The Art Barge at Napeague, on the South Fork of Long Island, was founded in 1960 by Victor D’Amico, the first director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, and has offered art classes there every summer since. Its instructors, however, can no longer afford to live in Montauk or the neighbouring towns, and the studio brief therefore asked for a residence where they could sleep and eat together.
The chosen site is a field near the Barge in which the concrete footings of a dismantled television tower were never cleared. Rather than removing them, the project treats the footings as its foundation and sets a timber structure on and between them. Because the two materials age at very different rates, the building is organised around that difference: the timber will grey and be replaced over time, while the concrete is expected to remain much as it is.
The project draws on the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), the German Romantic painter who returned to the ruined Cistercian abbey of Eldena, near his birthplace of Greifswald, for some thirty years. In one of these canvases a small cottage has been built inside the abbey walls, so that ordinary life continues within a structure that no longer serves its original purpose. Friedrich’s ruins thus register two kinds of time at once: the masonry, which has stopped changing, and the weather, which continues to act upon it.
The residence adopts the same relationship. The concrete footings are left as the tower left them, while the timber built upon them, exposed to the wind off the Atlantic, is expected to weather within a few years and eventually to be replaced.
Friedrich often painted his figures from behind, standing with their backs to the viewer and looking out at a distant landscape. The residence deliberately reverses that orientation. Although the site faces the Atlantic, the main room has no window toward the ocean; instead the roof closes overhead and daylight enters only between the timber ribs. The resulting form recalls a canoe that has been drawn up onto the shore and turned over.
