Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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framework is typical of Farrand’s work, and can be traced back to the influential English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. Farrand also added a naturalistic rock garden that wraps around the West Garden, as well as a secluded box parterre.
Since Eolia was a summer home, Farrand had the luxury of not worrying about what the gardens would look like off-season. But a winter visit reveals the bones of the landscape. Without the mitigating softness of the plantings, one can more easily perceive the formality of the layout, divided into roomlike spaces with different characters but tied together by axial views. One can note the transitions from one space to another, marked by gates or flights of steps. And one can experience the contrast between the sheltered parterre and the sunny, exposed rock garden open to the ocean breezes. This underlying structure gives the garden its strength as a place.
THE PLACE
EOLIA, EDWARD S. HARKNESS ESTATE
(Harkness Memorial State Park)
Buildings: 1902–1907, Lord and Hewlett. 1909–ca. 1924, additions and alterations, James Gamble Rogers. 1996–1998, restoration, Roger Clarke.
Landscape: ca. 1910, Brett and Hall. 1919–ca. 1935, Beatrix Farrand. 1992 and later, restoration.
275 Great Neck Road, Waterford. Open to the public.
FURTHER READING
Clouette, Bruce. “Eolia—Harkness Estate.” National Register of Historic Places, reference number 86003331, listed November 20, 1986.
Emmett, Alan. So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996.
FIGURE 63. Eolia, Waterford. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
4
RESHAPING THE LANDSCAPE
ROCKY RIVER HYDROELECTRIC STATION, NEW MILFORD
In the twentieth century, humans developed the ability to reshape their environment on an unprecedented scale. Road-building filled valleys and cut through mountains. Reclamation projects turned wetlands into dry ground. Irrigation transformed deserts into lush suburban lawns. Mighty rivers were dammed to create reservoirs to satisfy ever-increasing demands, particularly from growing cities, for water and electricity.
Around 1900, engineers found that electrical current could be transmitted for greater distances than had previously been considered feasible. Based on this discovery, businessman J. Henry Roraback consolidated a number of smaller electric companies into the Connecticut Light and Power Company (CL&P), which constructed a system of reservoirs and power plants to provide power to Connecticut cities.
The Housatonic River offered great potential for power generation, but seasonal fluctuations made it an unreliable resource. To address this problem, CL&P built the first major pumped-storage hydroelectric facility in the United States. Beginning in 1926, the company constructed a dam, 100 feet high and 952 feet long, across the Rocky River, a tributary of the Housatonic, to create Candlewood Lake. When the river is high, water is pumped up two hundred feet to the lake. When the river is low or demand is high, water is released from the lake and runs back down to turn turbines and generate power. Pumping water up actually uses more power than is produced on the return trip, but ensuring a reliable supply was worth it.
The powerhouse is a lofty brick structure, tall enough that the turbines can be lifted out of their housings for servicing. Full-length steel-sash windows emphasize the building’s height and provide natural light for monitoring the machinery within. Across the road the penstock, a giant tube fifteen feet in diameter, carries water up the hillside to the lake or allows it to flow back down to the power plant when needed. A seventy-six-foot vertical standpipe provides an escape in case of water surges.
Candlewood Lake flooded more than eight square miles in the towns of Danbury, Brookfield, New Fairfield, New Milford, and Sherman. It is eleven miles long and has more than sixty miles of shoreline. This was change on a massive scale. CL&P not only built an electric plant; it created a new landscape many miles long that has attracted development in the form of vacation cottages and year-round homes.
The lake also attracted a different mix of plants and animals and fish and birds, forming an ecosystem that in the following decades achieved its own stability. Yet the existence of this ecosystem depends on the human-made facility. For as solid as the dam seems to be, it also is fragile. Without ongoing human intervention in the form of maintenance, the water behind the dam, always seeking to run downhill, eventually will break through or flow around it. It will flood the towns downstream, leave lakefront property high and dry, and wipe out the Candlewood ecosystem. It is a useful reminder that whatever people build, they build in opposition to the laws of nature. In the end nature will win out.
THE PLACE
ROCKY RIVER HYDROELECTRIC STATION
1926–1929, UGI Contracting Company
200 Kent Road (U.S. Route 7), New Milford
FURTHER READING
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. “Rocky River Pumped-Storage Hydroelectric Station, New Milford, Connecticut.” National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark documentation, September 13, 1980.
FIGURE 64. Rocky River Hydroelectric Station. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
5
MODERNISM IN THE GARDEN
THE GLASS HOUSE, NEW CANAAN
One of the most famous buildings in the world, the Glass House is a poster child for the Modernist vision of a revolutionary new architecture that would dispense with all the inefficiencies and stylistic folderol of the past. Its designer and owner, Philip Johnson (1906–2005), was a leading evangelist of the new faith. Johnson was the curator, with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, of the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932, which introduced European Modernism to the United States. For his own house in New Canaan, Johnson took Modernist design to its logical extreme. He used modern industrial materials—steel and glass—in simple geometric forms, and created a universal space with no partitions save for the bathroom.
The Glass House doesn’t stand alone. It was built with a companion, the Brick (or Guest) House, and Johnson added other structures to his estate over the years. (Confusingly, “Glass House” can mean either the house or the estate as a whole.) He and his partner, David Whitney, would move from one to another, depending on what they were doing or what the weather was like. Together, these other buildings present a timeline of Johnson’s ever-changing enthusiasms: New Formalism in the pond pavilion, architecture as procession in the Sculpture Gallery, Postmodernism in the gate, Deconstructivism in the Visitors’ Center, and so on. Unlike the Glass House, they tend to have solid walls, small windows, and tightly controlled views to the outside.