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 This is a suspended room we call The Flying Carpet.
The Flying Carpet is a room that came straight out of Eric's imagination. He was obviously raised on a steady diet of Dr. Suess
books. Who says you can't have crow's nests and catwalks in your own home?
Eric's motto is "Be 12".
I loved to ride horses when I was 12.
He tells me, "So ride horses now."
He loved treeforts when he was 12.
Voilá - The Flying Carpet.
The Flying Carpet is a room in our house. It is 7' x 9', with a catwalk going out to it. It has a pulley, a rope, and a basket, and is
suspended 20 feet above the living room floor. The Flying Carpet (tapis volant?) is a guest room, and in the morning, guests will have
a thermos of coffee and a couple of croissants hoisted up to them.
When you come up with an idea like building a suspended room with a catwalk in your living room,
contractors balk. The Flying Carpet does not fall into the category of The Way We've Done Things Before.
We were lucky to find André and Pierre and Michel, framers who were not afraid to try something new.
The Flying Carpet is cantilevered, then suspended on 1" diameter steel rods, and it's as solid and conservatively engineered as you could dream of.
Another example of how The Way We've Done Things Before can cloud your vision: drywall sheets come
in 4' x 8' standard size: if you screw two of them horizontally to the wall on top of one another, there you
go - you've got yer 8 foot ceiling. We think you can have more fun with design than to let the standard
sizes of manufactured materials dictate what your house looks like. It's not that tough to cut another
sheet of drywall and make your ceiling 9 or 10 or 11 feet high… and it makes the room feel different - you
are uplifted, able to jump and sing freely in a room this height. I think that when you are made to feel
small (as you are in a room with 11-foot ceilings), you feel more like a kid again.
In his book The Poetics of Space
, Gaston Bachelard talks about experiencing your own immensity when faced with an immense proportion. For example, when you look out onto an immense vista - a huge
body of water, an endless field of wheat, an immense mountain - you feel dwarfed by it, but are also
made aware of the vastness that is inside you, because you see it reflected externally… You feel this
sense of life, and perhaps your self, being limitless. I love to experience that feeling when looking out onto
the watery horizon of a Great Lake, or an ocean, or, (and this is a tiny stretch, but I think the point still translates) a tall-ceilinged, open-concept living room.
"In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however
ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it."
- Beaudelaire, Journaux intimes. (as cited in Bachelard's Poetics of Space.)
So this is what we love about vast spaces: they are, ultimately, intimate. They reflect back at us our own
inner immensity. We stand staring off cliffs at grand vistas, we look out to endless horizons.. and instead
of overwhelming us by the largeness, we are instead put in contact with our innermost selves, by the vista becoming the symbol of our inner immensity.
When it comes to house design, this is not to say that every house must be big. But every good house
needs to take into account its views, its long stretches, its one manifestation of vastness. Not
necessarily a big house, but a big view, is required for a space to feel intimate. How do you achieve this
in the design? Take a look at what you have to work with. Even the sight of a massive industrial wall gives
us a sense of vastness… or a long view of a street, or a wide view of a lawn… you don't have to live on a mountaintop or on an ocean cliff to bring a sense of vastness into view.
For inspiration, have a look at these books that we found interesting:
- The Good Home - Dennis Wedlick
- The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-Centred Society - Lucy R. Lippard
- Wood: New Directions in Design and Architecture - Naomi Stungo
- The Old Way of Seeing (And How To Get It Back) - Jonathon Hale
- The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places - Gaston Bachelard
- A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander, published by Oxford University Press
(The concept of this book is amazing - a must-read if you're designing your own space, or if you're
just making a bunch of choices in a pre-designed home. It looks at how we inhabit spaces, by
breaking down their social uses: there are sections called Child Caves, Workspace Enclosures,
Different Chairs, Short Passages, and Things From Your Life. The theory is that structure follows social spaces.)
In
The Old Way of Seeing, (and in a TV documentary about beauty), we learned about The Golden Mean:
Beauty = 1:1.618
This ratio became apparent in our pre-design thoughts when we realized we were in love with the
rectangular windows on the older industrial buildings we admired in Ottawa and the scale of grain elevators in Saskatchewan.
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Do you
know how we arrived at the shape of our home? We walked onto the lot that we loved, and looked at what topography we had to work with. There they were: two beautiful, solid
outcroppings of pink granite to contend with. We thought of the birds, and the bears, and the future neighbours, and and our bank account, and decided not to blast any rock. So
the house we ended up imagining takes its severe dimensions (20 feet wide and 70 feet long) from the narrow trough that runs between the outcroppings of rock. We also knew that if
we built up high enough, we'd get a view of the Gatineau River. So our building had to be tall and slim… and the shape of the grain elevator that we'd admired started to play in
our imaginations.
The result of not blasting or taking down too many trees is ready-made landscaping… beautiful rock formations. Our landscaping budget afterward, then, is
minimal: some seeds, some wooden paths, some pea gravel.
(So you see, the photos of us pretending to prepare and eat marinara sauce in our imaginary kitchen weren't just us
clowning… We were being very serious designers - deciding what rooms could really fit between these two outcroppings of granite.)
Could a functional kitchen really fit
here? One way to find out (especially if you're not great at visualizing 3-D spaces) is to go to the land, take some orange surveyor's tape, and map out the imagined house, and
literally walk through it to see if the dimensions feel right. Sit at the table! Place your desk where you want it! Lie down in your bed! (Just watch for poison ivy.)
We're thinking about installing a masonry heater for next winter. Big outlay of cash.
Here are a couple of websites we've been steered to by friends:
Our sources of Inspiration:
I'd love to be able to list various architecture firms as influences. I like what Louis Kahn has written about light, and I admire the
architects who put huge windows in industrial buildings a century ago. But our influences can mainly be traced back to:
Dr. Suess
Tim Burton and Pee-Wee Herman
Scandanavian minimalism… or, simple red barns on rock.
Other sources of inspiration:
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