Dragonline Studio
Duncan Laurie's studio in Jamestown, Rhode Island, stands on the site of the 58-room Queen Anne mansion where he summered as a child, on a promontory that affords a view of the Newport Bridge and the former Auchincloss estate across the water.
Laurie's family home was leveled 20 years ago because it was was in a state of irreparable disrepair; all that remains of the original structure is a stone retaining wall. Laurie, who is an architectural glass and design artist, remembered the magical quality of the place: "I knew I had a magnificent site and knew that I grew up here in a building that was powerful and happy. It took the rawness of the environment and managed to put it into human context." One is struck by the strange luminosity of the site and the enveloping sound of the wind and ocean, and it comes as no surprise that it has been called "Weatherledge" for generations.
It took eight years for Laurie to build the three-story studio whose windows open on all sides to spectacular vistas of the sky and sea. A simple rectangular structure, it echoes a Greek temple in its proportions and a Tibetan monastery in its curved, wood-beamed roof. Laurie, who is a handsome athletic man in his early fifties with a polite, informal manner and a charming enthusiasm, developed the striking proportional scheme of the building in consultation with Michael Hellias. Laurie describes Hellias as "what you might call a geomancer with a musical edge" who has a "keen knowledge of astrology and the proportions of antiquity." Hellias worked with a series of sacred geometrical ratios, such as the golden mean, and with the physical restrictions of the site, and, of course, with Laurie's own requirements (the basement is his glass shop, which demands a wide-open space to accommodate his sculptures and tools). "The notion in antiquity," Laurie explains, "was that if you live in a structure and worshipped in a structure that had the right proportions, when you were scattered and you went out in your day and became disjointed, you would come back into the proportional system and that would essentially tune you up and put you back into an environment where you were in harmony with nature again." Laurie says that he designed the building in part to test that hypothesis.
But these lofty ideas are also combined with a strong vernacular aesthetic. The studio was built using many scrap and salvaged materials: The large concrete and glass blocks used as flooring were given away by a glass company, the windows on the second floor came from a hospital in Providence that was torn down, some of the dark red pine that cases the windows came from a factory in Fall River, Massachusetts. As a result, the plans for the building fluctuated according to the availability of materials coming in. Conceptually, Laurie drew on the works of two architects: Hasan Fathy, an Egyptian who stresses the idea of natural ventilation in buildings, and Pierre Chareau, a French early modernist who used a lot of glass and industrial materials and is best known for La Maison de Verre in Paris.
The salvaged-material aesthetic is carried out in the decoration of the main room, whose furniture was mostly scavenged. Two large oars are suspended horizontally from the ceiling and function as a nautical mobile of sorts, upon which a gas lantern is affixed. Laurie's interests in patterns and structure is reflected in his collection of aboriginal and Native American objects. Despite the clutter, the overall impression is one of airiness and space, which Laurie attributes to the fact that he used the sacred cubit (about 25 inches) as unit of measure. "It gave the room a wider feel," he explains. Yet there is also something a little old-fashioned about the room, perhaps even Victorian. A zebra rug is thrown across the stair railing. An antique model sail boat is perched atop a large mahogany cupboard. Laurie showed me a weathered photograph of his great grandfather's studio, which was also on the island. "Everyone feels it bears a striking resemblance to the way I still live," he says.
Climbing the stairs one must be prepared to understand that the animus of Laurie's studio extends beyond the experience of harmonious space. The second floor, which is almost entirely wrapped in glass windows, is the laboratory where he experiments with sound and alternative technologies in an attempt to understand and harness the energy in art—an energy we all instinctively recognize. "How [painters] organize color and [their] tool on the day they paint the great painting is somehow connected to some type of energetic phenomenon that flows through them at that moment. It crosses culture, it crosses history, it crosses all the normal barriers. It has to contain something of magic," says Laurie. The room contains acoustical and radionics equipment (radionics is a form of electronic homeopathy) as well as a large bed-like structure that hangs from the ceiling in the center of the room. Laurie poses the question: "Is there a parallel world of etheric energy that is the artistic domain in and of itself? That's conjecture and that's the conjecture that the studio here is addressing."
exerpt from FLAUNT 10.99, written by Nathalie Gimon
