The following article was published in the Home section of the Washington
Post last week. I skimmed it once and it didn't make much of an impression on
me, but then the house turned out to be less than a 1/4 mile away from the
house I was staying in, and we drove past it by chance. The house was
dreadful - an ill-proportioned lump of architectural cliches - so I went back
and read the article again. The subtle tone obscures the truly dreadful
things the architect said and did.
I regret that I can not post photos with this, but please remember that the
article discusses "art" that is 3rd rate design and 4th rate philosophy. That
contemporary architectural culture encourages this arrogance and blindness in
the name of "originality" is depressing. The fact that he is very successful
and a teacher makes it that much worse.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
CHARLES DAVENPORT, a seasoned law professor who goes by "Chuck," wants you to
get a good look at that mysterious, glowing, floor-to ceiling object in the
middle of his foyer. Ten feet high, four inches in diameter, cloaked in
silvery mesh and illuminated by two halogen bulbs, the object in question is
basically a vertical steel pole masquerading as a lamp.
The pole, which supports the second floor of Davenport's new architect
designed house in McLean, was originally destined to be wrapped in neon,
creating a showpiece out an awkward structural necessity. When the estimate
for neon proved out of sight, the architect, Travis L. Price AIA, dreamed up
the alternative scheme. It was Price who spent three hours personally misting
the pole with $100 worth of red, blue and gold automotive spray paint and who
designed the fin-shaped perforated metal cover, which his client tried in
vain to make. By the time a worker who finally completed the cover was paid,
the pole disguise had cost $1,000.
Davenport views the pole lamp as the perfect metaphor for his house. Like the
house, "it's arresting and different, unlike anything you've ever seen
before," he says. Like the house, it was also considerably more expensive
than expected. And, like the house, its design led to anguish out of all
proportion to its basic purpose. The Davenport experience is a sometimes
painful tale, pieced together in interviews over three and a half years, of a
couple who out to build a relatively simple three bedroom house and pool but
who became entangled in a nightmare of construction chaos and cost overruns
that caused them to liquidate their investments and deplete their savings.
Intending to spend $400,000, they watched the cost soar to nearly $600,000,
forcing Davenport to postpone his planned retirement by five years. And
although he and his wife, Gail, proclaim delight with their home now, the
indisputable fact is that their decision to build a grand design altered
their lives.
"We risked it all," says Chuck Davenport, who feels fortunate to have escaped
bankruptcy over a house a passing motorist once described as "a sinking
submarine."
If the project left scars on the owners, it was not without impact on the
architect. But Price's story is about the excitement of the creative process,
the thrill of finding clients willing to see poetry in architecture, and the
dynamic philosophy he describes as "sunshine, temples and highways." To this
day, Price defends his house and minimizes the difficulties encountered in
its creation. His concern now is that no one be dissuaded from taking another
bold leap into the crucible of contemporary architecture. "The worst part
about people like me is we kill ourselves to get good design built," says
Price.
Railing against the cookie cutter neo-Georgians and Victorians that are
taking over wealthy suburbs, he worries aloud, "I don't want to get stuck
doing McMansions .... My goal is to sculpt."
A First Encounter
It was in September, 1991, that I first met the Davenports. They were
building their dream house in McLean, the first residential example of
deconstructivist architecture I had seen in Washington. I was trying to find
out why, with few exceptions, innovative architecture wasn't being
commissioned in Washington. We met at the construction site for a progress
check. A photograph of architect Price at the site would later appear on the
Home section's cover, beneath the headline, "The Vision Thing." On that day,
the lap pool was in, a hole had been dug for the spa. The pebbly expanse of
exposed aggregate that would be the flooring for the ground level had been
poured, and a towering skeleton of slanted timbers rising from the front of
the lot hinted of bold geometries to come.
When completed, the timber framework would be covered in glass and stucco,
forming a 50-foot-long wedge aimed at the street. Inside would be a lap pool.
The living room and kitchen would fan out from the pool, their outer reaches
ending in a curved expanse of sliding glass patio doors. A three-story square
tower would house the home office, the triangular bedrooms and garage. Price
was jubilant, describing the design as "a collision of squares, semicircles
and irreverent angles," a central hub with the pool enclosure exploding from
the grounds." It was, he said, "the best thing I have ever done."
The Davenports, who had wanted a modern, low-maintenance home with an indoor
exercise pool, were more circumspect. It was the beginning of September, two
years into the project, and the 4,200-square-foot house should have been a
month or so from completion. Gazing down at the concrete, which had developed
jagged cracks, Chuck Davenport was saying, "It's a very imaginative house,
but I have an enormous number of questions about it. For a man my age, this
is high-risk stuff."
What he did not reveal until much later was that only the month before, he
had seriously considered dynamiting the site. Neither of us could have
imagined that it would be close to two more years before he could move in.
The Clients
Transplanted Californians with four grown children, the Davenports describe
themselves as comfortable but not wealthy. For them, $400,000 seemed plenty
to pay for a house. Gail, fit, energetic and a straight talker, is a contract
negotiator for a federal agency. She took 22 years' worth of magazine clips
to the first meeting with the architect. Chuck, a warm, can-do fellow with an
understated sense of humor, juggles two jobs. Three days a week, 30 weeks a
year, he teaches tax law in New Jersey at Rutgers University. For the
remainder, he's editor-in-chief for an Arlington-based publisher of tax
writings. The author of five books on tax law, he's the record keeper in the
family, the one who tracked expenses, amasses voluminous files and took
hundreds of snapshots documenting the progress, and lack thereof, of the
house. He has written an 80 page account of the project as a private
reminder." I've got 200 pages of notes," he says, "but it's my view, not
necessarily Gail 's."By his own bemused description, he and his wife are
"analytical to the point of paralysis."
The Davenports had interviewed 6 other architects before commissioning Price,
an established Takoma Park, Md., practitioner known for contemporary, energy
efficient houses. Price was working on plans for a passive solar house with
an indoor lap pool at the time. "It had been my dream to have an indoor
exercise pool," Gail Davenport recaps but we also thought an indoor body of
water would make the house homier and more interesting. They envisioned a
light-filled space with a rectangular shape. Price designed a dream house
with curves. "
"It was gorgeous - beyond our aspirations," Chuck Davenport recalls. "We had
not expected a pedestrian house, but here was Travis telling us that we could
have this unique house for the same budget as one less novel." Price
dismissed their worries that the house might be difficult and expensive to
build. They would economize with an inexpensive concrete floor, he said, and
walls with minimal finishing detail. There would be no marble in the
bathrooms. The architect's fee, a fixed 10 percent of the original
construction estimate, also was modest by Washington standards.
Today, Chuck Davenport has a theory about that rosy scenario. "As a lawyer,
I'm realistic about expectations. I have to tell clients, 'Things are worse
than you think.' It's possible architects can't do that. They're in a
position of helping people realize their dreams," he says. "To say, 'You have
a 50/50 chance to put that house up,' would be self-defeating."
The Architect
With his minimalist wardrobe and stylized haircut, Price, 46, looks as if he
could have just breezed in from Milan or Los Angeles. One of a handful of
architects pushing avant-garde design button-down Washington, he holds black
belts in judo, karate and aikido, drives a black jeep and quotes
philosophers, often in the original Greek. Price practiced with his then
wife, Jeanne, until they parted in 1991. The firm, now Travis Price
Architects, is considered a pioneer in the field of passive solar design.
Price has designed innovative, experimental, award-winning buildings as far
away as the Yukon. He has worked on institutional projects, urban designs
(including the master plan to revive downtown Takoma Park), dozens of
additions and more than 30 custom houses.
He has built a Japanese-style studio for a daughter of Paul Mellon, a
12,000-square-foot Nantucket beach house for a Procter & Gamble heir, a
synagogue in Laurel and currently is doing a $6 million underground library
project for St. John's College in Annapolis. The first modernist addition to
the historic 17th century campus, it will be a vision of glass, light,
crystal and curves. Price says, "To understand it, you have to know Ptolemy."
Last summer, 12 architecture students from Catholic University, where Price
is a visiting lecturer, experienced his brand of design excitement first-hand
in the Canadian wilderness, where they built two privies - one that looks
like a totem pole crowned by a flapping eagle's wing, the other with the
geometry of a crystal. The previous summer, the class produced a Zen
meditation temple made of logs and corrugated steel.
"It was the students' project, but it had Travis's mark on it," said Stanley
Hallet, the school's dean of architecture. "It was a powerful, almost
primordial piece."
On a spin down a winding back road to the Davenports' last spring, Price
raced from contextualism to aikido, which he studies with a Japanese master.
"It teaches you to engage when a problem is coming at you," he says. "It
affects how you take your clients' problems and turn them to advantage."
The House
The off-kilter, deconstructivist forms produced by gurus of the Los Angeles
architectural avant garde might make the Davenport project appear tame. But
in suburban Virginia, the first glimpse of the three-tiered, stepped-back
stucco structure with its raspberry chimney and monumental tilted wedge in
front is nothing short of startling. Approaching the house, which sits
between a Tudor and a modest white frame farmhouse, Price tossed off a
favorite pun, "Well, there's the priceless travesty." The pool enclosure, in
his eyes, appeared to be exploding from the ground, an example of the style
he now calls "emotional modernism."
With its angled rooms and soaring ceiling cutouts, the interior is as zingy
and provocative as the exterior. The entrance isn't in the front where you'd
expect. It's in back convenient to the garage and driveway, facing woods
instead of the busy street. The door, which is 9 feet tall, opens to the
foyer with its decorated pie lamp. To the left is the glassed in dining area,
to the right a spiral staircase. In front of that, intersected by the soaring
pool enclosure, is the kitchen and living room.
The second floor has a master bedroom suite, office and roof deck; the third
has two guest baths and bedrooms. Sliding glass doors, operable windows and
skylights are intended to reduce dependence on lighting and heating in
winter. The overhangs are for summer shade.
On a summer evening, in 1994, dappled light reflected from the sparkling pool
was dancing on the walls. The mood had lifted since the previous December,
when the pool smelled bad, the manufacturers' labels were still affixed to
unreachably high skylights and windows, and kitchen cabinet doors ordered a
year and a half earlier had not arrived. A sheet of perforated metal for the
lamp-to-be had lain on the floor, the holes smaller than Price had suggested,
and the Davenports' exhaustion and frustration were palpable. "It drives me
nuts that this place isn't clean and finished," Gail had said. "We've been
here six months and haven't washed the windows. We haven't been able to hire
anyone to do it."
Deep down, they were grateful for any house at all.
Building the House
Price sees his art architecture as symbolic of sunshine, temples and
highways, elements of light, serenity and drama his clients seem to crave.
The Davenports' house is a reflection of these forces, "an open, honest
expression, and they were brave enough to let the outside show it. Why build
a plain old rectangle if a client wants sunshine?" he asks. "Why not really
open the house with circles and arcs that capture the morning and afternoon
sun? If the client wants to swim, why not create a beautiful big room and as
long as you are pushing it into the house, make the space as exciting as you
can?"
In retrospect, it might seem that one very good reason not to make the space
so exciting is that it might be exceptionally difficult to build. But no one
is certain.
"It may have an unconventional geometry and image to it, but it didn't
require construction techniques that were out of the ordinary," Price
insists.
Steven Slaght, the Fairfax County building inspector assigned to the project,
agrees. "It was 'different' from your standard wood-frame house, but there
are many competent contractors that could tackle it."
But the director of the county's division of inspection services, Sophie
Zager, offers a caveat, "Unlike a simple box, which carpenters can do with
their eyes closed she says, unconventional geometry makes it "more difficult
for them to follow plans and consequently offers more opportunities to mess
up."
[The original contractor, whose bid was less than one-half of the high bid,
quit the job because of difficulties of construction and the number of
changes]...
A Second Start
. . . Home for the summer from teaching at Rutgers, Chuck Davenport proceeded
to interview prospective contractors. "Guys came, Poked, scratched their
heads and walked out," he says. With the exception of one, who left a
starting bid of $175,000, no one else made an offer. He says nothing he has
ever done, including publishing one of his own books, equaled the desperation
he felt when he realized he would have to pick up Hundleys job himself if he
wanted a house. Today, he says, "the time lost from work was as much of a
downer" as the extra costs. Wearing the general contractor's hat was so
consuming, the manuscript of his fifth book had to be consigned to a
colleague for completion. . . .
Pointing Fingers
Who had been minding the store? Hundley says he was on site every day during
the tune he was working on the project. Price, in accordance with his
contract, made weekly visits, certified that the contractor's work had been
performed, fielded questions and approved payments. With experts apparently
on the job, the Davenports still wonder why mistakes weren't detected.
AIA literature touts the architect as "the one professional who has the
education, training, experience and vision to guide you through the entire
design and construction process..." Price says clients' expectations are
sometimes too great. "They expect the architect to stand there and hammer the
nails."
Take the roof, for example. 'You see a done roof and a bonded roofer, and
that's about as you can go," he says. "You can't stand around to see if he
used the proper torch."
Asked if he would know a plumbing T-Joint from a Y, another prominent
architect, who was not involved in any way with the Davenports' house,
responded "no." And the contract says I don t have to."
The standard "basic services" contract, which the Davenports bought, AIA
Document B14 1, spells out the architect's duties and, indirectly those of
the contractor.
Unless otherwise specified and contracted for, the architect is defined as an
"observer," absolved from making "exhaustive," "continuous" or detailed
on-site inspections to check the quality or quantity of the work unless "more
extensive representation is required."
Legally, the contractor is responsible for his employees and
subcontractors. . . .
In the autumn of 1992, when the school year resumed, Chuck Davenport hired
his own on-site representative, Penny Etnyre, a detail-oriented former
neighbor, to supervise until Thanksgiving break. From New Jersey, he sent
exhaustive to-do lists to Etnyre and his own family members, called in daily
and, when in town, rolled up his sleeves and pitched in. After November, Gail
Davenport and their son Lane took over from Etnyre. Whether from relief or
sheer fatigue, Chuck says he almost cried when he learned he'd passed
close-in on the last day of November. But it still took until May 29,1993 ,
to get through the final, residential-use permit inspection.
"I'm sure he thought the road would never end," says a not-unsympathetic
Slaght.
Post last week. I skimmed it once and it didn't make much of an impression on
me, but then the house turned out to be less than a 1/4 mile away from the
house I was staying in, and we drove past it by chance. The house was
dreadful - an ill-proportioned lump of architectural cliches - so I went back
and read the article again. The subtle tone obscures the truly dreadful
things the architect said and did.
I regret that I can not post photos with this, but please remember that the
article discusses "art" that is 3rd rate design and 4th rate philosophy. That
contemporary architectural culture encourages this arrogance and blindness in
the name of "originality" is depressing. The fact that he is very successful
and a teacher makes it that much worse.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
CHARLES DAVENPORT, a seasoned law professor who goes by "Chuck," wants you to
get a good look at that mysterious, glowing, floor-to ceiling object in the
middle of his foyer. Ten feet high, four inches in diameter, cloaked in
silvery mesh and illuminated by two halogen bulbs, the object in question is
basically a vertical steel pole masquerading as a lamp.
The pole, which supports the second floor of Davenport's new architect
designed house in McLean, was originally destined to be wrapped in neon,
creating a showpiece out an awkward structural necessity. When the estimate
for neon proved out of sight, the architect, Travis L. Price AIA, dreamed up
the alternative scheme. It was Price who spent three hours personally misting
the pole with $100 worth of red, blue and gold automotive spray paint and who
designed the fin-shaped perforated metal cover, which his client tried in
vain to make. By the time a worker who finally completed the cover was paid,
the pole disguise had cost $1,000.
Davenport views the pole lamp as the perfect metaphor for his house. Like the
house, "it's arresting and different, unlike anything you've ever seen
before," he says. Like the house, it was also considerably more expensive
than expected. And, like the house, its design led to anguish out of all
proportion to its basic purpose. The Davenport experience is a sometimes
painful tale, pieced together in interviews over three and a half years, of a
couple who out to build a relatively simple three bedroom house and pool but
who became entangled in a nightmare of construction chaos and cost overruns
that caused them to liquidate their investments and deplete their savings.
Intending to spend $400,000, they watched the cost soar to nearly $600,000,
forcing Davenport to postpone his planned retirement by five years. And
although he and his wife, Gail, proclaim delight with their home now, the
indisputable fact is that their decision to build a grand design altered
their lives.
"We risked it all," says Chuck Davenport, who feels fortunate to have escaped
bankruptcy over a house a passing motorist once described as "a sinking
submarine."
If the project left scars on the owners, it was not without impact on the
architect. But Price's story is about the excitement of the creative process,
the thrill of finding clients willing to see poetry in architecture, and the
dynamic philosophy he describes as "sunshine, temples and highways." To this
day, Price defends his house and minimizes the difficulties encountered in
its creation. His concern now is that no one be dissuaded from taking another
bold leap into the crucible of contemporary architecture. "The worst part
about people like me is we kill ourselves to get good design built," says
Price.
Railing against the cookie cutter neo-Georgians and Victorians that are
taking over wealthy suburbs, he worries aloud, "I don't want to get stuck
doing McMansions .... My goal is to sculpt."
A First Encounter
It was in September, 1991, that I first met the Davenports. They were
building their dream house in McLean, the first residential example of
deconstructivist architecture I had seen in Washington. I was trying to find
out why, with few exceptions, innovative architecture wasn't being
commissioned in Washington. We met at the construction site for a progress
check. A photograph of architect Price at the site would later appear on the
Home section's cover, beneath the headline, "The Vision Thing." On that day,
the lap pool was in, a hole had been dug for the spa. The pebbly expanse of
exposed aggregate that would be the flooring for the ground level had been
poured, and a towering skeleton of slanted timbers rising from the front of
the lot hinted of bold geometries to come.
When completed, the timber framework would be covered in glass and stucco,
forming a 50-foot-long wedge aimed at the street. Inside would be a lap pool.
The living room and kitchen would fan out from the pool, their outer reaches
ending in a curved expanse of sliding glass patio doors. A three-story square
tower would house the home office, the triangular bedrooms and garage. Price
was jubilant, describing the design as "a collision of squares, semicircles
and irreverent angles," a central hub with the pool enclosure exploding from
the grounds." It was, he said, "the best thing I have ever done."
The Davenports, who had wanted a modern, low-maintenance home with an indoor
exercise pool, were more circumspect. It was the beginning of September, two
years into the project, and the 4,200-square-foot house should have been a
month or so from completion. Gazing down at the concrete, which had developed
jagged cracks, Chuck Davenport was saying, "It's a very imaginative house,
but I have an enormous number of questions about it. For a man my age, this
is high-risk stuff."
What he did not reveal until much later was that only the month before, he
had seriously considered dynamiting the site. Neither of us could have
imagined that it would be close to two more years before he could move in.
The Clients
Transplanted Californians with four grown children, the Davenports describe
themselves as comfortable but not wealthy. For them, $400,000 seemed plenty
to pay for a house. Gail, fit, energetic and a straight talker, is a contract
negotiator for a federal agency. She took 22 years' worth of magazine clips
to the first meeting with the architect. Chuck, a warm, can-do fellow with an
understated sense of humor, juggles two jobs. Three days a week, 30 weeks a
year, he teaches tax law in New Jersey at Rutgers University. For the
remainder, he's editor-in-chief for an Arlington-based publisher of tax
writings. The author of five books on tax law, he's the record keeper in the
family, the one who tracked expenses, amasses voluminous files and took
hundreds of snapshots documenting the progress, and lack thereof, of the
house. He has written an 80 page account of the project as a private
reminder." I've got 200 pages of notes," he says, "but it's my view, not
necessarily Gail 's."By his own bemused description, he and his wife are
"analytical to the point of paralysis."
The Davenports had interviewed 6 other architects before commissioning Price,
an established Takoma Park, Md., practitioner known for contemporary, energy
efficient houses. Price was working on plans for a passive solar house with
an indoor lap pool at the time. "It had been my dream to have an indoor
exercise pool," Gail Davenport recaps but we also thought an indoor body of
water would make the house homier and more interesting. They envisioned a
light-filled space with a rectangular shape. Price designed a dream house
with curves. "
"It was gorgeous - beyond our aspirations," Chuck Davenport recalls. "We had
not expected a pedestrian house, but here was Travis telling us that we could
have this unique house for the same budget as one less novel." Price
dismissed their worries that the house might be difficult and expensive to
build. They would economize with an inexpensive concrete floor, he said, and
walls with minimal finishing detail. There would be no marble in the
bathrooms. The architect's fee, a fixed 10 percent of the original
construction estimate, also was modest by Washington standards.
Today, Chuck Davenport has a theory about that rosy scenario. "As a lawyer,
I'm realistic about expectations. I have to tell clients, 'Things are worse
than you think.' It's possible architects can't do that. They're in a
position of helping people realize their dreams," he says. "To say, 'You have
a 50/50 chance to put that house up,' would be self-defeating."
The Architect
With his minimalist wardrobe and stylized haircut, Price, 46, looks as if he
could have just breezed in from Milan or Los Angeles. One of a handful of
architects pushing avant-garde design button-down Washington, he holds black
belts in judo, karate and aikido, drives a black jeep and quotes
philosophers, often in the original Greek. Price practiced with his then
wife, Jeanne, until they parted in 1991. The firm, now Travis Price
Architects, is considered a pioneer in the field of passive solar design.
Price has designed innovative, experimental, award-winning buildings as far
away as the Yukon. He has worked on institutional projects, urban designs
(including the master plan to revive downtown Takoma Park), dozens of
additions and more than 30 custom houses.
He has built a Japanese-style studio for a daughter of Paul Mellon, a
12,000-square-foot Nantucket beach house for a Procter & Gamble heir, a
synagogue in Laurel and currently is doing a $6 million underground library
project for St. John's College in Annapolis. The first modernist addition to
the historic 17th century campus, it will be a vision of glass, light,
crystal and curves. Price says, "To understand it, you have to know Ptolemy."
Last summer, 12 architecture students from Catholic University, where Price
is a visiting lecturer, experienced his brand of design excitement first-hand
in the Canadian wilderness, where they built two privies - one that looks
like a totem pole crowned by a flapping eagle's wing, the other with the
geometry of a crystal. The previous summer, the class produced a Zen
meditation temple made of logs and corrugated steel.
"It was the students' project, but it had Travis's mark on it," said Stanley
Hallet, the school's dean of architecture. "It was a powerful, almost
primordial piece."
On a spin down a winding back road to the Davenports' last spring, Price
raced from contextualism to aikido, which he studies with a Japanese master.
"It teaches you to engage when a problem is coming at you," he says. "It
affects how you take your clients' problems and turn them to advantage."
The House
The off-kilter, deconstructivist forms produced by gurus of the Los Angeles
architectural avant garde might make the Davenport project appear tame. But
in suburban Virginia, the first glimpse of the three-tiered, stepped-back
stucco structure with its raspberry chimney and monumental tilted wedge in
front is nothing short of startling. Approaching the house, which sits
between a Tudor and a modest white frame farmhouse, Price tossed off a
favorite pun, "Well, there's the priceless travesty." The pool enclosure, in
his eyes, appeared to be exploding from the ground, an example of the style
he now calls "emotional modernism."
With its angled rooms and soaring ceiling cutouts, the interior is as zingy
and provocative as the exterior. The entrance isn't in the front where you'd
expect. It's in back convenient to the garage and driveway, facing woods
instead of the busy street. The door, which is 9 feet tall, opens to the
foyer with its decorated pie lamp. To the left is the glassed in dining area,
to the right a spiral staircase. In front of that, intersected by the soaring
pool enclosure, is the kitchen and living room.
The second floor has a master bedroom suite, office and roof deck; the third
has two guest baths and bedrooms. Sliding glass doors, operable windows and
skylights are intended to reduce dependence on lighting and heating in
winter. The overhangs are for summer shade.
On a summer evening, in 1994, dappled light reflected from the sparkling pool
was dancing on the walls. The mood had lifted since the previous December,
when the pool smelled bad, the manufacturers' labels were still affixed to
unreachably high skylights and windows, and kitchen cabinet doors ordered a
year and a half earlier had not arrived. A sheet of perforated metal for the
lamp-to-be had lain on the floor, the holes smaller than Price had suggested,
and the Davenports' exhaustion and frustration were palpable. "It drives me
nuts that this place isn't clean and finished," Gail had said. "We've been
here six months and haven't washed the windows. We haven't been able to hire
anyone to do it."
Deep down, they were grateful for any house at all.
Building the House
Price sees his art architecture as symbolic of sunshine, temples and
highways, elements of light, serenity and drama his clients seem to crave.
The Davenports' house is a reflection of these forces, "an open, honest
expression, and they were brave enough to let the outside show it. Why build
a plain old rectangle if a client wants sunshine?" he asks. "Why not really
open the house with circles and arcs that capture the morning and afternoon
sun? If the client wants to swim, why not create a beautiful big room and as
long as you are pushing it into the house, make the space as exciting as you
can?"
In retrospect, it might seem that one very good reason not to make the space
so exciting is that it might be exceptionally difficult to build. But no one
is certain.
"It may have an unconventional geometry and image to it, but it didn't
require construction techniques that were out of the ordinary," Price
insists.
Steven Slaght, the Fairfax County building inspector assigned to the project,
agrees. "It was 'different' from your standard wood-frame house, but there
are many competent contractors that could tackle it."
But the director of the county's division of inspection services, Sophie
Zager, offers a caveat, "Unlike a simple box, which carpenters can do with
their eyes closed she says, unconventional geometry makes it "more difficult
for them to follow plans and consequently offers more opportunities to mess
up."
[The original contractor, whose bid was less than one-half of the high bid,
quit the job because of difficulties of construction and the number of
changes]...
A Second Start
. . . Home for the summer from teaching at Rutgers, Chuck Davenport proceeded
to interview prospective contractors. "Guys came, Poked, scratched their
heads and walked out," he says. With the exception of one, who left a
starting bid of $175,000, no one else made an offer. He says nothing he has
ever done, including publishing one of his own books, equaled the desperation
he felt when he realized he would have to pick up Hundleys job himself if he
wanted a house. Today, he says, "the time lost from work was as much of a
downer" as the extra costs. Wearing the general contractor's hat was so
consuming, the manuscript of his fifth book had to be consigned to a
colleague for completion. . . .
Pointing Fingers
Who had been minding the store? Hundley says he was on site every day during
the tune he was working on the project. Price, in accordance with his
contract, made weekly visits, certified that the contractor's work had been
performed, fielded questions and approved payments. With experts apparently
on the job, the Davenports still wonder why mistakes weren't detected.
AIA literature touts the architect as "the one professional who has the
education, training, experience and vision to guide you through the entire
design and construction process..." Price says clients' expectations are
sometimes too great. "They expect the architect to stand there and hammer the
nails."
Take the roof, for example. 'You see a done roof and a bonded roofer, and
that's about as you can go," he says. "You can't stand around to see if he
used the proper torch."
Asked if he would know a plumbing T-Joint from a Y, another prominent
architect, who was not involved in any way with the Davenports' house,
responded "no." And the contract says I don t have to."
The standard "basic services" contract, which the Davenports bought, AIA
Document B14 1, spells out the architect's duties and, indirectly those of
the contractor.
Unless otherwise specified and contracted for, the architect is defined as an
"observer," absolved from making "exhaustive," "continuous" or detailed
on-site inspections to check the quality or quantity of the work unless "more
extensive representation is required."
Legally, the contractor is responsible for his employees and
subcontractors. . . .
In the autumn of 1992, when the school year resumed, Chuck Davenport hired
his own on-site representative, Penny Etnyre, a detail-oriented former
neighbor, to supervise until Thanksgiving break. From New Jersey, he sent
exhaustive to-do lists to Etnyre and his own family members, called in daily
and, when in town, rolled up his sleeves and pitched in. After November, Gail
Davenport and their son Lane took over from Etnyre. Whether from relief or
sheer fatigue, Chuck says he almost cried when he learned he'd passed
close-in on the last day of November. But it still took until May 29,1993 ,
to get through the final, residential-use permit inspection.
"I'm sure he thought the road would never end," says a not-unsympathetic
Slaght.