2011 May Nashville Arts Magazine

NashvilleArts.com | May 2O11 | 9

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PuBLISHeR'S NOTe

One of my favorite slogans is “art knows no boundaries.” I like the idea that art is not contained by geography and that through it concepts can be shared by people regardless of where they find themselves on the planet. So, when we sat down to pick the articles for this month’s issue, we were delighted to find the Nashville connection to stories from England, Bhutan, Berlin, Nepal, China, and Africa. Nashville’s art influ-ence is clearly spreading around the world.

Kudos this month to John Hoomes, artistic director for the Nashville Opera, for his spectacular production of Carmen. It just doesn’t get much better than this, and it was reassuring to see a packed house at Andrew Jackson Hall at TPAC.

An interesting documentary was recently sent to our offices. The Art of the Steal traces the history of the Barnes collection of Post-Impressionist paintings and the power struggle to control the collection after Dr. Albert Barnes’ death. The collection that includes 181 (yes, you read right, 181!) Renoirs, 69 Matisses, and 46 Picassos is housed in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, and is valued in the billions of dollars. It is a grip-ping story of intrigue, mystery, and political wrangling over the largest private art collection in the world. Catch this if you can.

There are many incredible art exhibits going on in area galleries this month. One that I particularly enjoyed is Patricia Bellan-Gillen’s work at Tinney Contemporary. Her giant storytelling canvases are powerful yet whimsical. The show runs through May 13. Please be sure to visit this and other great exhibits around town.

Paul Polycarpou

editor in Chief

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14Cheekwood’s Garden Railroad exhibitOn April 9, a new exhibition opened at Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art featuring the work of Paul Busse and the Applied Imagination team from Alexandria, Kentucky. The exhibit features miniaturized replications of historic Tennessee sites, such as Graceland, the Hermitage, and Belle Meade Plantation, in Cheekwood’s garden rail-road. Each model is made out of natural materials and stands between three and four feet in height. The show will run until December 31, 2011.

Previously, Busse and the master craftspeople from Applied Imagination have created unique pieces for the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas and the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. This exhibit will surely capti-vate the imagination of anyone interested in local Tennessee history, trains, or garden art. On May 7, all children 17 and under can enjoy free admission to the exhibition in honor of National Train Day.Visit cheekwood.org or www.appliedimagination.biz for more information.

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LeQuire GalleryLeQuire Gallery, known for showcasing the work of nationally acclaimed painters and sculptors, opened a new location in Green Hills on Hillsboro Pike. Each month the gallery features a different artist with a reception and workshop. Just in time for Mother’s Day, LeQuire Green Hills offers a variety of fine gifts by recognized artisans, including unique jewelry that would make the perfect present for Mom. A trunk show of master jeweler Julie Shaw will be held Friday and Saturday, May 6 and 7, from 12 to 5 p.m. leQuire Gallery Green hills is located at 3900 hillsboro Pike, suite # 34,

Nashville, tennessee 37215. www.lequiregallery.com


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20Royal Icing Custom CakesNestled between Cummins Station and Mercy Lounge lies the new Royal Icing Custom Cakes, which combines baking with sculpture and painting. Carolyn King-Pennekamp and her sister, Jeanne, decided a year ago, after the loss of their mother, to combines their strengths and move forward by creating something no one has quite seen before. Jeanne had an obvious flair for baking, and Carolyn had a passion for sculpting and creating art from anything she could get her hands on. Fifteen years ago she amazed herself as she sculpted a Ninja Turtle cake for her 5-year-old son, and her love for the newly found medium began to grow. After running into local artist Rob Hendon at a charity event, her wheels began to turn, and an exciting new partnership was created. Carolyn got to work combining materials in the kitchen and invented her very own icing that not only can be painted in the same manner as acrylic, but even looks like acrylic paint on the finished product. The only difference is that it is completely edible.

Now the trio runs a bakery that also looks and functions like an art gallery and studio. Jeanne uses family recipes with all-natural flavorings and bakes delightfully sugary and buttery concoctions that serve as Carolyn’s sculpting block. From there, Carolyn fits together sections of cakes and chisels them into large sculptures that are commissioned from her clients’ imaginations. Her “gallery” displays dogs, purses, guitars, anacondas—you name it. Her studio is set up in the middle of the room so that clients can come and watch her throughout her process, asking questions and feeling involved with the masterpiece. Final form in place, she and Rob Hendon add the color and texture to the blank canvas with her special edible, acrylic-like icing. As a bonus, clients can also purchase a matching Rob Hendon painting. This is very popular among brides, as they can keep a special memento that reflects the concept and colors of the cake, a beauty that is often forgotten after it is eaten at a reception. Savory treats are available each day in the bakery or by free delivery—the menu changing daily with Jeanne’s culinary whims. However, all cakes are custom made to order.

royal icing is located at 822 Palmer Place.

www.royalicingcustomcakes.com

SPOTLIGHT

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http://www.phurbanamgay.com/

http://www.marriedtobhutan.com/


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24TACA Craft ShowThis month, the green grass of Centennial Park will again bloom white as the tents of artists from Memphis to Johnson City prepare for this excit-ing Tennessee Association of Craft Artists Show celebrating its 40th anni-versary year. Drawing large crowds from all over Middle Tennessee, TACA has become a popular Nashville tradition. On view are 160 fine craft artists and their work for purchase. In addition, TACA offers the opportu-nity for the public to see live demonstrations of wood carving techniques by the Tennessee Association of Woodturners, paper marbling by Breanna Rockstad-Kincaid, and linocut and letterpress printing by Shona Cowart. The Chestnut Group, a member organization of Middle Tennessee plein-air painters, will also be on site throughout the weekend capturing in paint the lively scenes and people who attend the fair.

The Nashville Public Library’s Puppet Truck will also make a cameo appear-ance, entertaining visitors of all ages with two performances of Hansel and Gretel on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Children can take part in the creativity by making their own crafts in the TACA Kids Tent. the taCa Craft show is open Friday and saturday, May 6 and 7, from 10

a.m. to 6 p.m., and on sunday, May 8, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. admission and

parking are free and open to the public. www.tacacraftfair.com

I’m New At Being Old by lucy rose Fischer

Offering wit, whimsy, and the vibrantly fanciful art of Lucy Rose Fischer, this new book of illustrations, I’m New At Being Old, captures the essence of what it feels like to be “new at being old.”

She crystallizes—and personalizes—a wealth of insights in this honest and engaging book.

The artist and author, Lucy Rose Fischer, Ph.D., is an award-winning researcher specializing for twenty-five years in the study of aging.

Fischer is coming to Nashville for several local book signings in May: May 16, 1 p.m., Brentwood Library located at 8109 Concord Road; May 17, 4:30 p.m., Gordon Jewish Community Center located at 801 Percy Warner Boulevard; May 19, 11 a.m., Brentwood New Neighbors Luncheon. www.lucyrosedesigns.com

ben Caldwell

http://www.tacacraftfair.com


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IN THe GALLeRy

A Splash of ColorLocal Color Gallery celebrates their 21st Anniversary this month with a

show of new works by two local artists, Kim Barrick and Darryl Steele.

The exhibition Oil and Water showcases Barrick’s luscious paintings

rendered in oil and Steele’s exquisite watercolors.

Many Nashvillians have been patrons of the gallery located in historic

midtown for over two decades. Local Color Gallery’s owner, Brooke

Robinson, is excited to be celebrating this anniversary year and wonder-

fully rich tradition as one of Nashville’s longest-standing galleries. Local

Color has received numerous “Best Gallery” awards throughout the

years, and it has been recognized by many local publications.

Robinson shares that Barrick and Steele are great champions of each

other’s work. Steele collects Barrick’s work. “They were excited about

the opportunity to do a show together, and Oil and Water is a perfect

way to highlight the diversity of the gallery as a whole. I am delighted

with every artist in this gallery. They are a stable group of accomplished

artists that have withstood the test of time.”

A passionate supporter of the land she loves to paint, Kim Barrick has

given generously to local environmental/preservation groups as an

artist and board member, including the Nature Conservancy, the

Continental Divide Land Trust, the Land Trust for Tennessee, Radnor

Lake Natural Area, the Warner Parks, the Hermitage, and Belle Meade

Plantation. In 2001 she founded the Chestnut Group, “Plein Air Painters

for the Land,” a non-profit group of 130+ artists, dedicated to preserv-

ing open spaces.

Darryl Steele, largely a self-taught artist, has studied the work and tech-

niques of several master artists including Ken Davies, Paul Strisik, and

Andrew Wyeth. He has exhibited his work in galleries around the United

States and has won several awards, including having twice won the

Priest Lake Women’s Club Award at the Central South Art Exhibition in

Nashville, Tennessee. In 1996, Steele followed his passion for climbing

and traveled all around the western United States. It was at this time

Steele also became inspired by the famous watercolors of the great

American painter Thomas Moran. Landscapes have always dominated

his body of work, which isn’t surprising as Steele spends most of his

time outdoors. Today his watercolors hang in many private and public

collections across the United States and abroad, in the Governor’s

Residence in Caracas, Venezuela, and locally at the Opryland Hotel and

Vanderbilt University.

Oil and Water is on view through June 25, 2011. local Color Gallery is

located in Midtown at 1912 broadway. Gallery hours are tuesday through

saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and also by appointment. Call (615)

321–3141. www.localcolornashville.com

above: Blue Glass

below: First Timers

left: Harmony

Kim Barrick


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29left: The Sentinel above: Winter Streambottom: February SkiesDarryl Steele


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34Julyan Davis

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right: Green Building, Oil on canvas, 20” x 40”

British artist, Julyan Davis has found his home in the American South. His history with this region reads like a romance. “I’ve always been an artist. There was never really a dramatic moment there.” He came from a family of artistic types. His father, a London barrister, played guitar and wrote. It was his father’s music that first introduced Davis to the American South. Davis describes his dad as an “Americanophile” who loved Appalachian folk music. After studying To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, Davis rabidly made his way through the works of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor.

The American South took hold of his imagination.

After graduating from art school in London, Davis returned to his family home in Bath, England, with a lot of confidence and very little direction. Convinced by a few early sales that he could make it as an artist, he floun-dered as he realized that painting pictures is only half the work of being an artist. It was around this time that Davis stumbled upon Carl Carmer’s book Stars Fell on Alabama, and it changed his life. An interesting, early-twentieth-century chronicle of the history of Alabama, one chapter in particular grabbed his attention. This passage described the 1817 journey of a group of ill-fated Frenchmen who hoped to found a new settlement on American soil.

Shanties, abandoned filling stations, endless lines of trees—his work stems from careful observa-

tion of the world we often overlook as it blurs past our vision on the interstate.

by Deborah Walden

ARTIST PROFILe


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35above: Dry Lightning, Delta,

Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”

left: Abandoned Mansion,

Oil on canvas, 36” x 38”

A sea party of hopeful Bonapartists had exited France after Napoleon’s crushing defeat at Waterloo. A group made up of aristocrats and gener-als, they would plant vineyards for a “wine and olive colony” in Alabama. A crucial misunderstanding of the climate doomed this venture. Towns and counties in Southwestern Alabama still bear their mark. Davis was so captivated by Carmer’s Alabama that he packed up his paints and moved there. Marengo County, named for Napoleon’s first Italian victory, seemed to call Davis across the Atlantic. He planned to live off the sale of his paintings and write a novel about this strange chapter in Alabama history. Perhaps the strangest twist to this story is the fact that those nineteenth-century Frenchmen were my ancestors. A branch of


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44It was May of last year when I strolled down Main Street with my husband in our brand new “hometown” and of course noticed the large signage proclaiming “Save the Franklin Theatre.” Little did we know the enormity of the mission set forth by those involved in saving a land-mark treasure on this award-winning American street. I’ve been lucky enough now to peek behind the curtain and get to know the history and the future vision of this iconic venue.

The Franklin Cinema began bringing a bit of Hollywood to Tennessee in 1937. Along with the ten-cent movies came many years of fond memo-ries and first kisses. It was over time lovingly referred to by the Williamson County residents as the “picksha show.”

The passionate pledge to save the theatre is now on the verge of mani-festing what hopes to be a rainmaker, one that will still maintain the charm of a people’s movie theatre but will also be a world-class stage for a high caliber of musicians and entertainers.

Back After This Brief Intermission by Robbie Brooks MoorePlease return to your seats. The show is about to begin. On June 3 a bit of history will be continued as the new Franklin Theatre opens its doors after almost five years of hard work and good will on the part of an extraordi-narily committed community.

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49 Slow Road to China

tell us why you decided to focus on indigenous cultures around

the world.

I was inspired, and I felt a sense of urgency. These regions are facing assimilation into the western world, and I wanted to reach out to them, document and celebrate them, before their cultures disappear. These different cultures offer our world so much diversity, and I feel like a lot of people don’t get to see and appreciate it. So I wanted to celebrate this diversity, before it becomes one language, one idea of what is beautiful. Working in fashion, trekking to faraway places to document

ancient cultures. is that a strange contrast for a photographer?

Actually, you see a lot of similarities between the two sides of my work. There are elements of style in both these worlds. Jewelry, clothing—it’s a creative outlet. It plays a big role in a person’s sense of self or identity. If there’s one thing my subjects share, it’s a strong sense of identity. In Nepal, I found the most interesting qualities in faces and hands. I focused on quiet, more personal portraits. I built up a level of trust by simply spending time with these people, eating with them in their homes, and talking with them.

how did you first get the idea to go to Nepal?

In Humla, the Himalayas have acted as a sort of wall that has preserved the culture. It’s a perfect example of an indigenous people who have a strong sense of identity and one that has been preserved over time. It’s an agriculture-based society that hasn’t changed much in the last hundreds of years, and they claim to be the last remaining guardians of true Tibetan culture. It’s just south of Tibet. The style of their houses and clothes is more Tibetan than Nepalese.

you were a foreign visitor—and you also had a camera. What

was it like interacting with the natives?

People were extremely humble and open to letting me document their customs and livelihoods. I was invited into the homes of many of the

drew doggett’s From Slow Road to China to Fashion and Beyond debuted in front of a rapt audience at last’s month art Crawl and

Collectors Night. Based in New York, the 27-year-old photographer is as comfortable in a fashion studio as he is in some of the remotest regions of the earth. Recently, he has embarked on a ten-year project of documenting disappearing cultures around the world. In addition to stunning images, Doggett’s project has produced worthy philanthropic results: proceeds from sales of his fine art prints and first book, Slow Road to China, have already funded operations at a Nepal health center for one year.

Doggett’s photographs from his trip to Humla, Nepal, have also been exhibited in New York and Washington, D.C. He is planning a book and show from his second trip, to Ethiopia, for later in 2011. His current exhibition is running at The Arts Company through May 11.

this month two prominent photographers, drew doggett and John Guider, share their images of Nepal and China. each went for very different reasons. both returned with stunning memories on film.

PHOTOGRAPHy


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only three Westerners in the course of my twenty-day hike—but I noticed the difference between villages that are along that trail and those that are off the beaten path. You can see the signs of modernity.

aesthetically, what were you hoping to achieve with these

photos?

I wanted to show the correlation between the rugged environment and the people who have lived in it for a long time—how the mountains have left an imprint on them. Hiking at 14,000 feet, there was snow-fall, avalanches—moments that helped me realize not only how diffi-cult this place is to reach, but to live in. These people are blocked off from the rest of the world for four to six months out of the year, when the passes are snowed in.

and this is where the charity element comes in?

Yes. I was passionate about partnering with an organization that can provide basic treatments and medicine year round—in this case, Nepal Trust. But I’m doing it for each place I visit. This is a ten-year project that documents the far corners of the world. In each one, I pick a chari-table organization to partner with, based on the schools and clinics I visit, the teachers and nurses I talk to, and the problems I see.

What have you been working on more recently?

I just got back from a month in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, where I was documenting semi-pastoralist tribes. They’re about to assimilate into the Western world at an even greater pace, because their land is desir-able for foreign investors and for their own government. In the month I was there, I saw a cell phone tower being built in one tribe and one being activated in another. These people have stayed the same way for centuries, living off their cattle, and have just started forming perma-nent housing structures—and now they’re being vaulted centuries ahead, into the world of instant communications, which is extremely exciting for some and frightening for others.

What was different about this region, when you compare it to Nepal?

They’re at a different stage of their integration into the modern world. Ethiopia seems further back but is changing way more rapidly, which allowed me to think about this process from a more macro perspective. A lot of these people have been living day to day for so long that thinking

about the long-term ramifications of some of these modernizing govern-ment programs and initiatives is very difficult for them to do.

and did the photos turn out differently?

I focused almost solely on the youth, whereas in Nepal I focused on the elderly. It was very much a study of their bodies and the graphic elements of their cultural traditions: the body painting, body scarification, lip plates, necklaces, and traditional garb, and then also the traditional activities, such as stick-fighting and bull-jumping ceremonies. www.drewdoggett.com


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69NOte: the interviewer is a longtime co-conspirator and friend of the

interviewee. She knows him to be a man of many talents, and more than that he is a Mel of many hats. He is musical, multifaceted, magnanimous, a man about town, madcap given half the chance, and a great dancer. He comes from here, and goes from here. He ebbs and is known to flow from here. He is famous to invent and reinvent himself, and I’m his biggest fan. I have followed his career for years as he has followed mine. And so, without further ado, please welcome, Mr. Hunter Armistead, the mandala behind the camera.

by Carol Caldwell

ARTIST PROFILe

One XL

this is a manufactured mandala. you can see it’s a

cool-looking array of t-shirts. i took the camera and

yanked it to blur and then took a shot of the window

intact. blurring symbolizes the passage of time. time is a

dimension of any static piece. Part of my theme is that

time exists in all these; the blur is future and the past.

Hunter ArmisteadReturn of the Mandala Man


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Star of David

i shot a lot on my favorite street in

berlin. Kastanienallee—Chestnut

alley—where i went to language

school. i shot one side of the street,

the right side, where the morning light

hits. there is a lot of graffiti in that city,

but this street is the Venice beach of

berlin. i went all over; everywhere i

turned there were great pictures.

Visions i was intuitively drawn to. i

collected a vocabulary of images,

compiled a library of icons to draw on.

What happens is i start by being

attracted to an image and then think

about it, make sense of it. i knew i

wanted to make three kinds of

mandalas, natural ones, one, and

diptychs combined of portraits and

poetic images, two, and mandalas

that i would manipulate. a series of

these. the mandala is a repeating

pattern in nature . . . a repeating

segment of the universe.

Super Sexy

the school took us on tours

with people who would tell

the history of berlin and its

arts. Our teacher identified

the graffiti artists closest to

the Wall. some of the icons

turned into manufactured

mandalas. but this one is

just as it was above a store.

i love the repeating

symbolism. the symmetry in

the lightbulb and the

inverted lightbulb—some-

thing provocative about the

inversions of each other. it’s

an abstract; the mind goes

where it wants to go. the

medallion in the middle

looks like a juxtaposition,

but it isn’t.

Koan

yes, this one! so Chinese! that’s what i was thinking when i saw it, Chinese or

Japanese because of the red. it looks like an oriental painting. i brightened

it, cropped it to make it more symmetrical as a mandala. it was in a

doorway. i felt like doors were opening to me in berlin, and i went around

being happy. i went there because i went there. you don’t know why you do

things. every time i look at these images i think of how inspired i am in berlin.


73

73Do re mi fa so la ti om

if you didn’t know this

was a bridge, you

wouldn’t know which is

the inner picture and

which is the outer. We

lay a concept over what

we see, and the eye will

show it one way one

time, different the next.

it’s jazzy, the reference

to Monk, the lines above

are like a musical

notebook.

Day Blur

a happy accident that

occurred when i spied

this graffiti artist doing

his thing in a blown-out

building near a famous

graffiti wall in east

berlin. i had to jump just

to see through the

window, so i could only

hold up the camera

above my head, snap it

before he saw me, and

hope for the best. i

didn’t have time to set

the shutter speed. better

than i hoped.

120 Beats Per Minute

Windshield on the left with rain, and on the

right a statue of the twentieth anniversary of

reunification—the day of the celebration it

rained, but huge crowds of people came.

exuberance of the breakthrough near the

brandenberger tor. berlin turned out to be the

perfect convergence of what i needed: a

dialogue. i needed to be inspired by what i

felt and saw, get people’s feedback.

http://www.mstreetnashville.com/

PB | May 2O11 | The Art House | NashvilleArts.com

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4 | May 2O11 | The Art House | NashvilleArts.com

McAlpine—architect, interior designer, furniture designer—has been finding home places within himself since he was five. He drew his first floor plan “in blue ink on the white back of the lid of a Whitman’s Sampler,” he says with total recall. McAlpine showed the plan to his mother, who responded: “That’s nice, but the dining room is nowhere near the kitchen.” “And to this day I’m hard pressed to put the dining room by the kitchen,” he laughs. “I guess almost every single day of my life since, I’ve drawn a house.”

Dreaming in ArchitectureOn the flyleaf of the tobacco-brown chapbook is a nineteenth-century woodcut of a stylized bird arched attentively over a nest with three eggs encircled by a rose branch. The humble image of home-builder-in-a-garden has symbolic resonance, and this is by design. The book, called Finding Home is by bobby mcalpine.

by ChrisTine kreyling

The anemic landscapeThe architect-in-the-making was in fact drawing and re-draw-ing the contours of his interior life. McAlpine was raised in a series of Alabama sawmill towns. “Nobody owned their houses. They were part of their salary package, so they didn’t invest anything in them,” financially or emotionally, he explains. “My father was mill manager, which set us apart” and made for a lonely life. “In this Dolly Parton situation, I began to pave an internal landscape, which was more understandable to me

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“There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through.” -Dan rice

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than the world around,” he says. “An artist is not born from exposure but from anemia, from what’s missing. Therein lies our purpose. Our work is our cure.”

In the architecture program at Auburn University, McAlpine “found for the first time people with similar passions.” After apprenticeship in Alexandria, Virginia, he began drawing houses for clients from his office (now McAlpine Tankersley Architecture) in Montgomery, Alabama, “the only town I said I’d never live in,” he laughs. “But I was intercepted by a friend from there, and it seemed better to start in a small pond, where I could be a big fish.”

The pond grew bigger as he received calls from prospective clients who’d seen his designs in publications such as Southern Accents and House Beautiful. National and international commissions and recognition came, with features in Veranda, House and Garden, Metropolitan Home, Traditional Home, and British House and Garden.

Along the way the architect became something of a design polymath, because “I wanted all the tools to use,” McAlpine explains. Just as, in childhood, “I always wanted the box with all sixty-four crayons, the one with the sharpener in it.”

In 1997 he established McAlpine Booth & Ferrier Interiors, with offices in Nashville, New York, and Atlanta. Five years later McAlpine debuted his own furniture line, McAlpine Home, with upholstered pieces by Lee Industries in North Carolina and English-made case goods from MacRae in Atlanta.

The Process McAlpine begins designing with a furniture plan “99 percent of the time,” he says. “It’s like setting up camp.” The architect first focuses on the gathering space because “it’s the most expressive” of those who live there. “I figure out

where to put the fire, and the amenities grow around that. Only then do I add the walls. If the soul is right the exterior will be beautiful.”

There are plenty of beautiful exteriors as well as interiors in The Home Within Us. The book, which McAlpine authored with

Susan Sully and was published by Rizzoli last year, illustrates the range of his work as well as the intuitions behind it. In the pages, a grand manse in Birmingham rubs shoulders with more modest vaca-tion cottages, a folly on Orange Beach made from a single pour-ing of concrete with a picturesque Anglo-chapel crafted as the final resting place for a long-time patron.

The ways that McAlpine combines disparate materials, shapes, and styles articulate the principle of the pendulum so central to his work. There are light floors and dark walls, stone coupled with steel, organic silhouettes and stepped parapets, Italian styling paired with 1930s factory minimalism. In one Montgomery house, two crystal chandeliers “illuminate” a conservatory.

McAlpine employs his design pendulum “to create spaces with a broad emotional spectrum,” he writes in The Home Within Us. “A rhythm of the grand and the humble, the exhilarating and the calm, the bold and the tender must be struck at a regular rate. This can show up in a million different ways—in the scale of a room, the material, or the math.”

When McAlpine hasn’t enough houses or furniture to design, he exercises his rhythms by writing. “I write quite a bit, free-style poems, left-margin kind of things,” he says. “It’s like crop rotation.” Each different creative action “retills the soil.”

Hence the book of poems and musings called Finding Home. On these pages, the creative process he describes as “falling toward a place” has the inevitability of a dream. It’s a dream with Romantic roots.

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Understanding phi provides a gateway to the geometries of nature and the ephemeral thing we call beauty. When we make things using phi, we give form to the geometries and the progression of scale that is nature’s soul. These things put man in harmony with the natural world, and, in doing so, these things, or objects, resonate with us because it’s who we are and how we are made too. Phi is the fundamen-tal thread binding parts to a whole.

Authentic green architecture, I propose, follows antiquity’s principles of harmony and conservation. My Phi Guest Cottage is an example of harmony and adaptive reuse in the true spirit of Classical architecture. In fact, most materials used in this cottage were collected and saved during the last 200+ years here in Tennessee. Materials include 150-year-old hand-painted wainscoting, 100+-year-old reclaimed poplar floors, and 100+-year-old barn timbers and re-milled, reclaimed old-growth lumber. The new components are also inherently green due to the low carbon emissions made for producing and future upkeep. There are overhangs to protect vertical surfaces from the elements, low window/wall ratios on correct exposures to maintain a comfortable climate, and many natural, inert materials. All of these things combine to

in the living world of nature, there is a common thread that binds all things together: from seed pods to the spiral pattern of a sunflower’s bloom, to insects, reptiles, butterflies, and trees; to all the bones in an animal and to our own bodies. This thread is what allows nature’s progression from the “One to the many” and is what Plato (428–348 b.C.e.) called “nature’s greatest secret”: phi (“fye” meaning the greater).

by eriC sTengel

My Green Home A Return to Nature’s Principles

arChiTeCTure

2011 May Nashville Arts Magazine

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Transcript of 2011 May Nashville Arts Magazine