It is possible to discuss the current condition of construction in North carolina by referring to a geologic event that happened between one humdred and fifty and 200 million years ago: a great geologic uplift, known as the Cape Fear Mid-foot ( arch ), pushed what is now North carolina in excess several hundred feet. The mid-foot ( arch ) also raised the sea contemporary houses floor, which had once been joined with South america, and the swells produced by this change created the Outer Banks, a sequence of barrier destinations that are even farther ocean going than in any other perhaps the Atlantic Seaboard. As a result, North carolina has superficial estuaries and rivers and only one major harbor at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, which is made treacherous by ocean going shoals. Shifting river patterns caused by the Cape Fear Mid-foot ( arch ), which continues to rise, remove topsoil thus giving North carolina less well off garden soil than in surrounding regions. The lack of estuaries and rivers for transport, inaccessible harbors and poor garden soil meant that early settlements in North carolina were modest. For a lot of its history, North carolina was a land of small landowners, its population tossed across an infinite landscape.
Though we have become the 10th largest state in the nation, our dispersed settlement pattern persists to this day. And that dispersal has created among North Carolinians a spirit of independence that is individualistic, self-sufficient, inspiring, and proud. If we have less wealth, we have less pretense. A long history of dwelling apart can also engender a people who are watchful of their neighborhood friends, self-righteous, and at times dour. I believe that all these qualities can be found in the construction of North carolina, not only in the past but also in the present.
Today an urban crescent nearly 200 miles long straddles the Cape Fear Mid-foot ( arch ) along Interstate 85, from Charlotte to Raleigh, an urban banana-like farm where, as every proud Carolinian will tell you, there is chardonnay on every table, NPR in every car, and enough digital progress to make, if not a Silicon Pit, a silicon Piedmont. Parallel to this line, which is about eight miles wide, there lies an adult North carolina, a quieter place where thousands of small frame houses, vegetable gardens and barns rest in the countryside. In these places it is possible to see an construction of plain living that is generated by hard-working people not opposed to wealth but not very pleased with opulence either. I believe there is a rare beauty here, described in the artwork of Darlene Blakeslee, Francis Speight, Maud Gatewood, and Gregory Ivy, and in the images of Bayard Wooten.
The diversity of plant and animal life in North carolina is another legacy of the Cape Fear Mid-foot ( arch ). Six fully distinct ecological specific zones extend the state, from the sub-tropics of the region to the Proto-Canadian climate of the highest mountain range east of the Mississippi. Today our construction trends towards sameness across this tapestry of plants and climate, but it was not always so. To a degree that seems remarkable now, the early settlement pattern of North carolina tells a human story of ordinary buildings near the land, as varied as the foothills and coast plains on which they stand.
The first buildings in North carolina were sustainable to their roots: built of local materials, embedded in the landscape, oriented towards the sun and piece of cake. These folks were that is generated by Local Americans, not Europeans, in the eastern part of our state. In 1585 English explorer and artist John White documented them in drawings that show a local people at rest in nature. For over 300 years this pattern of local adaptation would continue to persist across the state.
In the mountain range, for example, farmers built their houses on wind-sheltered slants facing south, next to a spring or a creek. They selected and planted rod pinto beans and morning glories to shade their porches in summer. Their houses were raised on stone piers to level the slope and to allow hillside water to strain underneath. The crops and the animals they raised varied from mountain pit to river bottom, according to how steep the land was and how the sun came over the mountain ridge. Their barns varied in pit to another location for the same reasons.
Strewn across the Piedmont hills of North carolina are flue-cured tobacco barns, meant to dry what was, for over 250 years, the state’s prominent cash plant. Sixteen to twenty-four feet rectangular and usually the same height, these folks were sized to fit wine racks of tobacco leaves put up inside to dry in heat that could reach 180°F. Capped with a low-pitched gable roof, these lowly barns remind me of Greek wats or temples. Legions of them populate the landscape, yet no two are the same because farmers modified each standard barn with outdoor garden sheds to suit the micro-climate of his land. To know where to build a shed onto his tobacco barn, the farmer had to know where the sun rose and set, where the good winds began, where the bad weather began and when it came. He designed his house just as carefully because the lives of his children depended on his knowledge. The philosopher Wendell Maqui berry has written that in such awareness of place lies the hope of the world. Ordinary people who had no idea these folks were architects designed and built these extraordinary barns and farmhouses across North carolina. Their constructors are nameless, yet they embody the wisdom of successive generations.
An equally extraordinary group of rustic cottages at Nags Head on the Outer Banks were also built on instinct for place — not for farming, but for summers at the beach. The Nags Head cottages date from the 1910-1940 era, and for nearly one hundred years have been the first things hurricanes minted being released from the Atlantic. Though made of wood mounting, their constructors made them sturdy enough to resist danger, yet light enough to welcome sun and piece of cake, increasing each cottage on wooden stilts to avoid floods and provide views of the water. Porches on their east and south sides guaranteed a dry deck in any weather, but there were no porches on the north side where bad weather hits the region. Clad in juniper shingles that have weathered since they were built, the Nags Head cottages were referred to by former News & Observer editor Jonathan Daniels as the “unpainted aristocracy. ” Today they seem as local to their place as the sand dunes.
Mountain houses, Piedmont barns, and water cottages suggest that there is a significant, direct way of building that, left to themselves, most non-architect, non-designer makers will discover. I can see this design ethic in corn cribs and linen mills, in peanut barns and in terms of how early settlers dovetailed firewood to generate a vacation cabin. These structures are to construction what words are to poetry. I see this ethic in terms of how a farmer stores his corn because a corncrib is simpler and quieter than most things we build today but no less valid for its simplicity.
I think that the same ethic is present in the minds of men and women who want buildings today, because it shows up in structures unencumbered by style, fashion, appearance commissions, or advertising. In countless DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION bridges, soybean elevators, and mechanics’ workshops across North carolina, I sense the practical mindset of this state.
Good building was much in demand in North carolina in the years following World War II, when the state struggled to emerge as a progressive leader of the New South. The director of the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, Dr. J. S. Dorton, wanted to build a new livestock pavilion that would make “the NC State Fair the most modern plant in the world. ” His architect was Matthew Nowicki, a brilliant young Enhance architect who had arrived in North carolina in 1948 to instruct at the freshly founded School of Design at North carolina State College.
Immensely talented yet foreign, Nowicki had an unassuming and practical attitude towards building and clients. He needed it, because he proposed to fling two immense concrete arches into the sky, anchor them at an angle to the earth, and spin a three-inch-thick roof on steel cables between the arches, creating what was one of the most efficient roof spans ever made. Strange as it looked, Dorton Arena’s practical efficiency made sense to his tobacco-chewing, country boy clients the way a tobacco barn or a John Deere tractor would. When it was finished, the news and Observer declared that it was “a great architectural wonder that has a tendency to lasso the sky. ” It remains today the best-known North carolina building beyond your state.