Shingle-Minded Pursuits
           by Vincent Scully

A Massachusetts town is rediscovering its legacy of master builders

Once upon a time, architects, who were less numerous that they are
today, spent more time taking care of good old buildings than they did building bad new ones. This was true of most architects from antiquity into the nineteenth century. Preservation stood at the very heart of the profession, not on its periphery.
      
That the opposite has come to be the norm is a result not only of
the demographic explosion of clients and architects alike but also of the romantic aesthetic of innovation, so essential to the avant-guarde mystique of the modern movement as a whole. The result has, of course, been the breakdown of permanence and community. Every-thing has to be different from everything else and nothing is made to last. For young American architects to get along—first in school and then in practice--they have been required to opt for some kind of highly visible pseudo-originality. Otherwise their work will not be published.

The work of Stephen Roberts Holt, a devoted and distinguished
preservation architect in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, is a case in point. It has never been properly published because it is rarely visible at all. It is, instead, woven inextricably into the fabric of the great vacation houses that were built in and around Manchester during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of them by the local contracting firm of Roberts & Hoare, which was founded by Holt's great-grandfather. When he graduated from the Yale School of Architecture in 1972, Stephen Holt had a clear choice before him.  He could head for New York and the bright lights and the quick turnover or go back home to a practice which would by its very nature always be modest and restricted but which would also be founded upon a solid architectural tradition very much his own. The choice he made was surely conditioned also by the kind of education he had enjoyed under Charles Moore at Yale.
      
Moore was the cofounder, with Robert Venturi, of the revisionist
movement that stuck the first pin into modernism's destructive pretensions and began the revival of the vernacular and classical traditions and their reintegration into the mainstream of contem-porary design, which as been by far the most important architectural event of the fast twenty-five years. It has in fact become a broadly popular movement of which, in turn, a considerable number of architects have become bitterly jealous in recent years, since it undermines their heroic stature as innovators and threatens
their command of public taste.
      
Holt was wise in deciding to return to Manchester, because that little
colonial and Greek revival harbor town was the center of a region that contained one of the richest collections anywhere of what now more than ever appear to be some of the most delightful houses ever built. The most distinguished of them all were the shingle-style summer cottages that began to appear in the 1870's and, joined by Palladian and other types, continued to be built right up into the 1920's. They were designed by some of the best architects in the country: McKim, Mead & White, Peabody & Stearns, Arthur Little, and, perhaps the best of all in this genre and in this area, William Ralph Emerson of Boston. H. H. Richardson, the father of the
shingle style, is conspicuous by his absence.
      
All these architects and their affluent clients were drawn to the
rugged coast that stretches from Salem to Gloucester for the very reasons that produced the shingle style itself: a new taste for summer living in one's own house, not a hotel, and a concomitant desire to make contact with the colonial past. One could live in what seemed to be the wild, privately commanding a deep rocky cove, but the old towns were also there, and the new suburban railroad ran right through the backyard, taking on to Boston in forty minutes. It was a soft primitivism, right enough, and was surely one more expression of the concentration of financial power during the late nineteenth century, of which the shingle-style cottages were the domestic
complement to the many-storied office buildings that were rising downtown. Indeed, old photographs of the big new cottages show them looming in the landscape around Manchester at a scale so vastly larger than that of the town as to seem like skyscrapers themselves.

Then times changed; Stephen Holt come on the scene just at the
moment when the life of those cottages was most threatened. The area around Manchester had never really recovered from the Great Depression, and the old summer families were selling off their houses or tearing them down or modifying them beyond recognition.  One of the most famous and Richardsonian of them all, Kragsyde, by Peabody & Stearns was totally demolished.  (It is now being recon-structed by an enthusiast in Maine,) Arthur Little's Fort House lost its grand tower and is barely recognizable today. And his River House was cut down to the second floor, flat roofed, hideously fenestrated, and re-sided. A comparison of before and after records the collapse of a civilization.
      
The practice of lopping off the top floors with all their dormers
and towers was weirdly common in this area during the 1950's and '60s. It was, in part, simply a modernist reflex, and it destroyed many of the houses just prior to the moment when the new professional and popular appreciation of their special qualities would have saved them. Holt points out, however, that buildings along the coast at Manchester have always taken a terrible beating from the winter gales, a fact that at once helped create the shingle style and hastened its demise. Unpainted shingles, like those used in colonial New England, make by far the best surface cladding under such conditions, but the freedom of shingle-style forms and the complexity of their intersections also make leaks inevitable when the savage nor'easter blows.

Holt looks back on the losses with sorrow, and yet his own presence
in Manchester has clearly played a large part in changing the situation for the better during the past twenty years. Besides carrying out the kinds of renovations that all buildings constantly need—and educating owners to the virtues of what they have—he as tactfully accommodated contemporary styles of life. Many of the houses had kitchens in the basement, for example, counting on service of a kind no longer available or desirable. All are under-bath roomed by the present obsessive and alarmingly sybaritic standard. Holt, as in hiss restoration of what was originally the Rogers-Stanwood House, built in 1885 by Roberts & Hoare ad apparently designed by them as well, manages to fit these things in without destroying the unique character of the architecture. The Shingle style at its best is so flexible and free and easy that it can take intelligent alterations and
additions much better than most kinds of building can.

This has been so in what I think is the very best of all the houses
along this coast, and certainly one of the best preserved, despite the addition of a library wing. It is the Loring (now Codman) House at Pride's Crossing my William Ralph Emerson. In 1955 I reproduced the drawings of it done by E. Eldon Deane for the American Architect and Building News in 1884, but I am sorry to say that I had never visited the site until Stephen Holt took me there. It was worth the trip. Thirty-five years after publishing a book on the subject I have at last seen what may well be the finest surviving example of the
shingle style.
      
The relation of the Loring House to its landscape of trees, beach,
and islands is of an intimate grandeur worthy of the Sea of Japan, and the sequence of movement through its interior spaces, wherein the scale and the light are always eloquently changing, locks us into that landscape and frames its views more movingly, more nobly even, certainly more flexible, than—I will say it—Frank Lloyd Wright himself was ever able to do. Anyway, the house suggests that kind of hyperbole. Emerson's sensitivity and Roberts & Hoare's craftsman-ship are alike absolute, expressive of deep caring about every shape, every surface, inside and out.
      
Stephen Holt is now actively engaged in helping to ensure the
continued existence of this magical building. We can only hope he succeeds in this as in his other work, since the role he has chosen is one that architects everywhere are going to have to take more and more seriously in the years ahead. The splendid preservation of the Loring House underscores its importance, as we stand on the beach looking up at the building growing out of the rock, while southward the chimneys of the power station at Salem stand out before the towers of Boston at the edge of the Atlantic.