The good old treehouse in the backyard has come a long way, but not as long a way as its designers at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville claim in their latest flurry of press releases. Sorry 'bout that, Josh Siebert. Who's he? He's the much esteemed co-founder of the architectural firm Modus Studio, who says he looked far and wide for anything similar to this hanging treehouse's design but found it not. For its cantilevered construction seems suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support. Not to mention enough activities to entertain the kiddies at a first-class day camp.
Without being too much of a spoilsport, let's just say we here at the Democrat-Gazette have learned over the years not to throw around terms like unique, one-of-a-kind and sui generis. Whether we're critics of architecture and the other arts--or columnists, reporters, editors, ad men or the janitorial staff. For we all stand on the shoulders of giants in this business as in all others, including architecture.
In this case, the giant has a name: Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Fallingwater is a masterpiece of American architecture outside Pittsburgh and has attracted visitors for generations. It always helps to have an angel behind any project. And Frank Lloyd Wright put together a dream of a home/waterfall/daydream.
Another such dreamer and doer was Verna Garvan, namesake and financial angel of Garvan Woodland Gardens who in 1985 donated her own private garden--where she experimented with Arkansas flora of every kind; wildflowers, tulips, native trees and shrubs, and so variously on--to the University of Arkansas School of Architecture. And now a floating treehouse worth upwards of a million dollars will decorate the land, too.
"We really wanted to introduce the magic of being in the canopy of the trees," says Becca Ohman, who's the director at Garvan Gardens. "It gets you into another world." A world our primordial ancestors may have known well as they swung from tree to tree. For there's no magic like the oldest kind, which has yet to lose its attraction for that peculiar species of fauna called Homo Sapiens.
The treehouse "doesn't necessarily have stilts or structure that immediately clues you in to how it's being suspended," says Mr. Siebert. "It is going to feel like it floats in the canopy." But nothing that lasts does so without the kind of care and maintenance it takes to undergird a work of art like either Fallingwater or this new project in Arkansas. "Our hope," says Mr. Siebert, "is that ... [this latest addition to Garvan Gardens] would last 20 to 40 years or more [if] maintained properly and used properly. It's definitely not temporary, but we also accept that architecture in nature, it does require a certain level of care to stay as pristine as you want to make it."
Amen brother, and how, for no matter how much talk is invested in a project, none of it can guarantee everlasting fame and fortune, and those who would like to think so might well remember old Ozymandias' boast:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said, 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear;
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!'
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
There the poem by Shelley ends, but surely not the vanity of mankind.
Editorial on 01/14/2017