Book Review : A Blueprint for the Art Around Us

The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski (Viking: $18.95; 166 pages)

Some of the most painfully inarticulate people I’ve ever known have been architects--I once worked out a theory that architects tend to smoke pipes because it gives them something to do while pondering what to say next.

Even so, sometimes less is more; the writing of some architectural theorists and historians is so abstruse and so highfalutin that it might as well be a dead language. Sadly, these quirks sometimes conceal the workings of a mind steeped in the classical tradition and yet fired with a visionary imagination.

That’s why “The Most Beautiful House in the World” is such a winning book, such a pleasure to read, and--above all--such a revelation about what architects actually do and how they go about doing it.

Witold Rybczynski, an architect and a professor of architecture at McGill University, sets out to tell the tale of how he came to design and build his own house in the corner of an apple orchard on the outskirts of Montreal.

His prose is sturdy, straightforward and yet elegant; tellingly, his little book has the clean lines and the human scale and the enduring beauty of the barn-like “boathouse” that he built as a home for his wife and himself. Like a well-designed home, it is comfortable and inviting and, at the same time, its attic and basement are full of oddities and surprises, mementos and keepsakes.

“It began with the dream of a boat,” the author writes. Soon enough, his work on a temporary boat-building shed turned into a much more ambitious project--the creation of “the most beautiful house in the world.”

And the same phenomenon can be observed in the book itself--the author’s account of his own efforts at house-building turns into a masterly contemplation of the history, philosophy and practice of architecture. “This story,” the author writes, “is full of accidents.”

Along the way, Rybczynski displays another quality that I have observed in some of the architects I’ve known: an intellectual vigor and curiosity that impels them to study all aspects of human civilization with an almost spiritual passion.

Informative Digressions

The author digresses into a hundred different sources and subjects: feng shui , or the Taoist art of selecting the most auspicious place to build; khat muhrat , or the Hindu rites of ground breaking; the dictates of the Koran on architecture; the symbolism of trees; the depiction of architects in the movies; the function of fun in the design process; the fraudulence of great works of architecture supposedly conceived and captured in a hasty sketch on a napkin; the mud-play of Jung; the Gastronomic Analogy in architectural history and theory; the exploits of the solo sailor Joshua Slocum; the magic of beginnings; stamp-collecting; the architectural practices of the Nabdam farmers of northern Ghana; the architectural excesses of Ludwig II, Hearst and Disney; the homes of famous authors, and so on.

Some of the most intriguing passages in “The Most Beautiful House in the World” are to be found in these digressions. Rybczynski’s survey of the history of barn-building, for example, reveals the aristocratic bloodlines of what we perceive as the most common of structures: The barns of medieval monasteries followed a “basilican plan,” and Jefferson’s design of Monticello inspired the building of a “Palladian barn.”

The Play in Architecture

His chapter on children’s toys and games, which includes a celebration of building blocks and other construction toys, stands alone as a small masterpiece; but it also illuminates the author’s theory that architecture is an inspired and enduring form of play.

“Architecture takes place in a broad and worldly context, of course; but the building game is played within the confines of a sheet of paper or a cardboard model, and although it has a practical purpose, much of its satisfaction is derived from the play elements: the rules, the smallness, the fantasy of making space, the re-creation of childhood freedom,” he observes. “The architect’s scale reduced all reality to neat, comprehensible shapes. It was in this sense that design was play; for, like play, it not only created order, it was order.”

Rybczynski is wholly free of the faintly mystical self-importance that afflicts some architects; he shuns the school of architecture that looks only to great men and great buildings.

Unavoidable Art Form

“For centuries, the difference between master masons, journeyman builders, joiners, dilettantes, gifted amateurs, and architects has been ill defined,” Rybczynski writes. “If we call buildings that move us ‘architecture,’ then we leave open the question of whether they are grand or small, known or unknown, sheds or cathedrals.”

Architecture, of course, is one art form that we cannot avoid; we live with the work of architects everywhere we go. That fact alone helps to explain why architects are tempted to regard themselves as something more than “master builders.”

But Rybczynski is one architect who honors the loftiest ideals of his calling even as he brings them down from Olympus and plants them in humble soil.

And, thanks to his work in “The Most Beautiful House in the World,” the magic and power of architecture are all the more dazzling.