Gables, porches and bilaterally symmetrical fenestration are essential elements in Bosworth’s canon. They are used here at the Tobin House at Gig Harbor on Puget Sound, WA.
Bosworth designed a light-filled wood-paneled interior for the Norquist/Hays house on Orcas Island in Washington. The stairs lead
to a gallery on three sides of the living room.
For clients with a spectacular site on a prairie in eastern Washington, Thomas L. Bosworth designed a patina-friendly wood-sided house with a lighthouse-shaped outbuilding, which serves not only as a lookout, but also as a wine cellar and sleeping area.
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Coastal Consistency Building with Light in the Pacific Northwest: The Houses
of Thomas L. Bosworth, Architect
by Erika Rosenfeld
ORO editions, Philadelphia, PA; 2007
322 pp.; 500 color photographs and 200 b&w drawings; $75
ISBN 978-0977-46726-0
Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn
For clients privileged enough to own a few acres on coastlines or prairies in the state of Washington, the go-to architect for low-key, woodsy non-McMansions is Thomas L. Bosworth. At age 77, he runs a 40-year-old Seattle practice (since 2004 it has been a partnership with architect Steve Hoedemaker). Although really more of a giant promotional brochure, Building with Light in the Pacific Northwest: The Houses of Thomas L. Bosworth, Architect, explains how the Pacific Northwest designer has resisted the Microsoft-era temptations to overwhelm landscapes.
Bosworth has also resisted temptations to be a committed Modernist – the career track he set upon in the late 1950s as a star student at Yale’s architecture school. An Ohio native of Puritan ancestry, Bosworth came under the Yale spell of Paul Rudolph, Gordon Bunshaft and Louis Kahn. After graduation in 1960, Bosworth took a job with Eero Saarinen and helped design the TWA Terminal at New York City’s JFK Airport. In 1968, he moved to Seattle to head the architecture department at the University of Washington while designing a timber-columned, wood-clad campus for Pilchuck Glass School. Once settled in Washington, Bosworth seems to have never again put up a curtain wall where shingles or clapboard would do. He credits this permanent shift toward traditionalism partly to his father and grandfather, who had been professors and Classical scholars at Oberlin College in Ohio. As architectural theorist Max Jacobson (a co-author of Chris-topher Alexander’s 1977 A Pattern Language) points out in this volume’s introduction, Bosworth had grown up in an 1855 Greek Revival in Oberlin while “spending happy hours alone” in his family’s “library-storehouse of ancient art, architecture, and texts.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, along with East Coast Postmodernist counterparts like Robert Venturi and Robert A.M. Stern, Bosworth helped re-introduce gables, porches and bays to avant-garde patrons of country houses. But unlike Venturi and Stern, whose styles have kept evolving (and, arguably, sometimes veered into blandness or kitsch), Bosworth has kept his palette extraordinarily narrow.
Since the 1990s, he has designed almost nothing but houses – more than 60 so far. All but a handful are in Washington. They are typically gabled with incomplete cornice returns, dormered, fronted-in porches with capital-less square piers, and bilaterally symmetrical along spines or crisscrossing axes. (The book is plentifully stocked with site and floor plans, elevations and sections.) Windows generally reach the floors and supplementing that flood of natural light are clerestories, transoms, skylights and monitors. Bosworth’s commissions range greatly in scale, from cottages to compounds. His subtle variations on recurring themes make this book a page-turner.
He sometimes stretches porch steps the width of the house, and lets the stair edges trail off into the beach grass. He points room axes toward water views, of course, or more surprisingly toward hip-roofed folly outbuildings/guesthouses shaped like silos or lighthouses. To stimulate quick patinas on his structures, he applies weathering stain over cedar siding, and he’s been known to leave gaps between concrete paving slabs so that weeds can root. Clients have returned to his office again and again for additions, but even at multi-structure estates, Bosworth keeps interiors cozy. His cedar-lined or whitewashed rooms resemble thrifty ship cabins; he tucks bookcases under loft beds, transoms over closet doors and window seats beside fireplaces. His architecture, as Jacobson writes, is “free of any trace of fussiness, coyness, or the overweening presence of an egocentric personality.”
Bosworth’s own summations of his work, however, are less straightforward and illuminating than Jacobson’s. In the book’s skimpy five-page Q&A with the architect, conducted by rhetorician Erika Rosenfeld, he sounds a little like a cryptic Zen master: “Architectural design involves a creative tension between the metaphoric and the literal, between image and reality.” In the volume’s detailed descriptions of 17 houses, filling up to two-dozen pages apiece, Rosenfeld herself tends toward fuzziness. “His houses emerge from and fulfill his understanding of what architecture is and what it is for,” she writes, and reports that one Puget Sound cottage’s axis “serves as a metaphor for the mediating and translating role of design and human habitation.”
Completion dates of the 17 profiled projects span from 1981 to 2003. The book designers organized them, confusingly, by plan type rather than chronologically. The authors don’t analyze any changes in the architect’s thinking or practice over the decades, nor offer hindsight evaluations of his older designs, nor describe how subsequent owners have made fortunate or misguided alterations. For any readers not planning to actually hire Thomas L. Bosworth for their own country houses, this lush, static advertisement of a book best serves as a trove of timeless ideas for sunny, resourceful, vernacular-inspired architecture at spectacular sites.
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