Haystack’s Architecture: Vision & Legacy

I did not know Edward Larrabee Barnes well, but our paths crossed on several occasions. Not long before he died, he and Mary Barnes came to Haystack to meet with my architecture students from the University of New Mexico and they talked about the origins of the project, their conversation with the landscape and respect for the site, and the ability they found to produce innovative architecture by hand.

For this and a few other profound meetings with Edward Larrabee Barnes, I was fortunate. As a Maine architect, Haystack’s architecture sets a standard for timelessness and a standard of problem solving through inventive ways of seeing and building.

Edward encouraged, or perhaps admonished the students not to copy what he had done, but to respond with the same sensitivity by questioning what they were about and by considering the repercussions of what they would propose. He urged them to recognize this responsibility in combination with their capability for architectural expression.

The inspiration and the lessons learned from Barnes and his work at Haystack are the basis for this summer’s exhibition, Haystack’s Architecture: Vision and Legacy. The projects presented, by models, drawings, and photographs, represent an extraordinary group of architects with the ability to bring together the pragmatic and the poetic.

The architect Edward Larrabee Barnes is to me as the painter John Bauer was to the Swedes. The Swedes loved John Bauer and they believed that no one else knew how to paint a forest. The Swedish illustrator Tove Jansson wrote:

“I walk through a forest drawn by John Bauer. He was the one who knew how to make forests; no one has dared try since he was lost. And those who try, we despise them . . . to make the forest big enough; you leave out the crowns of the trees and the sky. You just make straight and very thin trunks that rise straight up. The ground is soft hillocks, they continue farther and farther off, smaller and smaller, until the forest becomes endless. There are stones, too, but you cannot see them. Moss has grown peacefully over them for a thousand years. If you step on the moss, you make a deep hole that doesn’t fill for a week. If you step on it again, you have made a hole that lasts forever. Step on it a third time, and the moss dies.

In a properly painted forest everything is roughly the same color, the moss, the tree trunks, and the branches; it is something gentle and serious, somewhere between grey and brown and green but there’s only a little bit of green.”

Carol A. Wilson FAIA
July 2011, Falmouth, Maine