Henry Chapman Mercer’s Quixotic Castles and Caves

Fonthill Castle (all photos by me)

During my recent trip to Pennsylvania, I visited three remarkable buildings in Doylestown, Bucks County: the Mercer Museum, the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and Fonthill Castle. Archaeologist, artifact collector, and tilemaker Henry Chapman Mercer (1856–1930) designed and built the buildings to embody his interests in history, craft, and storytelling, innovatively employing reinforced, cast-in-place concrete throughout.
 
I’ve previously written on Mercer’s architecture, particularly drawing from University of Oregon professor Bill Kleinsasser’s insights. Like Mercer, Bill critiqued the effects of modernization and industrialization on design, especially the rise of standardization and the loss of diversity found in historical buildings. As a figure associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, Mercer championed vernacular architecture, nature-inspired motifs, and the craftsman-designer’s role. He stood out for his ability to weave legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology into his work. His three buildings are not only unique but also deeply personal and evocative. Bill appreciated their visual qualities, the lessons they offer, and their creator’s eccentricity.
 

The Mercer Museum rises an imposing six stories, housing Mercer’s immense collection of pre-industrial tools. The central atrium is crammed with objects, many of which are hung vertiginously from the ceiling above. Narrow staircases and abrupt transitions shape the experience. The building doesn’t guide visitors through a clear sequence; instead, it asks them to navigate on their own terms. The density of artifacts and the verticality of the atrium create a kind of spatial compression. It may lack legibility, but it is undeniably absorbing.

 

The Mercer Museum.

Inside the museum.

The Tile Works operates to this day. Its architecture is low-slung, with thick concrete walls, a ground-level loggia bordering a central courtyard, and a roofline punctuated by numerous kiln chimneys—each one slightly different in shape and tile adornment. Inside, the layout follows the logic of production, with workspaces, kilns, and drying rooms arranged in a straightforward manner. The building extends the tradition of Pennsylvania German potters and continues to produce tiles using Mercer’s original molds and methods. Mercer drew inspiration from Spanish Mission-style architecture when designing the Tile Works—an unusual reference for Bucks County, but one that lends the structure a sense of restraint and clarity. That restraint stands in contrast to the more elusive formal logic of the Mercer Museum and Fonthill, where spatial organization feels less tied to function.

The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works.

Courtyard.

Reception Hall.

 

Fonthill served as Mercer’s home. The labyrinthine building sprawls across the site, fully enveloping an older stone farmhouse. It holds forty-four rooms of varying shapes and sizes, eighteen fireplaces, and thirty-two staircases. Mercer embedded tiles, inscriptions, and found objects throughout. The stairs shift direction, ceilings rise and fall, and windows frame fragments of landscape. Bill remarked on Mercer’s fascination with caves, castles, and literary imagery. That influence is evident in the building’s spatial unpredictability and whimsical turns.
 

Fonthill roofscape. The separate garage building (now the visitor center) is in the background.

Windows.

Fonthill's saloon (living room). Every one of the irregularly spaced columns is unique.

Section through a digital model of Fonthill. Click on the image to view an enlarged version. The complexity and level of detail evident in this section are remarkable. Big thanks to Jim Givens for allowing me to share this image here.

Now that I’ve been to all three of Mercer's buildings, I’ve thought again about Bill’s interest in them and their broader relevance to today’s architectural discourse: He clearly wasn’t asking us to emulate their forms; rather, he saw them as (pardon the pun) concrete expressions of personal conviction and lived experience. That was the takeaway. He noted their complexity and resistance to straightforward interpretation. In Bill’s words, each Mercer edifice emerges from “images, first recalled and then carefully developed, from his travels and studies . . . places real, and places imaginary.”

Bill recognized that an architect’s internal landscape—the memory, narrative, and inquiry it might encompass—can shape architectural form in ways that are both personal and coherent. Mercer drew inspiration from his extensive travels and the archaeological sites he explored. I certainly considered how his subjective preferences translated into the spatial and material decisions I experienced as I moved through each building. As Mercer did, we can all reflect upon our own memories, values, or narratives when designing. Such an approach can foster buildings that carry individual significance and sensory richness, shaped by our own story and those for whom we design.
 
Ultimately, I left Doylestown with impressions of buildings that resist easy interpretation but richly reward one’s attention. Mercer’s buildings don’t yield readily transferable design strategies. They resist reductive generalization, yet they epitomize what’s possible when architecture is inspired by memory and shaped by craft and conviction. The Mercer Museum, Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and Fonthill each convey Henry Mercer’s personal inspiration, improvisation, and principles. That’s what Bill saw in them, and what I tried to keep in view at each site.

A Splendid Torch: Henry Mercer’s Historical Connections (Part 1)

Fonthill, the home of Henry Chapman Mercer, Doylestown, Pennsylvania (photo by Concord - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40253187)

The following is the first of two posts devoted to a lengthy passage from Bill Kleinsasser’s 1981 edition of his self-published textbook, SYNTHESIS. His fascination with the work and interests of Henry Chapman Mercer is perhaps no more evident than in this reading. Like Mercer, Bill disdained the downsides of modernization and industrialization upon design and construction, particularly the primacy of standardization and the loss of rich diversity associated with many historical buildings. Like other followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, Mercer sought to extol the virtues of vernacular architecture, patterns inspired by nature, and the work of the craftsman-designer; however, what sets Mercer apart is the extent to which legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology influenced his approach to architecture.
 
Henry Mercer’s three major building designs—Fonthill Castle, the Mercer Museum, and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works—are peculiar and idiosyncratic, but they are also distinctive, evocative, and highly personal. In this regard, it’s not surprising Bill would be fascinated by their appearance, the lessons to be learned from them, and their eccentric author.
 
Part 1:  Imagery of Many Times and Many Places
Henry Mercer believed in knowledge as a means of establishing historical connections. He often repeated the verse:
 
Happy the man who sees in things
Their causes gone before
All fear he spurns beneath his feet
Nor dreads inexorable fate
And Acheron’s hungry roar.
 
Mercer knew and respected what had existed before. Not only was he a great student of his place, but also an active archaeologist and ethnologist for many years before he built his buildings. His Museum extended and expanded an earlier one. Fonthill gave new life to the colonial farmhouse it joined. The Tileworks made possible the preservation and development of the art of the Pennsylvania German potters. The Museum contained thousands of artifacts that portray history from the standpoint of toil by human hands, and on its grounds Mercer reconstructed a pioneer log cabin so that its eloquent example would not be lost. Fonthill preserves and displays native trees and plants, and contains another colonial farmhouse, repaired and given to the local nature club to be used. His buildings look old and feel old. They contain many old things, and they evoke old forms and old places. Made on the strength of knowledge and respect, they continue the past rather than destroy it.
 
Mercer was devoted to the study of all manifestations of life, and he argued that:

“We are here to protect humanity from mistakes, and if we do nothing better, we thoroughly justify our existence:  research, discovery, investigation, and longing to open a new door and to find out something never known before. What a burning fire it is and how it seizes upon us. I do hope that some of you have this fire lit within you. If so, add fuel, get hold of the splendid torch of knowledge and wave it about.”
 

Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, by Henry Mercer (photo by Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mercer’s historical awareness was an inspiration and a great source of ideas. Consequently, his buildings have a kinship with many places and different lives. Drawings and notations in his notebooks, written descriptions from his stories and papers, and photographs and drawings from his library all confirm that much of the character of his buildings resulted from images, first recalled and then carefully developed, from his travels and studies. These images include dimensions of spaces and small details, special qualities and entire places, places known only by literary descriptions, places real, and places imaginary. In The Building of Fonthill, Mercer wrote that:  
 
“The plan of the whole house was an interweaving of my own fancies blending with memories of my travels and suggestions from several engravings, in particular The Dutch Houskeeper by Gerard Dow, The Great Barn by Wovermans, and a lithograph now in my morning room, also a woodcut illustrating a story called Haunted in a book published about 1865 by Tinsleys magazine named A Stable for Nightmares. This picture gives me the night lighting of the morning room. The first interior imagined and clearly seen was that of the west side of the saloon seen when standing near the large window about eight feet from the door to the library. The arrangement of the rooms at different levels seen over the gallery in the saloon is a memory of a Turkish house seen by me from a rear garden in Salonica in 1886.”
 
Mercer did not write directly again of the inspiration of images and memories, but their importance is strongly suggested by mention in his notebooks, writings, and travel photographs of many places, imaginary and real. Included among these are:

• The cave temples of Ellora and Elephants in India.
• The sunken city of Epidaurus near the Pelloponesus.
• The home of Carabas (in The Book of Fools by Thackery).
• The chapels of San Luis Rey, San Juan Capistrano, and San Miguel in California (which reappear in the elements and shape of the Tileworks.
• The imaginary cities of Avalon, Antiglia, Montezuma, Huitzilo-Pochtli, and Manoa (in the tiles of Fonthill).
• Several caves of France and the southern United States.

Two years before his death in 1930, Henry Mercer wrote seven strange short stories described as “tales of wonder, in which the inexplicable is made to seem the probable, beyond heaven and earth, whose imaginative settings seemed to have appealed to his fancy as much as the threads upon which they are strung.” These seven stories reveal much about Mercer: his interest in coincidence and coincidental experience, his interest in crime, misfortune, pestilence; his interest in legends and the supernatural.

Burg Vichtenstein, a 12th century castle in Austria (photo by C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Castles
They (Mercer's stories) also contain repeated references to important memories and images, especially castles. In the story Castle Valley, Mercer recalls the often-told Bucks County legend of James Meredith, who tried to build a castle overlooking Castle Valley, failed in the attempt, and went mad. It is said that some of the castle stones are still in the foundation of a nearby bridge, which itself has long been a ruin. Henry Mercer was in fact a relative of the legendary James Meredith, and as Joseph Sandford writes in Mercer as Seen in His Fiction, “. . . we may wonder how much the family tradition may have contributed to the building of Fonthill and the Museum, or whether its architect has ever toyed with the idea of placing it on that hilltop overlooking the Neshaminy. It needs such a setting, but the hard practicality which had permitted its builder to dare without destruction must have forbidden it. Yet we cannot help but feel that in his successful accomplishment he has built a memorial to the vision of his thwarted kinsman.”
 
Here are Mercer’s words from Castle Valley (the first speaker is the character, Charles Meredith, representing Mercer himself):

“Very delightful,” I said, “but I don’t quite understand. You have idealized things, not too much perhaps, but why the castle on the hill? Isn’t that going a little too far?

“I expected you to say that” he returned, laughing.

“The legend,” I continued, “is somewhat vague and hardly justifies you in deliberately putting it on canvas.”

“What legend?” he asked. “I know of no legend.”

“Do you mean to say,” I returned, “that you have painted a castle on that hill, without knowing that there was a castle there at one time, or the beginning of one, at least?”

“Never heard a word of it,” said he in astonishment.

“Why, the place is called Castle Valley,” I exclaimed, “from that fact, and I ought to know something of it, as the builder is supposed to be one of my ancestors. But it’s all gone long ago, the stones were used to build the bridge yonder.”

Pryor listened in surprise as I went on to explain that my ancestor in question, according to family tradition, had been in some way thwarted in the singular project of building a castle on the hill before us. Whether because of the hostility of his father and friends, or his own mental derangement, his architectural dream had never been realized. The walls had hardly risen above their foundations when the poor fellow died.

“I always felt very sorry for this,” I added. “But it is one of hose unfortunate memories that lose their tragedy and blend into folklore as time goes on. What strikes me as very remarkable though is the fact that you should be ignorant of the castle story and yet paint the castle one hundred and fifty years later. The castle became an ideal that we hold on to, in spite of the Devil and all his angels.”

“Just as I thought it was from the first, without knowing why.“ said Pryor.

“Now that the stone is gone, it is fortunate that I have seen your castle, thunderstorm included,” I continued, “or I should never have known what you were talking about. So much for hypnotism. But how wonderful, how astonishing it is, merely as a picture! Don’t you think so? Those unearthly pinnacles that pierce the clouds! If I were a painter, as you are, and saw a thing like that, I would feel that I had got hold of my ladder of fortune and only need to climb up, up, up.”

“But the ladder is yours as well as mine.”

“Why” I am not the painter, and never could be.”

“What are you?”

I got up, seized his hand, and looked deep into his glowing eyes. “I didn’t know, till just now,” said I. “I thought I was a politician. But I have decided that I am an architect!”
 
Though without the same ecstasy, castle imagery appears again and again in Mercer’s notes and records of travels. He photographed many real castles in France, Germany, and Austria; he drew them floating in the air and emerging half-hidden from forests. He collected etchings and engravings of them, and he wrote of them in several other short stories. He was also most interested in hose buildings bearing the greatest resemblance to castles: factories, coal breakers, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and, at least in form, skyscrapers. (WK/1981)

To be continued . . .

*    *    *    *    *    *

Next:  Part 2: Layering, Light, Caves

 

Whole Spirit and Mood

Henry Mercer's Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, Doylestown, PA (photo credit: CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1300580

It’s been my pleasure to periodically share excerpts from SYNTHESIS, the self-published textbook written by the late Bill Kleinsasser, one of the significant teachers and architects who shaped my architectural worldview. In the following passage from his book, Bill’s understanding of the idiosyncratic work of Henry Chapman Mercer illustrates a specific design principle, in this case the nature of an appropriate response to place. In turn, Bill drew a parallel between the memorable landscape of Bucks County, Pennsylvania (which he was as thoroughly familiar with as Mercer was) and John Ruskin’s influential writings about how places are experienced. The spirit and mood evoked by this piece perfectly suits my contemplative frame of mind on this gray mid-November morning in Eugene. 

Whole Spirit and Mood 

When Mercer lived this Bucks County countryside was partly wild, partly cultivated, partly inhabited, partly empty of human life. It was variegated, challenging, mysterious, and evocative of previous life. Mercer studied this land all his life and knew it well. He travelled through it again and again, searched it for its archaeological secrets, and found in it many inspirations. John Ruskin, whose works Mercer undoubtedly knew very well, probably would have called this land “woody green country,” a kind of country especially suited for habitation by industrious, conservative, but romantic people, and Mercer was all of these. He often revealed his strong feelings and romanticism about Bucks County. He loved to tell about the place, and he did it well.  

As if guiding Mercer’s response to this rich woody green Bucks County countryside, John Ruskin’s words in 1838 had been:

“. . . be it observed that anything which is apparently enduring and unchangeable gives us the impression rather of future than of past, duration of existence, but anything which being perishable and from its nature subject to change has yet existed to great age, gives us an impression of antiquity though of course none of stability. A very old forest tree is a thing subject to the same laws of nature as ourselves. It is an energetic being, liable to an approaching death. Its age is written on every spray, and because we see that it is subject of life and annihilation like our own, we imagine it must be capable of the same feelings and possess the same faculties, and above all others, memory. It is always telling us about the past, never pointing to the future. We appeal to it, as to a thing which has seen and felt during a life similar to our own though of ten times its duration and therefore receive from it a perpetual impression of antiquity.

“This being the case, it is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings. The noble form of the forest aisles and the subdued light that penetrates their entangled boughs combine to aid the impression, and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a woody country is a disgrace to his species.

“Now, this feeling of mixed melancholy and veneration is the one of all others which (a building in this land) must not be allowed to violate. It may be fantastic or rich in detail, for the one character will make it look old fashioned and the other will assimilate with the intertwining of leaf and bough around it, but it must not be spruce, or natty, or very bright in color, and the older it looks the better.

"A little grotesqueness in form is the more allowable because the imagination is naturally alive in the obscure and indefinite daylight of wood scenery. [It] conjures up innumerable beings—of every size and shape—to people its alleys and smile through its thickets.”  

Henry Chapman Mercer

Mercer must have understood Ruskin. His buildings embody just the qualities Ruskin recommended for the “woody, green country,” especially Fonthill with its “fantastic and rich detail,” its “grotesqueness of form,” and the fact that it “assimilates with the intertwining of leaf and bough around it.” All three buildings are “old fashioned” in appearance, “not spruce, or natty, or very bright in color.” All three have been developed to take advantage of the fact that “the imagination is naturally alive” in a woody green setting. To anyone who has felt the haunting serenity and mystery of the countryside of Bucks County, these qualities seem exactly right.

But these are responses to the character of the larger place. Mercer’s buildings also embody response to smaller contextual scales. All three contributed to the cultural place: the Museum with its evocative and informative collection of tools; Fonthill with its arboretum, preserve, and tiles; the Tileworks with its preservation of one of the unique crafts of the community; and all three buildings with their epical addition to community symbolism and richness as long-lasting sources of amazement, pleasure, and wonder.

The buildings also contain the results of many other contextual responses: towers from which one may see the surrounding place in all directions; numerous terraces and balconies upon which the variation of sunlight, wind, and weather may be felt; and spaces that collect and dramatize the daily and seasonal changes of atmosphere and light.

Even minor details, both inside and out, call attention to the sun’s position, the time of day, the season, the weather, and the place. Colored tiles on columns and walls become sparkling, independent sources of light. Dark surfaces and planar intersections tend to be obscured and mysterious as daylight diminishes. Other edges and planes catch light as it comes and goes, defining places, boundaries, and layers of space. Subtle colors and textures reflect and absorb light, become brighter or subdued, and change from sandy brown to bluish gray, to olive gray, to green and grayish gold. At certain times the buildings float across the fields like ships or suddenly appear like ghosts among the trees.

The buildings also address the most ordinary problems of building within an existing place. At Fonthill, a colonial farmhouse was in the way of the new place. Rather than destroy it, Mercer built around it and over it, giving it renewed and new life. At the Tileworks, the property boundaries and access route forced development to the south and west. The building was adapted to take full advantage of this. At the Museum, opportunities were restricted by the existing museum on the north and a street on the east. Mercer connected the new Museum to the old, accepted the tight boundary on the east, and freely extended the new building south, west, and up. In each building, ordinary stie problems generated unusual, useful, and often wonderful ideas.

By embodying as many responses to their surrounding places, Mercer’s buildings become vivid. Not only are they clearer and stronger in themselves, but they also establish a powerful source of appropriateness regarding the dynamics and nature of the places joined. Our consciousness is heightened by these links with place—by its reinforcement, dramatization, and celebration. Without these responsive links, an otherwise good place remains ordinary and fails to be what it might have been.

The Vivid Frame

Henry Mercer’s Fonthill Castle, Doylestown, PA (photo by Jared Kofsky used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

I previously mentioned how central the idiosyncratic work of Henry Chapman Mercer was to Bill Kleinsasser’s conception of richly developed buildings and places. During my studies under Bill, I considered Fonthill, the Mercer Museum, and Mercer’s Tileworks to be ugly and unworthy of his extensive attention; however, since then I have come to understand what Bill appreciated about these curious buildings. Bill repeatedly cited Mercer’s eccentric designs to illustrate his lectures about response to place, historical continuity, and—most intriguingly—the construction of mental maps in the process of comprehending the places we experience. 

The following excerpt from the 1981 iteration of Bill’s self-published textbook, Synthesis, speaks to Mercer’s highly personal and unaffected approach to design and construction. There’s little doubt in my mind that a vivid frame is vastly superior to a mute and impoverished one. 

The constructional framework that forms the spaces of buildings and places is a permanent, all-encompassing, pervasive setting. As such, it influences all that takes place there. It may be vivid or it may be dull and confused.

In Mercer’s buildings, construction is revealed by surface marking, irregularity, and evidence of spontaneity. There are many anecdotal expressions of the building process. In colored tile on a ceiling in Fonthill are the names of all the construction workmen and the jobs they did (including “Lucy,” the horse “who uplifted” the concrete). Cast into the concrete of two stairways are the footprints of his dogs, Rollo and Larry, who were with him daily during the work. Still visible in the concrete are traces of experiments, innovations, and mistakes. High on the west wall of the Museum is Mercer’s right hand-print, cast in the concrete (studies of symbolism state that the right hand represents the rational, the conscious, the virile signification of action, husbandry, and manifestation). These silent expressions combine to recall vividly the human involvement in the work: the ideas, the difficulties, the occasions, the joys.

Mercer’s buildings are full of invitations to feel and to imagine. Surfaces are varied and rich, yet subtle, soft in appearance, and quiet. Light is generous and varied, yet controlled. Colors are abundant and of clear hue, but always low in value and warm, and never garish or glaring. Elements are powerful, yet capable of dissolving out of the way. Spaces are clear, yet often ambiguous and always complex.

In Mercer’s buildings each stairway and corridor and entryway is unique. Each window and room embodies and expresses its positional uniqueness and function. Each tile is handmade and tells a different story. Each fireplace is special in shape and proportion.

Mercer’s buildings are full of evidence of his day-to-day development of ideas and responses, and as they make “an occasion of every place,” as the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck would put it, they tell of an exuberance and caring that is very rare.

WK / 1981

A Splendid Torch: Henry Mercer’s Historical Connections (Part 2)

 

Moravian Pottery and Tile Works (photo by Concord, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The following is the second of two posts devoted to a lengthy passage from Bill Kleinsasser’s 1981 edition of his self-published textbook, SYNTHESIS. (Read Part 1 here). His fascination with the work and interests of Henry Chapman Mercer is perhaps no more evident than in this reading. Like Mercer, Bill disdained the downsides of modernization and industrialization upon design and construction, particularly the primacy of standardization and the loss of rich diversity associated with many historical buildings. Like other followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Mercer sought to extol the virtues of vernacular architecture, patterns inspired by nature, and the work of the craftsman-designer; however, what sets Mercer apart is the extent to which legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology influenced his approach to architecture.

Henry Mercer’s three major building designs—Fonthill Castle, the Mercer Museum, and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works—are peculiar and idiosyncratic, but they are also distinctive, evocative, and highly personal. In this regard, it’s not surprising Bill would be fascinated by their appearance, the lessons to be learned from them, and their eccentric author.

Part 2:  Layering, Light, and Caves

Layering

The second kind of imagery appearing in Mercer’s stories concerns the layering of places and objects in space, the effect of this visual complexity, and how that effect is heightened under certain circumstances.

He wrote in Castle Valley:

“The boughs frame the picture. Look under them. They give distance to the meadow, the bridge, and the hill yonder. The scene has a curious effect on me. I hardly know how to describe it.

“When I awoke I found myself lying upon a pile of straw on the floor of a barn, through the open door of which I saw a red glow, with clouds of smoke, and moving figures of men.”

In The Blackbirds:

“He was standing by an open window, looking out across the city roofs and river at the magnificent up-rolled clouds that deepened the distant blue and cast their majestic shadows over the far-off suburb of Fairfield.

“There, on mounting to the top of a flat rock, the trees opened upon an enchanting view of distant meadow, cliffs, and a village, seen across an expanse of water. The eastern sky had changed to rose color. The water’s shimmer was broken by the breeze into deep-blue paths of ripples. Clouds, more gorgeous than ever, robed in white, gold, and lavender, floated overhead.”

Descriptions similar to these appear many times in the seven stories and all of Mercer’s buildings show his response to this interest: in the deliberate creation of vistas and spatial layering inside the buildings, by preserving and emphasizing the same phenomena outside, and by uniting inside and outside through the device of in-between elements and spaces.

Mercer Museum (photo by Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Light

The third kind of imagery brought to mind by Mercer’s short stories is about light and the effects of light, particularly on things and spatial organizations whose meaning the mystery are magnified by it, such as forms and spaces within other spaces, forms juxtaposed against other forms (layering again), ruins, junk, metal, textures, colors, water, landscape, and distance.

In North Ferry Bridge:

“The place I got into showed a vast roof space, with overhanging floors and galleries, extending back into the darkness, and looked as if it might be one of the wings of a deserted foundry.

“By the light of a hanging lamp I saw piles of lumber, rusty machinery, and casters’ flasks. Another lamp, with a half-barrel and some bottles and dishes, stood on a workbench behind me. Across the floor, near a pile of boxes stuffed with straw and close to a cupboard, I saw a long wire cage, built against a wall.

“A platform leading backwards brought us to a rotting staircase choked with rubbish, and thence upward into a long, narrow yard between high walls. Passing piles of waste iron and then a labyrinth of ruinous sheds faintly lit by the moon, we reached a gate at the end of a paved alley and pulled back its rusty bolt.”

In The Blackbirds:

“As they hurried down Merchant Street to the ferry, a lurid glare had suddenly caught the eastern house fronts. Against the deep shadows in the cross streets, it gave the city a threatening, unfamiliar look, as if the lights were out of order.

“Near a rusty derrick and some blocks of stone they stopped before a black, rotting shed, with a partly collapsed roof, built close against the rock. The dismal ruin had lost its lower wall of boards, a pile of which lay along its open front in the high grass. Its dark interior, half concealed by weeds and poison ivy, revealed faint outlines of rusting machinery and contending with the glare of an opening in the rear, the flicker of a fire.”

In The Wolf Book:

“Moments passed as he looked outward upon the evening lights that streamed across the tree tops and inward beyond the borderland of dreams. The place seemed confused with things astonishing, contradictory, casual, human feet floating in the air, a cave lit by glowworm, an ash tree, the Castle of Golubacz.

“The professor pointed at the darkening sky. ‘I believe in that, no beginning, no end. What are miracles to that?”

Descriptions similar to these appear sixteen times in seven stories. Views of Mercer’s buildings, showing elements defined by light, organization in response to light, and the consequent sensorial complexity of the buildings show his embodiment of this imagery.

Caves

As pervasive and intriguing as the imagery of light, layering, and castles in Mercer’s work, and perhaps combining all of these, is the imager of caves. This imagery is obvious in the labyrinthian arrangement of Fonthill and reappears in all three buildings. Mercer visited many caves during his archaeological days, and he was alert to literary descriptions of them. His construction notebooks contain references to the “cave temples” of Ellora and Elphanta in India, and there are photographs of caves and cave-like places from his journey along the three rivers in France.

Ellora Caves, India (photo © Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

But the cave image of greatest importance to Mercer was of a gigantic chamber in Yucatan, near the Mayan ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza. He saw it while on an archaeological search in 1885. The Mayans call it “Loltun,” which means “rock of flowers.” Because sunlight and water come in through ground-surface openings in its roof, the cave is alive with luxuriant plants, oversized butterflies, bats and bees, and schools of birds flying fish-like in the moist, hazy air. The main room is pierced with dozens of water-seeking tree roots which drop, column-like, through the entire hundred and eighty feet of the space. Mercer was astounded by this cave. He made drawings of it. He took many photographs of it. Over 14 years he wrote several descriptions of it, each richer than the last. There is no proof, but these descriptions suggest that he found the memory of this cave to be a perfect framework for the spatial arrangements of his Museum, whose many separate exhibit spaces presented a difficult organizational problem. Here is his final description of Loltun, written in 1914 just as the museum was under construction:

“. . . the third garden of my story remains in my memory rather than as a work of enchantment than a fact, a thing as far beyond the reach of our efforts at imitation as a coral grows in the depths of ocean. I saw it as an unexpected wonder in the underground world of Yucatan, when we were searching in a maze of tropical caverns for geological proof of the presence and antiquity of the ancient people who had built the ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza.

“No one had told us of the sight, which we saw after a dark walk underground. It came upon us a surprise, for here at first the unfathomed cave with its white stalactites revealed by candlelight, was not more remarkable than the Wyandotte or Mammoth Caves, or Luray, or any other of the underground labyrinths of North America. But suddenly as we proceeded through the eternal gloom of a long gallery, the resemblances ceased. A brilliant expanding spot of light appeared in the distance, which for some moments seemed like a round glass aquarium full of goldfish, hanging in a dark room, upon which a ray of bright sunlight had been focused. As we came nearer, the fish turned to trees and flowers, birds and plants. We saw before us, as if looking through blue water, a vast domed room, lit only from above by a window in its ceiling, down which came the light and air of the upper world.

“Here, incomprehensible sight! Underground, out of place, was a garden, where from the subterranean soil, externally moist in a parched land, sprang a floral paradise, watered by the dripping of stalactites which unlike those other caverns, because exposed light and air, had lost their pallor and taken on rainbow hues. But stranger still, the trees of the upper forest, whose roots clasped the edge of the skylight, swung loose in mid-air like cables, or shooting down many feet, took root gain in the floor of the cave. Sounds had lost their reality by the dark doorways of this underworld. We heard the murmur of approaching voices, as of spied who had dogged our footsteps. But no one came. It was the rustling of the palm trees that reverberated in unnatural echoes, when cooled gusts of the tropical air below down from above. More real was the sight of birds that flew in and out and of butterflies that fluttered from plant to plant, while behind the light and color was a blue blackness of cave walls in fantastic shadow, as of indistinct monstrous forms of animals and reptiles sculptured in the rock. Undecipherable hieroglyphics and the massive stone bowls which stood in damp spots full of dripping water, showed that the ancient people of Yucatan had been there, perhaps as worshipers. But their hands had not made the garden. That was hewn from living rock and planted by the vast forces which make the sea and sky and roll the Earth in space.

“For many days we worked in sight of it, while it wrought its spell upon us, until at last our task was done. Then looking upon it for the last time, a feeling like regret or longing seized us, as if we might have preferred to sit down in the unearthly light forever gazing. As we hesitated, the smoke of one of the perfumed woods, which the Indians burn in the evening floated down the skylight, while it seemed that the realities of the future were slipping from our grasp. Had we, like the fabled Lotus Eaters, tasted some enchanted fruit, which lured us to forget the way home? Had the refreshing water in the stone bowls enervated us, as still waiting, knowing not why we strove as it were against an occult force, to yield at last only to the necessity, which dragged us unwillingly away.”

Loltun Cave, Yucatan (lostpylon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Found attached to page four of Mercer’s construction notebook for Fonthill was this poem written in longhand by Mercer’s friend and fellow archaeologist, Dr. Charles C. Abbott, dated August 14, 1910:

“Reincarnation of the storied past,

Skyward in majesty thy walls arise;

In strength assuring us that they shall last,

Not crumble as the common structure dies.

They tower mantled with the morning light

Proudly acclaims the past still alive,

Where Prose, grim visaged (O, the sorry sight)

Would have the world in soulless fashion thrive.

All honor then to him who raised the pile

Where daydreams wander through each classic room,

Where honest speech is never brought to trial

Nor trustful candor hears its certain doom.

Defying critics, faithfully thou wrought,

Thou Master Builder of a fruitful thought.”

Proudly acclaims the past still alive, indeed. Mercer’s historical connections were many and clear. Written with the poem was the notation, “. . . for HCM . . .in recollections of a pleasant day.”

(WK/1981)

Special Parts

 
Saloon windows, Fonthill Castle; design by Henry Chapman Mercer (photo from the Mercer Museum & Fonthill Castle website). Fonthill has over two hundred windows of varying sizes.

My weekend schedule precludes producing an original blog entry, so I am happy to share an excerpt once again from SYNTHESIS, the foundational textbook written, self-published, and oft revised by my college professor, Bill Kleinsasser. As I have said before, I feel compelled to feature Bill’s writings on my blog because his legacy is otherwise non-existent online and risks being lost to time. The audience for SYNTHESIS was essentially limited to his immediate students. An increasing number of us are moving toward the back half of our careers or are already retired, so the opportunities to directly apply the principles he espoused in our work are dwindling. My hope is by publishing his words here that some among the newer generations of designers will also come to appreciate the value base he embraced.

Though brief, the selection below from SYNTHESIS is noteworthy because of how succinctly and concretely Bill uses the examples of Henry Chapman Mercer’s design of his home (Fonthill Castle), the Mercer Museum, and the Moravian Tileworks to illustrate how we acquire spatial cognition through the organization and utilization of special parts in buildings and places.

Special Parts

To know the places we experience, we construct mental maps of them, first assembling the outstanding features as a sort of outline, then gradually filling in the details. For this process to work, a building or place obviously must have some outstanding features. And the more complex the place, the more essential they are. Even a city can be understood more easily with such features but, without them, small places can be confusing.

Special parts also contribute to the richness and expressiveness of places.

Mercer’s buildings contained many special parts. In Fonthill, there are tiles, vaults, ceilings, fireplaces, and columns that stand out. There are also special rooms, a Russian stove, and many special relics of travel. In the Museum, many parts of the collection are markers. The whale boat, the sleigh, the Conestoga wagon are all memorable, and again certain rooms, ceilings, fireplaces, and columns. In the Tileworks, the huge kilns, chimneys, and the immense fireplace in the “Indian House” are unforgettable. Mercer deliberately established all these features. All are seen repeatedly from many vantage points. Together, they provide accentuation, orientation, and variety.

Mercer often used natural light to create special places. By letting lots of it in, by controlling it, and by using spatial organization and surfaces to dramatize it, he enlivened his spaces with its shades, shadows, and highlights.

WK / 1981  

 

Clear Sub-Parts

Mercer Museum, Doylestown, PA (photo by Jared Kofsky via Wikimedia Commons)

While Bill Kleinsasser may have disagreed with the notion of designing too specifically to suit immediate needs, such was not the case when it came to responding to the particulars of site, orientation, memory, and the materials with which one builds. He repeatedly cited the idiosyncratic designs in Doylestown, PA by Henry Mercer to illustrate his lectures about response to place, historical continuity, and—most intriguingly—the construction of mental maps in the process of comprehending the places we experience. For Bill, it was essential that rich, complex spaces also offer easily understood sub-parts. Clear sub-parts are the outline of outstanding features within which details are filled. 

A visit to the Mercer Museum, Mercer’s home Fonthill, and his Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, all located in Doylestown, features prominently on my “bucket list.” I look forward to someday experiencing these unique works of architecture, with the privilege of viewing them through eyes influenced over three decades ago by Bill’s teaching. 

Elements, spaces, sub-spaces, details
If, as in speech or music, the separate parts of a spatial construct are not fully developed and clear, there will be confusion about what they are and what they offer. Spaces and parts tend to merge with others if clarity and identity is lacking. Conversely, great spatial complexity may be understood easily if parts are clear, and a whole place may result that is rich, yet perfectly comprehensible. 

While each sub-space is always part of the whole in Mercer’s buildings, each is also always clearly expressed and useful on its own. Each is intriguing in regard to the special concern that is evident in its configuration and when the smaller spaces are brought together into the whole, a complexity of memorable elements exists without confusion. 

Interior of the Mercer Museum (photo by Mrmcdonnell, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

How different Mercer’s museum would be (and how confusing) if the sub-spaces were all alike in spite of the differentiation suggested by the different exhibits, different positions, and different conditions of light. The uniqueness of each would be lost and with it the lucidity of the whole. If in all the buildings, the vaults, walls, columns, stairways, corridors, doors windows, corners, and tiles were less clear and expressive in themselves, their simultaneous presence would be like mumbled words. Eloquence is only possible when sub-parts are vivid and clear.

WK / 1981