Life on the Edge

In one of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems, he asks of us: "Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well." "Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves from the sloping threshold..." Well, Rilke is correct in that I never fail to find joy in looking at the timber details of this house where I dwell. Nearly every morning where I sit to have coffee and toast, I look up and see this juncture of beam and post and brace and am forever gazing at what seems both complex, yet simple. Like a poem, like a visual mantra, they lull and pull me into a cathedral of trees. Only now, after many readlings, am I am slowly beginning to decipher their lofty language. Someone once described the design of the house as "lumberjack zen"; another. "Buddhist ski lodge". The point I would like to make is that, in designing this house, nothing happened by accident, yet it was only by accident that it came into being. After seven years teaching design and over thirty years as a practicing designer/sculptor, I am convinced that the best outcomes are arrived at slowly, with patience and in stages. In the above photo, there was a five year wait before the first timber post went into the ground and the last rafter was notched into place. There was no way to foresee this final outcome of a steep pitched roof giving way to a narrow slit of windows over a very shallow roof all in the one room. No blank piece of paper could have completely sketched out these timber details. One section had to exist before the other could be fathomed. What I am trying to draw out is an analogy of sorts in how to live our lives. To try and plan out the perfect life, to try and wait until it is all figured out before embarking on one's path, is fruitless, stalls us from finding purpose and dooms us to do nothing. A comment I hear a lot is: "As soon as I find myself, I'll become an environmental activist." Or, "I can't love someone/something else until I love myself first". "Ha!", I say. Start defending the trees and you will be guided, step by step, to understanding who you are. By helping others, you will help yourself.

This morning I walked up the hill seen in yesterday's photo to take today's photo looking back towards the beach (not seen; off to the right) in order to show that there really are buildings hiding in a grove of trees. Like everyone, when I first bought Windgrove back in 1991, my first thought was to build my "dream" home on a section of land where I would have commanding views of the beach, be sheltered from southerly winds and have plenty of sun. This was certainly possible, but what I hadn't taken into account, and what most architects and home owners fail to take into account, is what visual impact this house would have on the landscape. In other words, would this house, or any house, enhance or degrade the visual appearance and character of Roaring Beach? In 1993, before building anything, I drove a converted Befored bus onto the land, tucked it into the trees and planned to live in it for a couple of years to "listen" to the land in order to best locate a future building site. Within a week, a Roaring Beach neighbor came up to me and said: "I can see your bus through the trees while I'm surfing and it doesn't look good". Although I was correct in wanting to listen to the land, what I had failed to "listen" to were the concerns of my community. From this point forward, their concerns were my concerns. I had every legal right to build whatever and wherever I wanted and my artistic ego certainly wanted to express itself out in the open, but the lesson quickly learned was that visual structures on private land, like noise itself, knows no boundaries. I had a moral obligation to respect the wishes of my community and to those visitors who came to Roaring Beach wanting to walk and swim in a relatively wild environment.

Located approximately in the middle of today's photo is a two thousand square foot house, an office, a toilet block, a sculpture studio, a 30 foot Bedford bus, two shipping containers and three water tanks. Having trouble finding them? This is because a very important design consideration at Windgrove is to build so that no one walking along or surfing at Roaring Beach will see any structures on the landscape. This isn't because I want privacy; rather, I feel that the uniqueness of Roaring Beach is that it is still a fairly wild landscape and that exposing any architecture, no matter how beautiful, would detract from this wild quality. By tucking the buildings at Windgrove into a grove of silver peppermint trees, I had to sacrifice the grand sweeping view, but over the years I have begun to appreciate the importance of viewing landscape through the "little windows" created by gaps in trees, etc.. It also gets me out of the house to check out the surf; a modicom of exercise that will always benefit one's physical and mental well being. Tomorrow will be a photo of the Windgrove buildings' exposed backside.