Pocantico Writing Residency: Museum of the Future

Through my work with Teachers & Writers, I was invited to be a Pocantico writer in residence at the Breuer House on the grounds of the Rockefeller Estate about an hour north of New York City, on a hilltop overlooking a particularly wide part of the Hudson River.

Never have I a been a writer-in-residence in such a unique environment. The landscape and grounds around the mansion are ample, pastoral and at the same time home to a fabulous and quirkily-curated Modernist sculpture garden. 

But the really interesting thing was living in the Breuer House, which was created by Marcel Breuer in the late 1940s for a MoMa exhibit to be a "house of the future." It was displayed in 1949 in the MoMa sculpture garden and then, on the verge of being dismantled, moved in pieces to the Rockefeller estate where it was reconstructed on a hillock. This is where it still is. 

There was something totally dislocating and magical about inhabiting a “house of the future” that was built before I was born. There was a playfulness and an intimacy in these pre-plastic modernist spaces of wood and stone (Breuer was enamored with the natural landscape and designed his houses to sit within nature).

So much was particular, odd, and charming in its particularity. The cool, mottled surface of the slate floor. The clever, wood sliding doors that created a series of spaces an views within a space, like this one from my loft sleeping area.

 There was so much that Breuer got right. The future—now!—was everywhere. The open multipurpose spaces, each room's wall of plate glass, which obscured the distinction between inside and outside, reminded me of the Richard Meier construct on Plaza Street near us in Brooklyn, the feeling of being in a Bo Concept catalog.
 

I  found myself in my free moments looking through books on Marcel Breuer and came across this quote in which he expressed his idea of architecture as  “physical aesthetic."  I kept it on my desk.

Colors which you hear with your ears,

Sound to see with eyes

The void you touch with you elbows

The taste of space on your tongue

the fragrance of dimension

The juice of stone.
 

The juice of stone! Architecture was a kind of sensual poetic problem for him. This is obvious of course, but it was the first time I truly understood in a physical  way that architecture is a kinesthetic art. 

And as I explored Breuer's architectural process, which I found a different kind of inspiration for my own work too. I worked on my novel each day, and I became more aware of this work as a concrete process—even an architectural one.

It is extremely rare for a working writer to have time in seclusion, in a landscape of such natural beauty, as well as an interior space of such creative vision. The two together made for a powerful and dynamic writing residency.