explorations and endeavors of ian jean gilpin cozzens

the former Polish National Home

(in the store)


Olneyville Housing, the neighborhood community development corporation, commissioned this print from me to celebrate the opening of their newly renovated headquarters.

It was really interesting to draw this building: it's pretty ordinary and prosaic, nothing super dramatic or what might be called "architectural" in that flashy sense that people use the word today...

... but in the process of drawing it, I perceived what care was taken in designing it. To draw a building from before the computer-aided-design era is to step into the mind of the person or people who drew it originally; to trace over the lines that they laid out, to understand the decisions they made as you seek out the logic behind their shapes and construction. It's almost ghostly: the presence of someone else's hands and mind is so strong.

I became aware of the proportions of the different faces of the building, the pale stone banding used to create visual divisions and a satisfying cornice line, the way the windowsills and doors intersect that banding, the decorative bricks placed in patterns that are innately proportioned to the dimensions of the bricks themselves, the way the windows open wider for more light as the road descends (that's why the perspective in this image looks somewhat off, by the way: that's a steepish slope, not perspectival regression), the sensitive negotiation of how to make a building meet a corner asymmetrically and still look symmetrical and formal...

...and also, to give the renovators due credit, their elegant solution to a code- and ADA-compliant entrance, where the old entrance featured just a couple of concrete steps going down from the front door.

There's so much going on in this simple neighborhood building! This is what I am interested in about architecture — not showy facades or strange angles or novel technologies — but thoughtful solutions to the basic design problems that surround us everywhere.

It is in those problems that we encounter the crucial question: how do I make a beautiful thing that fits well into my world?