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Forward Thinking From the Past
Efficiency is in the blood of a carpenter, and Florida builder Josh Wynne, profiled in “Custom Builders on the Move,” relies on a lot of common sense to build what he has learned along the way. And much of that learning has come from reading history books, particularly about architecture.
Some of the most influential prose that Wynne says he has ever read is a passage about a sewing machine written in 1885 by Edward Carpenter, an English philosopher, poet, and anthropologist. Wynne read about Carpenter’s ideas in an article called “The Simplification of Life,” published by Gustav Stickley, the father of the American Craftsman movement, in Stickley’s periodical, The Craftsman.
Carpenter wrote that a simple-minded husband may think that because a sewing machine works 10 times faster compared with sewing by hand, then a tenth of the time will be spent on that task by using the machine. But to his surprise, he finds that there is no difference because his wife and daughter spend more time on the machine stitching more plaits and flounces onto their dresses. Time-saving devices don’t make life simpler, just as an expensive vase doesn’t make a room more beautiful. That vase simply adds another detail that needs to be dusted and protected from breakage. Carpenter and Stickley not only were pushing back against opulent Victorian design; they were sustainability proponents long before the word existed.
“If you can imagine why life needed to get much more simple than it was in the late 1800s, you can see that it was a human problem, not a problem with the time,” Wynne says. “It’s a problem with us. We have a habit of overcomplicating things.”
Though not an architect, Wynne designs most of his clients’ homes, borrowing design fundamentals from forward thinkers to reduce the burden of living in the houses he builds. So he champions Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchel of the Sarasota School of Architecture movement. They designed Florida homes with single-room depth to allow for natural ventilation, cupolas with whole-house fans to draft cooler air off the floor and pull warmer air out, and terrazzo floors for thermal massing. “Those guys did thermal massing before anybody knew what thermal massing was,” Wynne says.
He talks enthusiastically about Frank Lloyd Wright and Greene & Greene: Masterworks, a book about the brothers Henry and Charles Greene whose ultimate Pasadena bungalows in California eliminated everything unnecessary to make the whole house as simple and direct as possible. He also admires the place-based design approach of contemporary San Antonio architects David Lake and Ted Flato.
It’s not so much that Wynne admires the great thinkers of modern architecture. He does, but listening to him talk about these masters, one senses an appreciation for the efficiency of ideas conceived, in some cases a century ago, that are still valid for building durable, healthy homes today. It’s like the joy of rediscovering a forgotten gem.
