Flying used to seem a lot funner back when you could pack your carry-on with local beer and wine and back before anxiety about missing flights turned things sour for me. But one of the things I still do like about flying is the view from above and the chance to pick up local papers. I like reading newspapers and look forward to cruising the departure lounges on layovers and the first class cabin when deplaning, picking up the news others have discarded, always hunting for an interesting local paper in lieu of something bland like the USA Today. Last week I flew to New Jersey and was happy to scrounge discarded papers from New York, Colorado, and my favorite paper of all, the San Francisco Chronicle. The leg from DIA to EWR had a decent-sized first class, and as I was one of the last to get off I just went down the aisle picking everything up. (Rich people too cool to throw their trash away?) When I got to the hotel at night, while waiting for dinner, I scanned through my loot and glanced at The Wall Street Journal, normally semi-interesting at best, but there, under the heading “MANSION”, was a five-column picture of something that looked awfully familiar: the Wren House.
The Wren House, as I have heard it called – Wren being the owner’s daughter – is a single-family home more than a year in the making which occupies a corner lot about eight blocks from where I live in Rose Park and which I bike past about four times a day. Rose Park is about a mile from downtown and stocked almost exclusively with modest (think 900 square feet) post-war Craftsmans and bungalows, although lately there has been a spate of additions, new second floors, and tear downs (four of which are within a block of my own house). Tear downs are tricky business; the original home was obviously insufficient, but what replaces it, especially in an older neighborhood of small homes on small lots like Rose Park, takes a lot of hard to fit in. There are notable exceptions, but the Wren House is not one of them.
My issue here is not entirely with the Wren House but also with the Wall Street Journal, which wrote an interesting but odd story. The M3 feature had four photos and roughly 25 inches of copy; the copy contained intriguing details, such as home’s building price (about $2 million), the cost of the home’s German-made sound-proof glass ($300,000), and the owner’s occupation (computerish whatnots). There were also some choice quotes from the owner and from the journalist: (a) "’I like disrupting things, changing it up, but not to the point where it's distasteful’"; (b) "’I thought this house would add something to the community.’"; (c) “’We knew it would be a little controversial. But we wanted to expose people to modern architecture—right where they could see it,’"; and (d) “Since the home was finished in March, they say they haven't heard any complaints.”
I like houses and buildings and architecture, and believe they have to be interpreted in context. The Wren House is impressive and a work of art, but in the context of Rose Park, the Wren House has all the charm of (and a remarkable resemblance to) an electrical substation. Where the journalist came up with (d) above is a bit of a mystery, as none of the neighbors were quoted in the story, and the only local to make an appearance other than the owners is the director of the Missoula Art Museum, which hopes to host a fundraiser in the house. What was the writer expecting exactly? Picketing? Prayer vigils for the un-built?
Did the writer even make it to Missoula? I took these photos this morning:
(My apologies for the picture quality. The sun is kinda low these days.)
Here’s the story:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579182130505692414
And here’s a link to a photo gallery accompanying the online version of the story:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579195853968234872
And here’s a picture of a baby asleep in the back seat with a fig newton in his sweaty palm:
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