The Griffin, Bridging Heaven and Earth

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DANIEL LEE ARCHITECT

FINE CUSTOM ARCHITECTURE

DESIGNED TO LAST

The Ancient of Days, by William Blake

"BY MEASURE WE LIVE"

-The Motto of Sir Edwin Lutyens

BUILDING TO LAST

A Whole Greater than its Parts

C.S. Lewis, the noted Christian author and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, once said,

"We do not want merely to see beauty... We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with that beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."

Architecture ultimately is not merely a technical métier. I believe great architecture pursues something beyond beauty by creating good buildings for good purposes, in context. The Eiffel Tower would look wrong in Brooklyn, the Sistine Chapel is more than a ceiling, and the Mona Lisa is not simply about a smile. They each came to life in a context that made their beautiful elements meaningful. But their creators transcended also those contexts by pursuing something deeper, to be united with the source of beauty‚ which is why we still appreciate them today.

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”  — Michelangelo

With my projects, I aim to do the same.

Great architecture renews our sense of nobility and dignity, reminds us of our humanity, refreshes our sense of purpose and can reveal parts of life — beauty, balance, the spiritual — that are too often hidden.

As my team and I work with our clients to visualize their projects, we become specific about materials, textures, details, shapes, and structures. But we are always pursuing larger ends that transcend the assemblage of parts. Materials communicate in concert with textures and shapes. Structures balance with details.

Taken together, in the context of history, of landscape and of human expectations, these elements can create a vibrant, enduring place. This is why technical proficiency is just the beginning of what makes a fine architect. What emerges from great design is not technical, it is soulful.

Timeless Building

Great buildings are beautiful. But timeless buildings go a step further – they are beautiful and built to last.

 

 

Notre Dame, Isle de la Cité, Paris -- Every stone of its construction was chosen, chiseled and fitted by hand to last, for generations, as testament to a priceless living faith. Sunlight that beams through her hand blown glass windows on a March afternoon traces a specific moment that will never be repeated, creating an almost tangible calm that is nevertheless present every day of the year for each worshipper, each tourist, whether young or old, male or female.

 

Notre Dame’s construction and the play of light across her high Nave, binds together the humans within. Even tourists outside share a common, inspiring experience. These experiences link all of us to the many generations of people who have passed near Notre Dame, or worshipping within her walls, during the nearly eight hundred years since the Rose Window was first completed. And so it will continue.

“…Men in those days had convictions, we moderns have opinions, and it requires something more than an opinion to build a gothic cathedral…”— H. Heine

Such timeless buildings embody truths we hold as essential to an understanding of our shared human experience.

People long to create kindred works, true and timeless, even today.

A Sense of Place

Real architecture is also meant to create what architects call a "sense of place" enriching our cities, by enlivening and anchoring the landscapes they rest upon, creating homes and urban places to transcend the notion of pure property to become our shared home.

Whether you experience a building from outside or within, it should be consciously designed to engage you or its occupant in a language that makes sense for that place in that time, yet for all time.

“Architecture aims at eternity.” – Sir Christopher Wren

This sense of place is possible because we bring to our experience of buildings a sensibility that is specific to the present and also universally human. When buildings have a sense of place, they can often lead us to deep reflection.

The East Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC., was created for such reflection, and is one of our nation’s finest architectural treasures. Designed by the great John Russell Pope, and commissioned by Andrew W. Mellon in 1935, the court is never used to display paintings or other works of art. It exists simply as a place of great beauty, and for pure enjoyment alone. Using a carefully proportioned Doric colonnade in cut limestone, and open to the sky above, it contains perhaps one of Washington's most beautiful baroque fountains. Visit it, and you will have a keener concept of the place itself and of "sense of place" as a goal in great architecture.

A Life with Architecture

When I was a teenager living in France, many years ago, I became close to an international executive with Procter & Gamble and his family. P & G graciously had provided my friend with a car and a home in the western suburbs of Paris.

I remember walking into their home for the first time as though I were there today. A grand home, built of limestone, it had a coolness to the foyer and a clean, clear smell. The ceiling was so high I couldn't help craning my head to look up at it. And the doors between rooms were tall, too, covered with mirrors that made the home seem larger and more luminous.

Straight ahead was a huge staircase (probably made of walnut, now that I'm remembering) that wrapped upwards to the second floor. Behind it was a window that looked out onto a garden that was lush without interfering with sunlight that washed into the foyer.

The house was full of other details burned into my memory: parquet floors, a white bear skin rug, delicately crafted wallpaper featuring Asian garden scenes. But the most magical element of all was how the garden was themed: Faux ruins lay around it, evoking history, collective memories of past empire, and wise words of great thinkers that might still echo if you just listened hard enough.

Architecture has become part of my spiritual and aesthetic life now. Just as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul captured the wisdom of an age in architecture, so wisdom is a partner today in my pursuit of responsive and responsible architectural design.

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.” -- Ernest Dimnet

My earliest conscious impression of architecture came when I was about six years old. My family had moved to France, crossing what seemed to me to be an endless ocean aboard the SS United States, towards the "Old World" - which became for me my true New World. We disembarked at Calais and traveled past Paris, deep into the sunny center of Southern France, which was to become my home. I saw towns, villages, churches and homes of all kinds pass by the windows of our car or train. They had a beauty and grace that was new for me.

Thus began an intensive immersion into the art, architecture and life of France and Europe, that would slowly change my life.

My first task as a boy was to learn French. My parents chose for our home a crumbly old stone house in the Loire Valley, with large-scaled keystones, quoins and high-beamed ceilings. Such were wonders to me.  The homes I came to know in that region had a very strong sense of being the possession of the grape arbors, orchards, and rolling pastures that framed them. It was a land with fascinations for this young American.

“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.” -- Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

 
Our old house stood some distance off from a narrow country road, just a mile or so from the classic Renaissance chateau Azay-le-Rideau. In the cool nights the floor boards of my bedroom would whisper. The wind in the eaves would moan softly.  I imagined the other people who had slept under these eaves in this house - it was my first sense that a house might have a story and was worth protecting. In that countryside house I began to have dreams about new architecture, with grand spaces, beautiful details - buildings of purposeful lasting consequence.

As a boy, adventuring about and touching old buildings, bridges, fences, chateau walls and stone cottage doors, I started to get the sense that what humans build is meant to endure. Here were the evidences of people long since turned to dust, who crafted these artifacts to serve them in their time gracefully, and to also endure for future generations to enjoy as an inheritance.  It could even be enjoyed by a stranger from a foreign land.

Imagine my satisfaction recently, then, when the phone rang on a recent Monday morning. A client and his wife had just spent the last forty five minutes in the garden we created from the home we had built for them. He said he had been sitting on a low wall looking back at the house, taking in its details: the sculpture that made up the pediment, the artistic and personal themes on the house's ornaments. The view, the home and that morning moment meant so much to him because it evoked his own memories of his long life journey, and of France, a country he loved and which he visited as often as he could.

As he told me about his special time in his garden, I was suddenly a teenager in the western suburbs of Paris walking into the home of my executive friend from Procter & Gamble, pushing at a tall door that swayed open onto my future all over again.

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