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The Ancient of Days, by William Blake
"BY MEASURE WE LIVE"
The Motto of Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens
BUILDING TO LAST
The Whole is Greater than it 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. We 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 our projects, we 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 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 in the place 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 worshipped 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. We are here to help.
A Sense of Place
Real architecture is meant to create what architects call a sense of place, enriching our cities, by enlivening and anchoring the landscape it rests upon, creating homes and urban places that transcend the notion of pure property to become inspirations.
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, and 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 often inspire us to reflect.
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 our pure enjoyment alone. Using a carefully proportioned Doric colonnade in cut limestone, and open to the sky above, it contains perhaps one of the most beautiful baroque putti fountains. Visit it and you will have a keener concept of the place itself, and of the 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, aesthetic and even ethical life. 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 first awakening impression of architecture emerged when I was about six years old. My family moved to France, crossing what seemed to me to be an endless ocean of foreboding, aboard the SS United States, towards the Old World - which became for me the dawning of a New World. We disembarked at Calais and traveled past Paris deep into the sunny center of Southern France. I saw towns, villages, churches and homes of all kinds pass by the windows of our car or train. They had beauty and grace.
Thus began an intensive immersion into the art, architecture and life of France that would change my life.
My first task was to learn French. My parents set up our home in a crumbly old stone house in the Loire Valley, with over-scaled keystones, quoins and high-beamed ceilings. These were wonders to me. And the homes I came to know in those years had a very strong sense of being the possession of the grape arbors, apple orchards, and rolling pastures that surrounded them. It was a land of enchantment for a young American.
“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”
-- Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
Our old house stood some distance from a remote country road, not far from the small Renaissance chateau Azay-le-Rideau. In the night her floors would move. The wind in her eaves howled. I thought of the other people who had heard these sounds in this house - it was my first sense that a home might have a legacy that should be protected. Under those eaves and in that countryside I began to have reveries about architecture, grand spaces, dramatic events, and choices of long-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 can capture time in a special way. Here were the works of people long since turned to dust but who built these artifacts for future generations. For me..
Imagine my satisfaction, 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 wall looking back at the house, taking in the 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 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.
Need vs. Desire
Shelter fulfills basic practical need. But as human beings we act on motivations far deeper than need. Architecture is about those motivations, capturing imagination, spirit, promise, story – even love. Think of the Parthenon, the Holocaust Museum, and the Taj Mahal.
Underneath these motivations lies that eternal wellspring called desire. Capturing the deepest desires of our clients is fundamental to our vision for our work. Toward this end, we continually apply our professionalism and judgment to creating places that are meaningful and timeless, with great style.
Do you share these values? If so, make real what you desire – a life with timeless architecture!
NEXT STEPS
There is More Waiting for You . . .To see actual projects of Daniel Lee Architect, and to see a useful Reading List for further study on this subject, visit our flash site HERE.
