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As shown in the floor plan (above), the "garden wall"
zigzags through the main residence, guest house, and courtyard. The
exposed block forms some interior walls; others are finished in plywood
panels (below, right).
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James van Sweden's landscaped meadow at his house on Chesapeake Bay (above).
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Sorg, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, arrived in Washington from her
native New Delhi in 1968, enrolled at Howard University--which at the time
offered one of the few accredited architecture degrees in the area--and
graduated two years later. Before undertaking graduate studies in historic
preservation at Cornell University, she spent another two years in the Ivory
Coast and Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer. "I suppose there's something
of the mud-brick aesthetic from my Peace Corps days here," she says,
observing the concrete blocks. "And if you go to the villages of India
and Africa, homes are made up of separate buildings--you have your cooking
hut, outhouse, structures for livestock, and so on--and so what happens
between the buildings is important."
Indeed, the interstitial spaces are as deftly composed as the home's wall
and structures. Defined by a raised courtyard and planked walkways,
these somewhat meandering areas are punctuated by planted openings. "The
idea is that the house will float over a meadow," van Sweden explains.
This quality--along with the home's flat roofs, the movement encouraged
between the pavilions, and the stepped asymmetrical plane of the garden
wall--evoke Le Corbusier. In fact, alongside renowned architect Harry Weese,
at whose firm she began her career, Sorg cites the Swiss architect--whose
impact on modern India, most notably at Chandigarh, cannot be underestimated--as
an influence. Also evident are traces of other modern masters: the
interior-exterior path of the garden wall suggests Mies's Barcelona Pavilion,
and the exposed fasteners that pin the home's plywood panels could claim
roots in Louis Kahn, whose work at Dakka, in Bangladesh, also earned him
prominence in South Asia.
However, Sorg is not self-conscious about these comparisons. This house--despite
its peculiarities--seems to her not an abstruse academic exercise or an
act of showmanship, but rather a matter-of-fact employment of aesthetic
vocabularies, straightforward forms, and low-cost materials that honestly
looks to the vernacular roots of Modernism. It is a deceptively unlabored
expression of the Modern idiom and, refreshingly, shows how its subtler
influences and less pretentious values--rather than theoretical indulgence--can
produce buildings of the inspired simplicity by which elegance is defined.
"People look at the overhangs and think it's inspired by Wright,"
she says of the roof. "But I just did that for drainage. I didn't want
to deal with downspouts."
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