This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here [img_assist|nid=1295|title=Robert Wood's Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=400] A few weeks ago, Nancy and I spent time down by the Mohawk River in the oldest part of this city, the Stockade, that section of the city once surrounded by a stockade fence to protect the settlers from the outside world. We were helping out at the annual Stockade Walkabout, a fundraiser for the neighborhood association. Afterwards, we attended a couple of parties for people involved in the Walkabout, including one at the home of Robert Woods, who was finishing up the remodel of his old house in this oldest section of Schenectady. Almost the second we entered the house, I noticed that the walls, upstairs and down, were decorated with framed verbo-visual collages of striking constructivist design. That night, I asked Robert if I could talk to him about these in more detail and write about them in this space. And that I will do. But I’ve decided that I need to break this story into pieces, so I’ll begin with the story of Robert’s house, which is all part of the same narrative, the same tendency. [img_assist|nid=1296|title=Cherry Staircase Robert Woods' Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] Robert is an architect who has spent much time in Europe studying buildings, learning design, thinking about esthetics. He currently works as an architect for the Department of Health, where he reviews designs for hospitals. I assume that that work is primarily focused on functionality, practicality, rationality. What also interests Robert, beyond these necessary issues, is beauty. He worries that too many people worry too hard about size, cherishing largeness over design, measuring their worth in square footage rather than beauty. [img_assist|nid=1297|title=Cherry Staircase Top Floor Robert Woods' Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=400] When Robert bought this house of his, it was rundown and in need of repair, so he gutted the building and started afresh, reimagining the space. This is the third house he’s done this for. He recreates a house, and then he moves to a new house to do it all over again. It seems to me a true art: taking something that has worn itself almost away and bringing it back as something more than it was before. The central beauty that Robert has included in this house is a cherry staircase that climbs to a landing, turns, and climbs again. The cherry newel posts have a geometric feel to them: their heads are round, but the posts themselves are cut into diamond shapes. And these diamond shapes echo the diamonds created by the flat stair rails at the top and bottom of the stairs. This simple repeated shape ties the floors together, and the staircase itself tells us that care has been taken with this house. (Remember the staircase and the shapes. Eventually, we’ll see how they remind us of the shapes in his collages.) [img_assist|nid=1298|title=Kitchen (2) Robert Woods' Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] I’m a cook. I like to slice food apart, apply heat to it over time, and rub herbs between my hands before allowing their pieces to tumble into a pot. I like the smells of food cooking. I enjoy how my years of practice have taught me to understand foods, to know when to turn off the heat, to know how to disassemble certain foods well. I like the feel of a knife running clean through a stalk of celery or a lamb chop. The kitchen is my home. [img_assist|nid=1299|title=Kitchen (3) Robert Woods' Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] This makes a kitchen important to me as a room. I like a kitchen to be utilitarian but beautiful, and certainly my kitchen is the most beautiful room in my house, suffused with wood and graced with long counters. Robert’s kitchen is beautifully utilitarian. It is an open space that surrounds the cook with work space. It is compact, allowing the cook to move from place to place efficiently. And it is bright but filled with the color of wood and stainless steel. It is a graceful collage of shape and color. Just as Robert’s house is a place for art, his own and that of Corbusier, Klee,* and others. As soon as you enter the house there is a small alcove-like coat room to the left (along with a restroom). The entryway frames the framed collages of Robert’s that he has arranged on the wall. This space did not exist before Robert; he decided this demising was necessary to make the space more useful but also beautiful. Note that the doorway is an arch, which replicates the existing archway into the front sitting room. But rather than simply an arch, this is an archway that surrounds a door frame to a door that doesn’t exist, thus this entryway incorporates the past in the form of the existing archway and the present in the form of the door almost like all the other doors in the house. This is two entryways: one that moves us into a new room, and one that moves us into a new space of art and contemplation. [img_assist|nid=1300|title=Pine Floor Robert Woods' Home|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] Finally, look at Robert’s floors. I saw them and wondered if they were pine, so I mentioned to Robert that they looked like pine, which is what he then said they were. Pine, I thought, is too soft a wood to be used as flooring. Everything I have made of pine has been horribly distressed by the natural misuse I put things through. Robert said pine was not that hard a wood, but that he’s gentle on floors. A careful man who lives in the world lightly, Robert creates delicate textures of light and shadow, color and shape. And he creates verbo-visual collages that are remarkably architectural in feel. More about those collages tomorrow. They will show how a life is always of a piece, how an architect is always an architect, how our past follows us like a wedding train, how our future is just another version of that past—something Robert will prove soon. Next weekend, he moves to a new rundown house in the Stockade. My friends who have been in it say it needs enormous amounts of work. So Robert will live in some small corner of a room while he disassembles the fourth house that he will eventually turn into another beautiful piece of functional art. _____ * Keep in mind that the favorite artist of visual poets is Paul Klee. (Well, at least he should be.) ecr. l’inf.