"faith based initiatives"

I spent some time recently with a friend who was about to get married. He was from a storied family-their progenitors had fought in the revolutionary war, and just about every war since. I didn't know them very well at all, in fact, I had some reservations about even attending. But I was very good friends with many who were attending the wedding and so I thought that it would be a worthwhile adventure.

The reception and rehearsal were to be held in their fathers house, which was built at the base of the grand Tetons in Wyoming, the kind of landscape that only seems possible in dreams. The house itself was something of a fantasy. It was a newly built, but had come out of an extended period of labor for the father and had represented an ongoing, almost ecumenical, negotiation between him and the architects on what a proper American house should be. It was an exquisite piece, although flawed in many ways. In a way, the house was the very embodiment of the father, with all of his possibilities and all of his failings.

The father was one of those characters. He did not have a first name- only a series of initials, which some how surrounded him with an impenetrable formality. This was reinforced by a thick mustache which masked his expression perfectly. You could not read his countenance for clues about what he meant, you had to wait for the words to issue from somewhere behind all of the facial hair, and then try to figure out the meaning. This constantly kept me off balance and a little bit intimidated, but it made for exhilarating conversation.

He had a story for every piece of furniture in this beautiful place. Especially the chairs. This one was brought over from England and this one was made in Massachussets by such and such a cabinet maker and then brought out west at incredible cost and risk and yet had survived generations. Tremendous stories. The old mans passions had been memorialized in every corner of this house, in every view of the surrounding landscape, in all of the arrangements of the furniture.

And yet. The estrangement of the three grown children from the father through years of formality and distance found its perfect expression in their attitudes about the house. Manifest in his love for it was all of the time, love and attention he had neglected to provide to them all those years. And so, underneath the polite chatter and the well rehearsed exchanges flowed a river of resentment. They didn't like it. It was too expensive, too excessive, vanity, a giant conversation peice so that the old man could prattle endlessly about his chairs and his guns and how they had crossed the Ohio to get here.

And yet even though these were my friends, I found that my sympathy aligned with the father after all. In my fantasy of it all, I imagined him building the house, working on it all of those years, in order to say what he could not say to his children. It was about what all fathers wish for their children- that they might remember his dreams, that they be kept safe, surrounded by beautiful familiar things but within sight of a mountaintop. That they have a story.

Architecture is a faith based initiative. When we build, we make the world again. With every new beginning, we labor in the hope that we can be the people we want to be instead of the people we are. And when we are done, we stand back in order to see a changed world.