Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren
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or state of society in a broader sense. It may reflect social conditions, or express hopes for changing them. It may seek to articulate something about its users or builders or to evoke an emotional response in its viewers.
For example, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford (1867–1869, Edward Tuckerman Potter) was commissioned by Elizabeth Colt as a memorial to her husband, pistol manufacturer Samuel Colt, and three of their children who all predeceased her. Elizabeth chose many of the church’s decorative motifs herself, notably images and scriptural passages related to the theme of God’s comfort amid sorrow. The church’s south entry presents a different message. Known as “the Armorers’ Door,” it faces the Colt company housing (figure 1). Around the door, carvings of pistols and pistol parts intertwine with more conventional flowers and crosses in an unparalleled marriage of Gothic and industrial imagery, while a carved motto proclaims, “Whatsoever thou doest, do all to the Glory of God.” Clearly addressed to Colt employees, it is an injunction to hard work and a warning that they are answerable not merely to the boss but to God.1
FIGURE 1. Edward Tuckerman Potter, Church of the Good Shepherd, Hartford, 1867–1869. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation
Almost never is a work of architecture either purely science or purely art. Instead, function and structure and beauty and expressiveness intertwine to form a whole. Function may determine a structural system, for instance, in factories such as Hockanum Mill (place 33), which had to be strong to support heavy machinery. Structure, in turn, may determine aesthetics, as at Lover’s Leap Bridge in New Milford (place 12), or the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven (1961; figure 2), where architect Paul Rudolph chose arched forms to express the plastic nature of concrete. Art may enhance function, as the decoration of the Church of the Good Shepherd does. Expressiveness may be a function, as at the Groton Battle Monument (place 60), built to commemorate traumatic losses in war.
This leads to the heart of the definition of architecture: “making places.” What is a “place”? And what does it mean to “make” a place? As used here, a “place” is not merely some location on earth, but rather one that has some significance. It means something. This meaning can reside in the mind of the creator or in the mind of the beholder. For instance, the straightforward design of barns and factories can be meaningful to their owners and users for their functionality and perhaps as expressions of the importance of the work that they house. They also can have an aesthetic appeal that was not consciously intended by their builders, but that present-day viewers readily acknowledge (figure 3).
As a rule, “making” places involves human alteration: shaping, smoothing, digging, assembling, or organizing materials to create something new. But one of the places discussed in this book—Mohegan Hill (place 1)—points to a different approach, arising from a very different, non-European culture. For Native Americans, making a place could entail discovering the meaning inherent in the hill’s natural features rather than altering them.
As a definition of architecture, “making places” is very broad. It includes not only buildings (structures big enough for humans to move in), but also the interior design of those buildings, which may be independent of their actual construction and is more easily altered to suit changing tastes or needs. It includes landscapes, both those consciously designed, like parks and gardens and campuses, as well as those that emerge out of the function they serve, such as the Catlin Farm in Litchfield (place 24) or larger regional landscapes as in South Windsor (place 2). Places also can be structures that do not provide shelter, such as bridges or dams or roads (for instance, the Lover’s Leap Bridge, place 12). Finally, places include towns or neighborhoods or streets, or any other grouping where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (for example, downtown Norwich, place 41).
FIGURE 2. Paul Rudolph, Temple Street Garage, New Haven, 1961. Tom Zetterstrom
FIGURE 3. Charles Sheeler, On a Connecticut Theme #2 (Bucolic Landscape #2), 1958. New Britain Museum of American Art; copyright estate of Charles Sheeler
In today’s world we divide the work of creating places into a number of separate disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, planning, and interior design—but all these really are aspects of this single activity of making places. In practice, it is not always easy to draw firm dividing lines among these disciplines. Architects design landscape settings for their buildings. Landscape architects design habitable buildings or structures like dams or bridges. Engineers create buildings such as sports arenas or aircraft hangars. Interior design affects exteriors. Architects and landscape architects alike plan neighborhoods or large developments, and planners draw up architectural guidelines for buildings in their projects, if not the actual buildings.
Calling all this “architecture” might feel like co-opting the work of interior designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers in favor of architects. What is needed is a single, straightforward term that encompasses all those fields. “Placemaking” might work, although it seems to have become the property of tourism marketing boards. For the moment, with apologies to the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association, the American Society of Interior Designers, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, I’m sticking with “architecture.”2
Why is architecture important? I’ll focus on two brief points that grow out of my definition of architecture as making places: humans are place-based beings, and humans are beings that create.3
Humans have bodies, and those bodies occupy space. The nature of that space makes a difference to us: it can be comfortable or uncomfortable, it can further our activities or frustrate them, and it can ennoble us or debase us. How we design and build places, then, can affect the quality of our lives in them—sometimes in ways that are crucial to our well-being. See the description of the Connecticut Hospice (place 67), which was carefully designed to shelter people at a particularly difficult and traumatic time not only for patients but for their friends and families. Similarly, the urban renewal programs of the mid-twentieth century were grounded in the confidence that architecture could solve social ills, a belief that was tragically overstated, to the ongoing distress of cities like Hartford or New Haven (places 46, 99). Even that failure, though, demonstrates the power that places have to affect our lives. How we shape them matters.
Humans also have an innate need to create, to make things. Our reaction to place is not passive; we need to manipulate and alter the environment and materials we find about us. If a place is uncomfortable or hinders a desired activity, people try to make it more comfortable or more conducive to the activity. Or they may just try to make it more attractive.
Creating refers to more than artistic achievements like painting or sculpture. It might mean doing carpentry or setting up a classification system for a library or writing an instruction manual. Whether it involves physical or mental activity, it is still the remaking of one’s world. All humans do it, even the toddler who delightedly smears food on a wall and calls it “painting.” How we shape the physical world around us, how we create places, says much about what we want our world to be, how we want to live in it, and, in some cases, how we want others to think we live in it. Making places lies at the very heart of what it means to be human.
THE LAND
Connecticut architecture begins with the land, the given which its settlers first encountered, beginning with Native Americans who arrived more than ten thousand years ago and, later, the Europeans who started coming at the beginning