My
mother's house was designed for her as an elderly widow with her bedroom on the
ground floor, with no garage because she didn't drive, and for a maidservant
and the possibility of a nurse - and also as
appropriate for her beautiful furniture which I had
grown up with...
I
have written of the house as modern but also as referential/imageful - as a generic/iconic
house - as not striving to be original as architecture, but to be good. It connects
with ideas of mine of the time involving complexity and contradiction, of accommodation
to its particular Chestnut Hill suburban context, to aesthetic layering I
learned from the Villa Savoye, its pedimented roof configuration derived from
the Low House of Bristol, Rhode Island, its split
pediment derived from the upper pediment of Blenheim Palace,
and the duality-composition derived from the Casa Girasole
in Rome, and involving explicit applied elements of ornament.