Architext: Hopper House

You ignore the sign that says private driveway. The narrow
sandy road winds through the pine trees. The road seems longer when you know
you’re trespassing. You see large houses set in the dark forests. You choose to
come at night thinking it’d be easier to hide in the cloak of darkness. But in reality,
the car lights make you more conspicuous at dusk. The trees start to thin
out and you can see the evening clouds. On the left, a turn off for a car. You
continue driving all the way to the end. You find the driveway is blocked by 2
wood rails forming an X. You park the car and step over the fence. It’s a
slight slope down to a garage. The motion detectors trigger the lights and you just
pray there are no security cameras.

At the end of the garage, a set of stairs emerge. You
ascend and notice the stairs gradually get steeper towards the top till you
reach the southeast corner of the building. There’s a strip of cobblestones at
the semi exposed foundation wall. Another short flight of stairs to the left leads to an elevated entry perch on the left corner of the building. From this vantage point, a miraculous uninterrupted view of the bay opens up. Bayberry shrubs flow down to the beach and horizon.

Walking around the house you see a large deck. To the north,
a really garish house. You recognize this blight on the landscape as the house
that’s been covered in the newspapers. In fact, the way you found Hopper’s studio
address was a news article concerning lawsuits filed against the neighbor. 15
years ago, a couple bought the Hopper property and built a 9000 sf monstrosity
next door. It was so large it destroyed the view and landscape. All the surrounding
neighbors wanted it demolished for violating various zoning statutes. For 6 years the
house sat vacant pending lawsuits. The spouse died, the widow sold it to the
current owners who promptly paid the town off $3 million to use the house plus an
additional $500,000 to clear the legal fines.

There is no vegetation to hide behind. You are completely
exposed on a hill. You notice the neighbor’s light is glowing bright and a car is parked
in their driveway. You start thinking they are looking at you wondering what
you’re doing on their property. Under the threat of surveillance you take
pictures as fast as you can. A panoramic video to preserve the glimpse. You start
making your way towards the entrance and walk briskly down the stair. You’re
now on borrowed time.

You start to think if the neighbors call the police, how
long would it take for the cops to drive down the roads and show up? With a single
lane driveway, an incoming cop car would block your exit. You make a K turn on the
dirt path. Your car is so long it overhangs the road and backs into bushes to
turn out. On your drive out, you start mentally preparing a litany of ignorant
excuses… “Sorry we didn’t know this was a private road… We got lost, we’re
trying to find the beach…. Is this the way to Provincetown?” Nothing happens.
Escaping without incident, you replay the scene in your mind.

You start thinking although Hopper’s house appeared to be a Cape
Cod style house in volume it was very well designed. The house was kinked slightly
non-parallel from the shore to create a dynamic tension between house and
landscape. By running the stair diagonally to the side of the house for entry, you think
Hopper is a genius for incorporating the sweeping views of the bay as part of the entry
sequence. It’s a simple house that makes total logical sense. A double
height painting studio that occupies over half the house’s volume with large windows
facing north, an entry through the kitchen on the southeast which receives
morning light, a bedroom facing sunset on the south west and sculptural chimney
at the center to tie all the elements together.

At home, you start reading random articles about the house to understand that
which was not to be seen. You read about an artist who painted in Hopper’s
cottage for 15 summers. He had befriended the owners that had bought one of his
paintings in a local gallery. The most exciting thing the artist provides are photos
of the inside of the house.

The wood flooring is striped in an alternating gray aged wood
and dark stained pattern. Moldings on the doors are classical. Expansive views
out of windows bring light to the entire house. A simple sculptural chimney
forms the center and hearth of the house. The artist mentions in his writing the
existence of an architectural model of Hopper’s house exhibited in Salisbury University,
Maryland. He describes the model as painstakingly made. You find out the
exhibition occurred sometime in 1993. Dejected, you think morbid thoughts like
all the curators who put the show together are probably dead and you’ll never
see the model. You start emailing random Hopper biographers who mention the
model, but they don’t have the common courtesy to write you back. You enter
stalker mode and start cold calling museums to see whether they have this model
in their collection or not. One museum you call says they indeed have it
in their collection and sends you some photos of it. Eureka you’ve struck gold.

The model is a valuable artifact. It’s like a fingerprint and a
window into a designer’s soul. The model is a fossil record from the design
process that reveals how the designer’s brain made decisions. Hopper’s model
is no different. There are architects who paint like Corbusier, Steven Holl,
and Zaha. But this is the first time you look at a painter who architected.
Hopper’s model is made of painted cardboard. His loose pencil marks and
notations are scribbled to indicate positions and appearances of doors. There
are no cut outs for the windows in the walls of the model. Instead, all the
windows are painted on the outside with a light blue color. On the interior,
the attic floor, chimney, stair, furniture, painting supplies, and walls are
detachable… allowing Hopper to insert interior elements into the house. The craftsmanship
is crude. You imagine the 6’-6” tall Hopper hunched over a small model, cutting
gluing and taping all these pieces of cardboard together. What’s as informative
about the model is what is left out. Hopper didn’t model the site, the garage
or the exterior stairs. These geometries and views which impressed you the most
are not even documented. What’s important to Hopper is the placement of doors
and walls. The sculptural chimney. For an artist who spent hours and hours
meditating on buildings and painting them… when it came to designing his own
house, these are the elements that he focused on in particular. Hopper’s design
process regarding architecture is like his painting: hands-on, iterative, and tactile.

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Looking at the model, you start making connections between the model, photos of
the house and his famous painting, Rooms by the Sea displayed in the Yale Art Gallery.
Initially titled “Alias the Jumping Off Place”, Edward Hopper’s Rooms by
the Sea was Hopper’s painted vision of his understanding of the world. Critic
Clement Greenberg stated, “Hopper happens to be a bad painter. But if he
were better, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist”.

Rooms by the Sea 1951

Sketch for the Painting

View of Room Painted

Model of the Room during design

The painting shows the corner of Hopper’s painting room opened to a view of
water. In painting, Hopper took liberties to move the setting sun to the
northwest, flip the door swing, remove the bayberry hill in the foreground. Hopper
wasn’t concerned with painting reality, he was concerned with distilling the
scene to the raw elements of light, color, water and architecture to provoke a feeling. Painted at
70 years old Hopper sketched the view prior to painting. Two decades prior, he had
modeled the house before building it. In 1933, with his wife’s inheritance money,
he designed the house they would summer in for the next 40 years of his life.  The Hoppers were frugal. Their walkup apartment
overlooking Washington square park in NYC had no heat and featured a communal
bathroom. The Hoppers allocated what little money they had on architecture and
their summer retreat.

Camel Hump. Past view from Hopper’s House

When the Hoppers arrived, Truro was completely denuded of
trees. The land was a barren wasteland. For 12,000 years the Wamponoag Indians roamed
the same Truro area in loincloth year round… living off fish and shellfish in
old growth forests. Within 200 years of their arrival the settlers cut all the trees
down for firewood and building materials leaving the hills to look like camel
humps. Into this scene you can imagine Hopper, the tall solitary figure walking
in desolation quite alienated like a figure in one of his paintings. Something in
this wasteland touched his soul and inspired him to paint. “Maybe I am not very
human – all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”