Making it New in Soho: Stephen Jay Gould and Rhonda Roland Shearer
recast a downtown loft
by Suzanne Stephens
ity
dwellers who acquire industrial lofts are usually quite zealous about
keeping the large, undifferentiated spaces completely intact when they
convert them for residential use. There are no "afters." With the exception
of adding a bath, a kitchen and perhaps a sleeping balcony, the "before" is
it. A loft in lower Manhattan designed by New York architect William T.
Georgis violates this practice, and with good reason. It had to allow for a
complicated array of living and work spaces, including two libraries: one
for him and one for her. He is Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist,
professor and author who has just published a revisionist argument on
evolutionary theory, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to
Darwin. She is Rhonda Roland Shearer, an artist and
writer whose theoretical essays, such as "Real or Ideal: DNA Iconography in
a New Fractal Era," appear in art journals.
"It was your typical loft building,
a former doll factory whose rough-and-tumble decrepitude had been carefully
preserved by the artist who had lived there," remembers Georgis of his first
visit to the apartment. In transforming the 4,200-square-foot space, he
ended up with a design that not only responds to the couple's personal
predilections but acts as a metaphor for the themes of evolution and change
that are integral to their intellectual pursuits. While Gould and Shearer
share similar professional interests, their work patterns differ
dramatically. Gould retreats each day to a Stickley roiltop desk in a
library lined with books. Shearer, who does her writing, reading and
preparatory work for her painting and sculpting in various quarters of the
apartment, uses a semiprivate alcove just off the living room for her
library. "Spaces reflect the people who make them," she says. "Steve likes
to separate himself from people, but I'm more open."
In addition to the libraries, Georgis was charged with
creating living and dining areas, four bedrooms, three baths, a family room
and a kitchen as well as studio and storage space for Shearer's art. Moving
into a house would have been easier. But the couple, committed to living in
New York, rejected the notion of a town house. "They're too dominated by
established geometries," observes Shearer. Instead, she and Gould preferred
the diversity a loft would offer, since its raw space could be subdivided
according to individual needs. "We just stripped it and began again," says
Georgis. "The floors were a patchwork of wood with nails sticking out, and
there were few interior walls."
An important consideration is that the loft lets Shearer
work where she lives and still have access to a second studio that she
maintains nearby. Her artistic process is complex, and her intriguingly
cerebral, figural and abstract mixed-media works involve all the senses. "I
do the 'clean' work at home, things like drawings and models," she explains,
"and the dirty work, involving painting and making sculptures, at the other
place."
Her twelve-and-a-half-foot-high work area merges
unencumbered into the open dining and living areas, which reflect Gould and
Shearer's desire for spatial and visual variety in their working and living
arrangements. "It was a matter of careful negotiation to make everything
function together," Shearer remarks.
Georgis, who had to accomplish this task, agrees. "It
seemed impossible to keep both the openness of the loft and at the same time
fit in different types of rooms and areas," he says. The fact that his
clients came to their new residence with a collection of ostensibly
unloftlike antique furniture was the least of his problems. "There actually
is a strong affinity between the simplicity of eighteenth-century American
furniture and an industrial loft," he says. "I just tried to deploy the
pieces in a spare, modern way." In blending these two aesthetics, the
architect proposed that wood moldings, doors, floors, cabinets and shelves
appear throughout. "I wanted the same basic material everywhere for visual
continuity," says Shearer, who favored cherrywood because its warm tones
tend a richness to the high ceilings and off-white walls.
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At the same time, it was important to preserve the
architectural character of the original spaces. "Steve loved the cast-iron
columns, the pressed-tin ceiling and the original windows that imbue the
place with its nineteenth-century industrial character," points out project
architect Silvina Goefron. But keeping those elements required no small
effort. For example, much of the pressed-tin ceiling in the living, dining
and work areas had to be removed, stripped and reinstalled. "We were
determined to keep the old glass in the front windows," Georgis notes. "The
contractor, Curt Royston of RBMc, had to reproduce the original windows with
this glass, besides adding wood floors, ceilings, walls, fifteen tons of
air-conditioning, a new electric service and extensive plumbing. And he had
to do all this in four months."
The large axial gallery cuts a swath through the loft,
punctuated by the cast-iron columns. Like a row of tall trees, they
underscore the loft's approximately ninety-foot length.
The windowless middle section of the apartment contains
Gould's library and the family room. The family room, which includes a
dining area and kitchen, seems an anomaly—as if one had just stepped
into a New England farmhouse. There are Windsor chairs, a William and Mary
tavern table and nineteenth-century English iron lanterns. The effect is
heightened by the cherry molding that defines the spaces.
Georgis, however, has subtly modernized the farmhouse
vernacular by heightening the flow of spaces between the rooms and
mitigating any suggestion of the claustrophobia that can settle like a cloud
over windowless interior rooms. He installed sliding wood doors to separate
the family room from the gallery. "You can catch glimpses of other rooms
from various vistas and angles," Georgis notes. "Yet you still have a
feeling of privacy and enclosure."
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| ABOVE: The family room features a
William and Mary tavern table and Windsor chairs. | |
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The architect then dropped the ceiling in the family
room, which endows the room with a more intimate scale than the living areas
at the front of the loft. And he countered the possibility of a closed-in
effect by installing a cove on which is mounted a strip of incandescent
lights. The softly suffused light bouncing upward makes the actual height of
the ceiling somewhat ambiguous. "The ceiling was essential in unifying the
kitchen, dining and family area," Shearer comments.
This intermediate zone, where private and public spaces
come together, is backed by a row of bedrooms for the couple's children and
guests. The master bedroom is located at the end of the gallery, and it
exudes its own distinctive atmosphere, with a fireplace, dark wood, paneled
walls and trim and a mix of period furnishings. While lofts rarely come with
fireplaces, Gould was clear about his desire for the comfort of a crackling
fire, as was Shearer, since she writes in the bedroom. "I'm like Descartes,"
she adds. "I like, to write in my bed. I'm not a desk person."
From the master bedroom a back passage leads through a
couple of baths to Gould's library. There, tiers of shelves hold antiquarian
books on the natural sciences and other scientific tomes as well as Gould's
own books which include The Mismeasure
of Man and The
Panda Thumb.
Gould, who spends half the year teaching at Harvard,
naturally took a particular interest in the design of the library. Yet there
was one other place where he participated extensively in the selection of
furnishings—the dining area. Instead of placing a single suite of
chairs around their Stickley table, Gould and Shearer carefully constructed
an arrangement that characterizes the evolution of the chair from the
seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. "The selection reflects my
concern for geometries and stylistic change, and Steve's for evolution,"
says Shearer. It begins with a seventeenth-century American slatback
armchair, followed by a William and Mary side chair, an American Queen Anne,
a Hepplewhite, an Empire chair, a Stickley side chair, a Ruhlmann side chair
and, finally, Robert Venturi's 1980s reprise of a Queen Anne chair. "Steve
did quite a bit of research on the collection," says his wife. "But we still
want to add an out-of-control rococo Victorian chair and an International
Style modem chair." The ensemble underscores one of Gould's main points in
Full House: Evolution is not a matter of progress from simple to ever
more complicated forms but to a variety of types and forms.
Gould and Shearer's loft seems to operate as a metaphor
for the theoretical concerns they express in their work. Its straightforward
plan yields a variety of opportunities for their activities, while the
changing character of each area and room continually redefines the mood and
sensibility of the whole. The result, to borrow from Stephen Jay Gould, well
demonstrates "the spread of excellence."
[ Suzanne Stephens, "Making it New in Soho," 1997
Architectural Digest, 54 (2): 108-115, 190. ]
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