Simplicity

I've been out tromping around old houses again. This time at Hancock Shaker Museum in Massachusetts.

The museum is definitely worth the visit -- and I learned all sorts of things I didn't know about the Shakers. I have actually read a little about them, and I'd seen the film by Ken Burns (which the museum staff say is good, but has some inaccuracies in it), but still there was a lot more to hear and read about. And nothing compares to seeing the incredible beauty of their handwork. The essence of simplicity, form following function.

The museum has many of the work spaces preserved, the dairy, the kitchens, the weaving loft, the woodworking areas, the laundry, basket making, blacksmith, cider mill.  The weaving loft (over the dairy - an interesting choice) made me want to jump the rope and get closer.  But I managed to restrain myself.  Just barely.

The round barn is the iconic structure of the site.  I stood scratching my head at the drawings of how it was used.  A three story barn, the second story had the door to drive in wagons with hay, via a ramp built to the second level.  Animals came in on the first story, and hay could be piled up almost three stories high.  The barn actually has wooden floors through most of it -- rather than dirt -- and they were scrubbed every morning.

In fact making things easy to clean seemed to be a driving design factor - beds had wheels so they could be moved. Chairs where hung on the walls so that floors could be easily swept and mopped, cabinets and chests went all the way to the floor and the ceiling so that dirt wouldn't accumulate under them or dust settle on top, even the window design for many of the buildings made it possible to remove both the upper and lower windows so that they could be washed without climbing ladders.  About 150 years before anybody else thought to do the same.

I also had the impression that they didn't use color - maybe from the Burns film, but it's not true.  In fact, the ochre they seemed to prefer for some spaces is positively mind bending.

And all of their meeting rooms, completely unadorned in any way, were painted in some part, an intense Prussian blue, that turned greener over the years as the linseed oil used as the binder yellowed.

What you wouldn't know about, until you actually stand in the buildings, is their skill in design for natural light.  I've visited enough places built in about the same time frame (early to mid-1800's) to realize that they were masters at building so that natural light would come into every room.  And when you're there taking pictures with only the sunshine streaming through the windows and thinking about all that hand work being done with only natural light, you can understand the reasoning. And then you think about the long winters and the many gray, rainy days and you really get the point.