcrop or ‘Tor’ . To build his house, shortly after commissioning it’s construction to a local builder, Jeffers apprenticed himself to learn the art of stonemasonry, building large parts of his house with his own hands. He built additions to Tor House throughout his life, writing in the mornings and working on the house in the afternoons. Many of his poems reflect the influence of stone and building on his life.
“Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years : It is the granite knoll on the granite And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel theseRiver-valley,fourwill remain In the change of names. The Tor House, Robinson Jeffers
It was the Summer of 1921.
Sabato “Simon” Rodia ( 1879 - 1965
)
Sabato Rodia, or ‘Sam’ as he was often called, a poor Italian emigrant and odd-jobs man purchased a small triangular plot at 1761-1765 107th Street in Los Angeles. Rodia had come to the US when he was 15, and had lost a brother in the coal mines of HePennsylvania.hadasingularly monumental vision, to build a metaphorical ship that pointed towards his homeland with massive masts and a wealth of detail.
Construction worker by day and artist by night, Rodia began work on a complex, twisted sculptural piece of Art that defies definition to this day. They are popularly called the Watts towers, but are equal parts mural, folk art, sculpture and maze. Rodia worked on his towers almost every day for 34 years, constantly adding, twisting, bending and embellishing. He adorned his towers with a diverse mosaic of broken glass, sea shells, generic pottery and tile, a rare piece of 19th-century, hand painted Canton ware and many pieces of 20th-century American ceramics.
Every neighbour knew that Simon could and would, use anything and everything to add to his towers. Much of the ceramic and pottery material came from detritus discarded by the nearby factories where he sometimes worked. The grandness of his vision is reflected in the scale of his structures, the tallest of his towers stands 99½ feet tall and contains the longest slender RCC column in the world.
He spoke in halting jerky English, and was a man of extremely few words. "I had it in mind to do something big and I did it."
In a world built for speed, efficiency and quicker turnarounds, what room is there for the eccentric, the whimsical or autobiographicalthe?
At first glance, there seems to be absolutely nothing in common between the sombre granite monoliths of the Tor House, and the light ephemerality and folksy decorations of the Watts Towers. Their creation myths overlap though, homes and structures carefully built, day by day, stone by stone, tiny ceramic piece by tiny ceramic piece. Structures like these, built often very frugally, acquire something that the store-bought is constantly denied.
Layers and layers of Soul.
Both the Tor House and Watts Towers stand distinctly apart from the prevailing ‘aesthetic’ of their times, and are distinctly ‘UnModern’ structures.' Their creators were going for something fundamentally different. Both were deeply autobiographical, each square inch holding their own fingerprints and memories, plastered into the very structure of the buildings. Both artists lived impoverished, frugal lives, and the structures reflect this. There is a deep, intimate, incremental engagement with the building that is impossible to replicate.
In a world of metrics, it may do justice to these buildings to conceive of a wholly new metric. That of “Intelligence per Square Foot” .
Jeffers for example imbued his Tor House with all manner of relics from across the sacred and natural world. He symbolically brought the spirit of all the Monuments he visited back to his own Plasteredhome. into the walls of his Home are bits from all the Towers of Ireland, the Babylonian Temple, The Great Wall of China, The Pyramids of Cheops, a piece from Hadrian’s Villa and Lava from Mount Vesuvius amongst other items of personal significance. By scratching in quotes, signs, objects and minerals, the home became deeply autobiographical, imbued with all kinds of personal memories.
One of the boulders, for example has a name and a date chiselled into it. It says “Hardy 1.11.28” . It was the day the stone was set in, and the writer Thomas Hardy died.
Perhaps most telling of all, is a single quote etched into a lintel, from the ancient Roman poet Virgil, that sums up the Home’s ongoing relationship with the passage of time, and it’s deeply inter-generational view. It translates to “The Grandchildren gather the Fruit” .
By slowing down the act of building, and engaging intimately with each stone, in his own words “Making one stone love another”, Jeffers expanded his sense of time. The Home he built was a gift to his children and grandchildren, and he was acutely aware that he was only planting the seed.
Simon Rodia on the other hand, was working entirely from a day-to-day collection of found and donated objects, with little or no control over what may land up in his menagerie of a building. His structures were constructed on steel rebar , cladded with his own concoction of concrete wrapped with wire mesh. The Watts towers contain bottles, ceramic tiles, seashells, figurines, mirrors, and all manner of broken pottery pieces brought to him by children from the neighbourhood. Working with simple hand tools and no predetermined design, Rodia created an icon of folk architecture.
Both Jeffers and Rodia worked on non-existent budgets, building frugally and with extremely limited access to tools and technology.
Details at the Watts towers show his use of the simplest of tools, pressed into a concrete relief panel for posterity.
Rodia used the most fascinating array of objects to decorate his “Nuestro Pueblo”, Spanish for “Our Town”. The flower-like motifs across the towers are created with the head of a Garden hose. Blue and Green glass comes from Seven-Up and Milk of Magnesia bottles from around.
In place of large budgets they gave their creations Respect, Deep attention and Time. All of which we deny to Architecture and Design today.
Both Rodia and Jeffers rejected prevailing ideas of “Aesthetic” , building from materials that they had ready access to, the emergent form of the house speaking of their own personal journeys and skills.
The Aesthetic was not “rejected” as much as it was just not relevant. When Architecture becomes so personal, so autobiographical and so deeply intimate, it cannot matter what kind of Global trend or Aesthetic is doing the rounds at the moment.
By expanding their notions of time, they remain rooted in a much longer inquiry, far from the limits of fleeting “Aesthetic” affiliations.
In their proudly individualistic creations, they created ‘singleperson Manifestos’ against the prevailing aesthetic of their times, by showing that an alternate Architecture could exist.
