Rick Joy

Do you think his use of materials and building form are convincing?

In the Foreword of Desert Works, Steven Holl comments on Rick Joy’s work as that where “the overall phenomenon which is a result of material, detail, space, texture, light, and sound, allows architectural form to be almost negligible.”  I found this aspect of Rick Joy’s work to be very strong in the 152-foot-long house on Woodstock Farm in Vermont.  The simplicity of the form allows the home to rest peacefully and quietly with the surrounding forests and hills.  The stone texture, cedar cladding, and cedar roof shingles create the feeling of age and a tie to stories of English settlers’ lives in pastoral settings.  The 152-foot-long house’s simple form does not need to be any more or less than what it is because the materials (both exterior and interior) and the placement of windows and entrances already hold a hierarchy in telling the story of the house.  There is one area in the house, however, that I find not as resolved as the rest.  The hallway (labeled as No. 6, the Gallery, in the floor plan) which leads to bedrooms appears overwhelmed by the heavy, 12-feet-on-center, black steel frames.  It seems to be an area where the form and materials are not complementing one another.

Do you think the experiential characteristic of his projects is in anyway compromised by his fundamental basics?

Rick Joy is one of those few architects whose use of simple materials and forms enhances the experiential characteristics of his projects.  The simplicity of his architecture allows the surrounding context/ environment to come to the foreground, and lets the building itself become a background.  The building becomes a tool that aids the user in experiencing the surrounding environment.  This can observed in both the 152-foot-long house at Woodstock Farm and the Tubac House.  Joy recognized that the the houses at either site could not compete with the lushness of the forests and hills in Vermont or the mountainous landscape in Arizona.  It is also evident by his choice of materials in the Tubac House that the house is meant to blend with the desert flora and the burnt, rusty colors of the immediate sandy landscape.  In the Tubac House, Joy also makes an effort to connect the living spaces with the outdoor environment – in a way similar to Glenn Murcutt’s Simpson-Lee House (click on photo below).