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io a motorist or peaestnan travelling Main St. in either direction, Mr. Lee said, “it will read like three very nice homes. Viewed obliquely, in a progressive manner, the hyphens will disappear into the spaces between the large masses.”
That, he continued, is another reason the addition is built right to the property line on Main St., rather than set back from the road. That shields the viewer from seeing the entire building at the same time, “reducing the impression of mass.”.
He compared the process of judging a building by its drawings to judging a person by a photograph. “Just as a photo doesn’t really tell all about a person, so a plan is strictly a two-dimensional expression of a project. It can be terribly misleading.”
And, Mr. Lee added, architectural drawings are not a medium most people are used to seeing and interpreting. Looking at the rendering of the Main St. elevation, for example, the building is striking in its size. “But no one will ever see it from that perspective.” To do that, he explained, the viewer would have to be somewhere on the Stuart property looking toward Main St. Even then, the homes along the west side of Main St. would screen much of the building.
Prior to beginning the design, Mr. Lee said, his firm did extensive research on the existing architecture of the town. The goal was to create a building “that is compatible, like a hand in glove with Washington, Virginia.”
Allen Greenberg, the firm’s namesake and principal, is perhaps the foremost architect of the classicist school and, according to Mr. Lee, “one of the few who still designs buildings with an appreciation of the architectural heritage of the United States.”
The Founding Fathers, he continued, “all had ideas about architecture and its role in expressing the vision of a nation.” In the young United States, with its distinct character as a republic, much of the architecture “expressed the values of republics,” especially the classical
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