Nick Drummond [The Cottage]

In the midst of a curriculum focused on the future forest, I found inspiration in the details of the past. The Cottage emerged out of the first doodle of my four-week stay at Overlook. The ink on trace drawing depicts something resembling a Victorian turret with orange windows and highlighter-green shingles. The caption reads, “The old spire on the old house on the old tip-top of the old estate”.

Upon viewing historic photographs of the property, I was taken with the grand turrets and wrap-around porches of the old home, which emerged like a ghost from the faded photographs. Constructed in 1902 and expanded in 1919, the Cottage was the original main residence at Overlook, though a newer, more practical house has since replaced it. I built the piece not only to remember this fallen artifact, but also in an effort to gain a more tactile understanding of the interconnectedness of architecture, landscape, and time. Though I was hesitant to focus on a building in a landscape architecture class, buildings are, in fact, an assemblage of manipulated landscape materials; choreographed to both shape and adhere to human and natural processes.

Limiting myself to found or crude materials, I expressed this idea through a simplified design and construction method, with a final product that is intended to mature over time. The pale yellow leaves of the surrounding Katsura trees illuminate the structure in the early fall, with a new effect brought forth by the snowfall in winter. And eventually, like its predecessor, The Cottage will fall victim to time, collapsing, rotting, and fading from view.

-ND