February 12, 2004 |
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DESIGN
An
original composition
The late Lou Harrison, a new music maestro, built his Joshua
Tree home of straw using traditional materials in an experimental way. Much
like his music, it's eclectic and influential.
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(Rick Loomis / LAT)
(Eva Soltes)
(Rick Loomis / LAT)
(Rick Loomis / LAT)
(Rick Loomis / LAT)
(Eva Soltes)
(Rick Loomis / LAT)
(Rick Loomis / LAT)
February 12, 2004
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A single, elegant vase sat in the kitchen window of the high
desert retreat built by late composer Lou Harrison.
As the first light of day crept in, documentary filmmaker and concert promoter
Eva Soltes, who worked with Harrison on numerous projects over three decades
and now owns the house, looked up at the vase and smiled.
"That's Lou," she said quietly.
The comment could have been taken as her describing the ornate object as just
the kind of thing he loved. So she laughed and added, "That really is
Lou."
Soltes pressed her hands together and bowed slightly toward the window. The
ashes of Harrison, who died on Feb. 2, 2003, at age 85 while en route to a
festival of his musical works, were inside the vase.
The house, built against a stunning backdrop of huge granite rock piles common
to this landscape near Joshua Tree National Park, is very much representative
of what Harrison — for whom the term iconoclast seemed coined — was all about.
Like Harrison — who incorporated Baroque, Asian and a wide range of other
musical forms into complex, achingly beautiful works — it's a glorious mixture.
The retreat is dominated by a soaring, arched roof that took design cues from
both mosques and medieval cathedrals. It uses traditional materials in an
experimental way, so much so that it took almost three years to get through the
permitting process. It was built in large part by a community of people, some
of whom were longtime friends and admirers of Harrison and others who were
lured by the novel way in which the house was constructed. And finally, it has
strong ties to the environment.
Inside the retreat's 2-foot-thick walls, the primary building material is
tightly bound bundles of straw. Straw-bale construction — a rapidly growing
nationwide trend — was used because of its recycled materials, low cost,
malleability and insulating quality that makes heating and air-conditioning
more efficient.
But while most straw-bale houses end up looking either quite conventional or
like something out of a hobbit village, the Harrison retreat is so elegant and
awe-inspiring that it's not unusual for first-time visitors to drop their
voices to a whisper as they step through one of its many doors into the main
hall.
Soltes was visiting from her regular home in San Francisco to host a small
celebration — with music, dance and the scattering of those ashes in the desert
— to mark the first anniversary of his death and to look toward the future of
how the retreat would be used, perhaps as the core of an artists' colony.
Harrison was a man of ample girth and flowing white beard, which led to his
being referred to as the Santa Claus of new music. His work, though long
respected in music circles, did not become widely known until his later years,
when it was performed by the likes of the San Francisco Symphony, Yo-Yo Ma, the
Kronos Quartet and Keith Jarrett.
He had a wide network of friends, a legendary thirst for knowledge and a
just-as-legendary generous nature. "When Lou found a book that he liked,
he would buy at least three copies," said George Zelenz, an architect who
lives nearby. "One for himself, one in case the first got lost and one for
a friend he thought might like it."
Many of Harrison's close friends were involved in his broad range of projects,
including the building and playing of gamelan, an orchestra of bell- and marimba-like
instruments native to Indonesia for which Harrison wrote numerous pieces.
But woe to anyone who confused his jovial persona with permission to vary from
his precise ideas for how he wanted his music performed. And that goes for
other expressions of his artistry too, including the house.
"He thought of it as being made up of modular pieces in the way that
gamelan music is modular," said Chris Daubert, an artist and
furniture-maker who built several instruments for Harrison.
"Traditional gamelan pieces are short and repetitive, and then
embellishments are added to the simple structure. In that way, you can think of
the house as starting out with nine modular pieces, almost like a tic-tac-toe
board."
On the south side, the three pieces are the equally sized kitchen, bathroom and
bedroom.
The three pieces of the design puzzle on the north side are not exactly rooms,
but equally spaced, outdoor patios, set apart by graceful arches. Soltes said
that Harrison spoke of perhaps enclosing these spaces someday, making them into
additional bedrooms.
But the heart of the house, figuratively and literally, is the great room in
the center that is the combination of three of these modules with no walls in
between (imagine the three squares down the center of the tic-tac-toe board and
then erase the top and bottom lines of the center square, leaving you with one
long space).
Although not a large room, area-wise, its drama derives from its being three
times bigger than the others and, most importantly, from the fact that its
thick gray walls climb 22 feet to a vaulted ceiling that gives the house its
cathedral-like feeling, making the retreat seem far larger than its total of
1,000 square feet.
The smooth walls of hand-applied plaster give the doorways — there are six
leading to the room — a sculpted, sensual look.
There are other dramatic touches that give this room a quieting, exalted
feel. The entire east side is a vaulted window — providing a striking
view of the sunrise — that was built by Daubert to withstand 100-mph desert
winds.
On the outside of the window is a wooden lattice, made up of rows of triangles,
called a mashrabiya in Arab desert countries. It diffuses strong
sunlight.
Harrison would not allow his desert retreat to be built without the Romanesque,
vaulted ceiling, not only for appearance, but also for the incredible
spaciousness of sound it would give to live music played in the room.
That vault ended up causing painful delays, not to mention a great deal of
heartbreak, during the building of the house. But it also helped lead to this
little retreat forging into new territory in housing, and its legacy is already
being felt on the other side of the world.
Harrison started telling friends in the early 1990s that he wanted to build a
second home to get away from the intrusions that had come with growing fame.
"Our house has turned into a sort of office," he explained in a
speech before the American Humanist Assn. "We intend to build a getaway
house. If I have a project that I want to take, I can take it there and
complete it undisturbed."
Harrison's primary house, shared with life partner William Colvig — an
electrician by trade who built numerous Asian instruments with Harrison — was
in coastal Aptos, near Santa Cruz, Calif. Both men were in fragile health and
thought that spending at least part of the year breathing dry desert air would
help. But not much money was available for buying land and building a retreat.
Commissions for serious music are not bountiful and all but a tiny handful of
serious music composers in this country have to teach or otherwise supplement
their incomes, even when in demand.
"He started a special bank account," said Soltes, "and when he
would get a commission, he would say, 'That's for the house.' "
On the way home from a concert event in New Mexico in 1995, Harrison stopped
off to see Zelenz, who shared his interest in gamelan music. "I drove Lou
around in my truck for a couple hours, showing him the different
neighborhoods," said Zelenz. "A couple days after they got home they
called and asked me to find them some property."
Zelenz found a 1.25-acre lot in a failed development for about $8,000, sent
them pictures, and they bought it.
Harrison and Colvig, both ardent environmentalists, were committed to straw-bale
construction. It recycles straw, which is essentially a waste material, and
provides bountiful insulation to cut back on energy use.
The Skillful Means construction and architecture firm, which specializes in
straw bale, was engaged. Harrison's design ideas were influenced by famed
Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy.
Luckily, project architect Janet Johnston had visited whole desert villages
Fathy had designed.
"Originally, we had not only the vault, but three domes — one over each of
the single rooms," said Johnston.
The original plan was to seal the straw-bale insulation with gunite, a strong
concrete mixture that can be blown onto a structure. But during the planning
stage, the cost of gunite skyrocketed, placing it far beyond the modest $70,000
budget for the retreat.
The house ended up costing Harrison a lot more — about $125,000. Still,
Skillful Means officials said their company lost money on the project, due to
the extra costs they absorbed.
The backup plan was to use stucco, but in seismically active Joshua Tree that
would have required an interior wood frame to meet the code. And the vault and
domes would have to be eliminated.
Harrison was willing to let the domes go, but not the vault.
Delays began. Finally, a prominent seismic engineer in the Bay Area, David Mar
— who had worked on San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton hotel and several downtown
commercial buildings — heard about the project. He was intrigued and took the
job pro bono.
At that point Mar had never heard of Harrison.
"I was invited to the concert of the San Francisco Symphony with Michael
Tilson Thomas conducting his music," Mar said. "It blew my socks
off."
Mar came up with a theoretical solution, and a full-scale, prototype vault was
made for testing. It passed easily, Mar said, showing integrity more than three
times the code. But code officials still balked.
As delays grew longer, costs and frustrations mounted. But saddest of all,
Colvig — who had shared Harrison's life since 1967 — died in 2000.
Finally, a compromise was negotiated. An outside engineer could be hired to go
over the plans. The cost of this was shared equally by Harrison, Skillful Means
and Mar. The engineer gave them a passing grade and construction finally went
ahead full speed.
When it came time to stack the straw bales in the walls, volunteers — including
Daubert, Johnston, Mar, Soltes and Zelenz — came from all over California. That
part was done in two weekends.
Soltes, who is making a feature-length documentary about Harrison, was on hand to
film the moment, on Feb. 2, 2002, when the house was declared finished and the
proud owner rushed in to play a gamelan for the first time in the main room.
(Clips from the in-progress documentary are at http://www.harrisondocumentary.com.)
A year later to the day, Harrison was gone, having had the chance to take only
about five trips to his retreat. On the last of those, in November 2002,
guitarist John Schneider played him what turned out to be the composer's last
major piece, "Scenes From Nek Chand."
"He really enjoyed it," said Schneider, another longtime Harrison
associate, "and I was so glad. Who could have known it was the last
time?"
Sitting in front of the main window, on a blustery night of the celebration,
Schneider played it again. It was spacious, haunting music, so appropriate for
the desert setting. And the sound in the room was luminous.
The ashes were spread outside and Zelenz read an epic poem by Harrison, mostly
concerning the death of Colvig. One passage was about the musical instruments
they built together.
It ended: "They will sing his lasting voice into the future, for we lived
a covenant of love and tune."
The integrity, adventurousness and stubbornness with which Harrison took on the
project of building his house will likely play a future role in the lives of
many people who will never hear his music or know of the Joshua Tree retreat.
"We proved that you could make housing appropriate for areas with high
seismic activity for very low cost — maybe $4 a square foot in parts of the
developing world," said Mar. Of course, this would be without a vault. But
a plain home that can withstand strong earth tremors and still be afforded in
poor areas could save lives.
"More than 400 of these houses have already been made in China," Mar
said. "Lou would be so proud."
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
A sampling of his work
For a sampling of Lou Harrison's music, go to http://www.musicmavericks.org/listening
to hear a San Francisco Symphony concert — conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas —
devoted to his works. An interview with the composer also is on the site.
Notable CDs include:
Piano Concerto (New World Records), performed by Keith Jarrett and New Japan
Philharmonic Orchestra.
Rhymes With Silver (New Albion Records). Music written for Mark Morris Dance
Group.
Just Guitars (Bridge Records), featuring John Schneider.
Gay American Composers (Composers Recordings), includes Kronos Quartet playing
two movements of his string quartet.
Lou Harrison: A Portrait (Argo). Selections performed by the California
Symphony.
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