Urban Front

One day back in 1986, I was riding in a shuttle bus, headed for a hilltop eyrie that was part of a home tour sponsored by the local Realtors’ association. “Nashville has some of the most beautiful homes in the world, and they’re all hidden,” I overheard one of my shuttle-mates say.

What I noted was that my fellow tourist had said “and”—not “but.” For the suburban idealist, I began thinking, hiddeness is a correlative to beauty. The places of private life are to be kept, well, private. They are for insiders to know, and for outsiders merely to hear about. The inhabitants of private places commune with Nature; they don’t deal with neighbors.

I was reminded of this suburban veritas on a recent outing to the province of West Meade, a collection of 1950s and ’60s subdivisions that is not known as one of Nashville’s architectural treasure troves. In West Meade the ranchburger is the basic building block, with an occasional Cape Cod thrown in as a hedge against complete monotony. The neighborhood even has a ranch-style fire hall.

West Meade also has two buildings-in-hiding that are really worth looking at. One is West Meade itself, the 1886 mansion that bequeathed its name to the neighborhood. The other is a just-completed expansion to the Abintra Montessori School, a home-away-from-home for the 3-to-12 set. Considered together, old house and new schoolhouse illustrate past and present ways of making organic architecture.

Most Nashvillians have heard of West Meade, but few of us had actually seen it until the Junior League featured the home as this year’s Decorators’ Show House. West Meade has always been a private residence, set back from the road in a grove of trees that assures its detachment. Originally part of Belle Meade plantation, the property for West Meade was willed by William Giles Harding to his daughter Mary Elizabeth. She and her husband, Judge Howell Jackson, built their new home at what is now the intersection of Old Harding Pike and Highway 70 West.

Unlike their siblings across the road at Belle Meade, the Jacksons of West Meade chose not to dwell behind the classically inspired white columns we associate with Old Southern Living. Instead, the Howell Jacksons went with the modish Second Empire of Napoleon III for their plantation house. This French style was popular in American urban housing between the 1860s and the 1880s, in part because its steep mansard roof provided an additional floor.

In adapting an urban architecture to a rural setting, the Jacksons retained the style’s irregular massing and highly textured surface treatment. The walls of brick, which were hand-pressed on site, are encrusted with a series of porches featuring lathe-turned posts, ornate balusters, and eave moldings. The slate mansard roof is laid in a two-toned fish-scale pattern and crested with a filigree of iron. Vegetative scrolls are incised in the window lintels. Floral and sunburst pediments surmount the doors, and fleur-de-lys finials crown a multitude of gables. A wealth of decorative motifs abstracted from nature creates the general impression that West Meade is growing, or that something is growing on it.

The Abintra Montessori School does not so much imitate the forms of nature as it opens itself up to the natural world. Designed by local architect Cary Dunn, the half-million-dollar building provides two additional classrooms for the expanding school. The new structure is sited on a south-facing hill, behind two generically suburban structures, former quadruplexes that now serve as class and office space. Abintra may be hidden on its wooded lot much like a typical suburban villa, but it is nondescript no more.

Galvanized metal sheathing covers much of the exterior of the new Abintra. Applied in horizontally corrugated panels, it creates the initial impression that a Greyhound bus is resting at the edge of the parking lot. A closer look reveals three spines of steel clad in plywood, glass, rubber, and vinyl-coated canvas, as well as metal. Inside, roofed-and-walled, roofed-but-not-walled, and open-to-the-sky spaces alternate in a staggered pattern. The building occupies 7,000 square feet, but only 60 percent of that space is completely enclosed.

The name “Abintra”—Latin for “from within”—reflects an educational philosophy rooted in the concept that children innately know how to learn. In order for the guides—they’re not called teachers—to liberate the learning potential of each child, the new building’s program called for classrooms that are large, open spaces within which a variety of activities can occur simultaneously.

Dunn opened up the classrooms by separating service from the served. The mechanical and storage spaces are segregated in their own closets at the ends of the spines. The rest of the building is devoted to flexible indoor space that can be organized and reorganized at will. Outdoor spaces can host less-focused activity.

Interior corrugated panels that mimic the exterior metal sheathing control the noise that is usually a big problem with large, open rooms. The radiant-heat system in the concrete floors makes desks unnecessary. Kids can sit, lie, or roll on the floor without fear of drafts.

Dunn began his professional career as a lighting consultant, and a sensitivity to the sun’s rays is a strong characteristic of his work here. NES will never hire this guy as a consultant. Indirect light drifts into the classrooms through walls and doors that are planes of glass. More illumination pours through clerestory windows sheltered by roof sections with a curved profile. This roofing system allows direct sun to penetrate the classrooms in the cooler months and baffles the baking rays during the summer.

Additional curvilinear roofing shelters outdoor courtyards that contain, among other things, a Zen garden. Dunn left one section of roof as exposed steel truss, a permeable membrane between the human and natural worlds. Large limestone slabs excavated on the site serve as retaining walls, stepping stones, and a fire lane. The slabs serve as the connective tissue between the obviously manmade materials of the building itself and the earth of the surrounding landscape.

Dunn acknowledges two major influences on his work at Abintra: Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. “I think of Abintra as a kind of Usonian school,” he says, recalling Wright’s prototypical housing designs. “Daylight was very important to Wright. And he used a modular system of assemblage. I based Abintra on a 4-foot-by-8-foot grid—the size of a standard sheet of plywood.”

Kahn is a more obvious predecessor—particularly his Kimball Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas, which maximizes natural light and celebrates lowly materials. For the Kimball, Kahn created a veritable ode to concrete divided into barrel-vaulted spines illuminated by skylights.

Abintra and West Meade seem an odd couple at first glance. To citizens of the late 20th century, a house like West Meade has the charm of an eccentric aunt, a formidable matron wearing a little too much rouge. We often fail to understand the highly serious purpose behind the architecture’s apparent whimsy.

Abintra, on the other hand, is as streamlined as a speedskater. Yet both buildings are responses to a world in which nature is an increasingly precious commodity. And both buildings are in hiding from a world where commerce is king.

Face to face with the Industrial Revolution, the citizens of the Victorian Age mass-produced architectural details abstracted from a nature they dominated with increasing confidence. When the Jacksons set up housekeeping in the soon-to-be-suburbs, they preferred the irregular profiles and elaborate textures, taken from mountains and forests, to the smooth and rational geometry of the machine.

Contemporary architects such as Dunn extend architectural fingers of metal and glass into the suburban landscape. Abintra is a rational geometry interpenetrated by grass and trees, stone, and sky. Face to face with the post-Industrial Revolution, we use high technology and mass production not to imitate nature, but to embrace it.