It's the summer of 1958. Somewhere north of Pickering, Ont., six young architects are gathered on a hill overlooking a valley. A dapper and elegant couple in their forties are describing the kind of house they want to have built here. Rule No. 1: It has to cost $20,000 or less. Rule No. 2: There are no rules; let the imagination run wild. Since the couple are both artists - he a portrait painter and she a sculptor - these conditions are hardly surprising.
Cleeve and Jean Horne have just decided to hold a limited competition to have a weekend house built on their 210-acre farm just south of the little town of Claremont in Pickering Township. Since they already have a modest house at the front of the property, facing the road, it's time for something a little bit wild to reflect their personalities. They'd always talked about building something at the back, past the barn, to take advantage of the sweeping views and they'd even drawn up some plans themselves. But, feeling they weren't qualified enough to design a house of this calibre, they stopped themselves at the last minute.
The Hornes had always been able to talk people into trying new things with painting and sculpture and enjoyed that freedom, so why not turn the tables on themselves and let someone else have that chance?
Since they were acquainted with University of Toronto architecture professor Eric Arthur, who had just finished organizing the competition for Toronto's new City Hall (and would go on to write the legendary Toronto, No Mean City in 1963), they let him organize the whole thing.
Arthur, Cleeve Horne and another architect would be the judges. Jean Horne can't remember who that other judge was, but she does remember what happened: "So the [entries]all came in and Cleeve was outvoted. We didn't like [the winner's]house at all, but we were very curious about the second runner-up, Clifford and Lawrie's house."
Mike Clifford and Kenneth Lawrie had just opened up their own architectural practice in 1956. Both had emigrated from Britain and had met while working for Page and Steele in the early 1950s.
Mr. Clifford, now 76 years old, picks up the story: "All I remember is Cleeve calling and saying `Thank you for your submission you did not win it,' " he laughs. " `But we have selected you to go forward with the design.' "
Clifford and Lawrie's design was wild, to say the least. The original entry, according to Mr. Clifford, had a much more "plastic and amorphous" concrete roof than what was finally built. Since "nobody could figure out how to build this thing, the young engineer Morden Yolles and his partner Roland Bergmann were called in to come up with alternatives.
"I was, of course, immediately interested," Mr. Yolles, 78, recalls. "I was passionate about the notion of using [concrete]shells and I suggested the hyperbolic paraboloid shell-form," he says, referring to a self-supporting style of roof made famous by Spanish architect/engineer Felix Candela working in Mexico around the same time. "The shell structure roof is a fairly simple form; it's a square, really, in plan, if you look down upon it."
A square, yes. Simple, yes, but it soars and takes on the appearance of a winged bird (like Eero Saarinen's famous 1962 TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport). Two opposite corners of the square are folded down and anchored to the ground by massive concrete abutments; the other two corners lift up 13 feet above the ground, forming a roof that's vaguely saddle-shaped. The roof is edged with steel I-beams, painted white, which resist the compressive and tension forces by turning them into thrust that travels down into the abutments. Except at the edges where it joins up with the steel beams, the roof is a wafer-thin shell of concrete two and a half inches thick. To ensure the roof doesn't tip over (from the various loads acting on it and even from the wind), it's tied down at the high corners as well: hidden in the window mullions are adjustable ties that come down vertically and anchor into the ground. "Theory was that each year as the seasons changed you would have to adjust them but they never were and have always behaved properly, beams Mr. Clifford.
A local man, Nils Eriksson, was hired as general contractor. He had done things in his native Sweden that convinced Clifford and Yolles that he could tackle this unusual roof design. More importantly, he promised to do it within budget since "most firms wanted about $70,000 to build it," says Mrs. Horne, who will turn 90 in September.
Unlike traditional houses, the roof went up before the walls and floor since it would flex a little when temperatures changed or the wind blew. The window-walls would be assembled underneath the roof afterward and attached to a movable dowel and pocket system between the roof and window casements. "I think the hornets found their way in a few years later and they had to get rid of them," chuckles Mr. Clifford. "It was fairly experimental."
Eriksson started to pour the concrete roof that winter. Thinking the roof needed more strength, he started pouring it far thicker than what had been designed. When Mike Clifford saw this, he nearly had a fit and had to convince Eriksson he was making a mistake.
"We had to rush around and find garden rakes and rake the concrete off," he recalls, "and he was so worried, this guy, because he felt absolutely sure that as soon as the formwork was stripped it would tumble down." But up it stayed and all stood in admiration of the graceful form in front of them, floating above the ground like some sort of spaceship.
By 1959, the house underneath was ready for Mr. and Mrs. Horne and their three young boys. An almost perfect 42- by 42-foot glass box underneath a 48- by 48-foot roof, the only thing breaking up the symmetry was the brick building core which poked out slightly from one exterior wall.
This core held the furnace room and two bathrooms. It also housed a kid-friendly "back" door that wasn't included in the original plans. "I realized that the front door comes right into the living room. The other door comes right into the living room and when spring comes and three little boys are out in the mud and they come bounding in, I got a mess on my hands," explains Mrs. Horne.
"So I phoned the architects and I said I'll make a deal with you: I want you to look over the plans very carefully - we're getting to the end - and we're going to let you live in it for 10 days after it's finished and see where you went wrong," she says. "We upset them so much that they hardly slept and in about three days they came back and said, `We've got some changes.' "
That same year, Canadian Homes and Gardens magazine started to pressure the Hornes about doing an article and photo-shoot. Since it wasn't fully furnished yet, the magazine's designer asked if she could bring some furniture in. Thinking this would be a good way to see what worked in the space, Mrs. Horne gave her consent, but when it was all set up she was totally disappointed with the starkly modern choices. "There wasn't one single thing that I got out of it," she says, "so we just picked up things as we went."
The house, still in the family today, is a remarkable thing to experience. Walking in, one immediately feels the sheltering effect of the concrete roof. The gentle double-curve of the hyperbolic paraboloid creates two cozy low points, two breathtaking high points and a dome-like area in the middle of the space. It's like a cool, bright, crystal cave with a panoramic view of the valley. The mahogany kitchen and brick wall of the core add texture and the terrazzo floors are clean and efficient. To create more headroom in the two low corners, the floor is sunk 18 inches in the living area and the Horne's bedroom. The furniture is a hodgepodge of comfortable sofas, homemade items (like the ceiling fixtures done with string, plaster and a deflated beach-ball) and serious designer pieces, like the two "Techno" chairs by Borsani in the upper living area. A triangular stone slab in the sunken living room marks the place where a beautiful fireplace that never worked once sat. "It smoked the house out on many occasions," Mr. Clifford says with a grin.
Mrs. Horne sums it up like this: "The people that dislike modern love it and the people that like modern love it. It's the softness of the ceiling, I think, in that it makes you sort of feel like you're enfolded." And it cost only $22,000 to boot. Mr. Yolles remembers Cleeve confiding in him that they never believed they could do it "anywhere close to their budget."
The house would be used for all sorts of parties over the years, but mostly it was just there to get away from it all and commune with nature. The Hornes, Cleeve and Jean, would continue making their mark in the art world: in addition to his bust of Shakespeare already in Stratford, Ont., Cleeve would paint portraits for U of T and select art for major corporations. Jean would continue as one of the first welder-sculptors and install a piece for the Banking Hall of the CIBC building in Montreal in the early 60s.
Clifford and Lawrie would go on to design some of the pavilions at the new Metro Zoo and then design the mammoth Manulife Centre at Bay and Bloor in the early 70s. Morden Yolles would take Yolles Engineering to new heights by engineering Toronto's tallest skyscraper, the 72-storey First Bank Tower at First Canadian Place in the mid-70s.
Like all of those things, the house will probably stand for many years to come as well. The Horne's daughter-in-law Pat, who still lives on the property, had it designated a historical site by the township in 2000.
Reflecting on the house almost 50 years later, Mr. Clifford says, "It's still a thrill. It's still a wonderful thing to look at."
Dave LeBlanc