Preserving The Magic In Chatham’s Architecture

Author Gives Examples Of The Good, And Bad, In Local Building Designs

by Debra Lawless

            Dance, music and song. Magic. Mystery.

            These may not be words you'd expect to hear in a talk on architectural preservation, but they are words that architect Jonathan Hale used frequently Saturday in his lecture "Preserving Chatham's Architectural Magic," which kicked off National Preservation Month in Chatham.

            The 60-minute lecture, sponsored by the Chatham Alliance for Preservation and Conservation, attracted over 80 people to the Eldredge Public Library on a soggy morning. 

Architect Jonathan Hale

           Chatham architect Len Sussman, candidate for selectman and a friend of Hale when both were undergraduates at Harvard University, introduced the speaker by saying today he would be "our guru, our sensei." Hale, who lives in Watertown, is the author of "The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic (And How to Get It Back)" (1994 ). He is working with the Chatham Historical Commission to expand its survey of historical properties.

            Hale began his Power Point presentation with a photo of an 1850s Chatham house that his family rented in 1950. That Greek revival house with its yellow clapboards and porch is his earliest image of Chatham, he said. "It's an image that has a nostalgic touch to it. Of course, Chatham has changed a great deal. Not all for the bad. How can we move forward in a very different world? Preservation is not about getting back the past."

            Chatham is an old town, yet "most of old Chatham is 19th century and a great deal of Chatham is 20th century, built in the last 50 years," he noted. He added that "the quality standard of design in Chatham is higher than in many other places I've been."

            Hale then gave a quick tour of some of Chatham's most charming old houses as audience members whispered "that's precious" and "that's sweet."

            "You can see something of the mystery of old buildings," Hale said.  "Charm, magic, important to hold on to and not easy to get."

            One thing's sure, it's obvious when charm is missing, as in a trophy house in Concord and in a McMansion in Andover. Of the Andover house, Hale said, "Its whole design is meant to impress."

            It is possible to enlarge living space without building a monstrosity. Chatham has a tradition of "sprawl" houses --- 19th century Greek revivals that have been added onto through the years. Several examples of successful sprawl houses can be found on Stage Harbor Road, Hale said. "The house becomes like a mini-village of pieces."

            So "what is the 'it,' the magic behind houses that we love?" Hale asked. The key, Hale believes, lies in the house's proportions. "The house is designed as a pattern in light and shade. In our time that's been lost."

            Hale analyzed the placement of the front windows and door on an 18th century five-bay Colonial house on Nantucket by drawing diagonal lines from the corners of window trim to the bottom of the doorframe, for example, and noting that the lines cross other significant corners. "It need not be perfect," he said. "It's more a question of the dance of the pattern." (In his book, Hale uses the same method to analyze Audrey Hepburn's face.)

            Proportion, then, is the key to the "magic" or "music" of old buildings. "Proportioning systems connect us to the nonverbal side of our minds, the 'magic' side," he writes in "The Old Way of Seeing." Designers through the 19th century consciously and unconsciously worked proportional systems into their buildings, giving them an indescribable beauty. Yet this talent was lost at some point in modern times as these systems were no longer commonly understood. "In our age we focus on the comfort side" and give short shrift to form, he writes.

            Hale analyzed a new house of the same style as the Nantucket house. The new house has "no personality." Not surprisingly, when diagonal lines are drawn, they meet nowhere. "Without making your house into music, it's not going to sing," he said.

            Hale also discussed the tricky issue of choosing an exterior house color. Believing that we often learn from bad examples, he cited a $1 million house in Newton painted in a cartoonish swirl of green, pink and cream. "It's a circus," he said. And "it torpedoes the values of the houses around it."

            Hale advocates testing a color by painting a minimum of a five-by-five-foot swatch.

            Hale offered a few negative examples from Chatham, too. The Methodist Church covered perhaps-rich architectural details with vinyl siding; a homeowner painted his front steps "fire engine red;" and another old house owner chose a flat plate glass window  over a graceful bay window.

            "We have lovely details here in Chatham," Hale said. But the thorniest question of all is: "How do you protect them?

            "How can you regulate colors of a house --- and do you?" He noted that one possibility that stops short of employing a "czar" to oversee historic districts, as Cambridge does, is to offer guidelines.

            The Alliance distributed a brochure with about 10 guidelines for renovation and construction in Chatham; a larger-scope Chatham pattern book has been proposed, but a request for community preservation funds was turned down.

            For Hale, the bottom line is "not just preserving existing buildings but also preserving a way of looking at a building," he said.

            Architecture is all about magic, music and mystery.

5/8/08