Josephine Wiggs was a founding member of The Breeders. She collaborated with Vivian Trimble (Luscious Jackson) to make the album Dusty Trails (which includes a song written for and sung by Emmylou Harris), and music for the film Happy Accidents by Brad Anderson. Recent work includes the soundtrack for a short film by internationally acclaimed choreographers chameckilerner, commissioned by Performa09, which premiered at SFMOMA. Current projects include the soundtrack for Spectral Houses, a documentary about the Modern houses in Wellfleet.
CCMHT Kugel Gips House
Wellfleet, MA
Josephine Wiggs, Musician-Composer
September 18. 2011
I anticipated a seven-hour drive from New York City, but what with one thing and another it took ten, and googlemaps rattled my nerves in the final stretch by sending me on the dusty and rutted Old King's Highway, which seemed as if it couldn't possibly be right. I was relieved to reach Long Pond Road and find the K-G marker, headlights illuminating a tunnel of trees as I turned into the driveway, finally coming to a clearing where the house and Peter were waiting. Emerging from the car, the silence and darkness outside the city is always a surprise, and on the lawn, dimly visible and ghostly, a spectacular troop of Shaggy Parasol mushrooms add to the enchantment.
The next day I set up my recording equipment on the slab of the built-in desk in the office, looking out into the trees, and beyond them, to Northeast Pond. What could be a more perfect work space? I had just returned from England, where I had recorded piano (also in a secluded house in the countryside) and my plan was to arrange these pieces and record additional parts. While in England, I went out every afternoon on my bicycle looking for mushrooms, not to eat, but to photograph, and so the presence of the Shaggy Parasols was especially exciting.
My week-in-residence at Kugel-Gips was an opportunity to be immersed in the landscape that had inspired this and the other Modern houses in Wellfleet, with the idea of creating a soundscape for the houses, their surroundings, and the harmony between the two.
The last few times I've visited Wellfleet it had been cool and damp, so it was delightful to find the weather sunny and even warm, despite it being mid-September. After a couple of hours work, I went for a bike ride. Ocean View Drive to Lecount Hollow Road to buy a baguette from the French bakery, but, being Monday, the bakery was closed. I got one instead from the small bakery next to the General Store, and then rode south on the Rail Trail. I was amazed to see an astonishing array of fungi growing on the banks of the trail, puffballs nestling in the grass like eggs, and dozens of classic umbrella-shaped toadstools, including both Yellow and White Fly Agaric, False Death Cap, Powdercap Amanita, and Onion-stalked Lepiota.
The next morning after coffee on the deck, I walked down the slope from the house to the pond's edge and launched a canoe. This pond is shallow and verdant, a dense underwater forest. I glimpse a fish here, a turtle there, emerging for a moment and withdrawing again. Around the perimeter, reeds stick up out of the water like bright green hatch marks indicating the edge. At the far shore, a row of small trees grows along a narrow ribbon of of sand, beyond which is Great Pond. I drag the canoe over, and as I push off, the white sandy bank drops off precipitously to empty blackness. I wonder how deep the water is, without wanting to think what the answer might be. Great Pond is so large it is like being on open water, very different from Northeast Pond. Approaching the other side, I notice that beyond another sandy ridge is another pond, Turtle Pond. I pull the canoe over into it. The water here is black too, but it is a stagnant, gothic blackness. Leafless branches poke up through the inky surface, and my oar snags on things submerged and invisible, and catching on Waterlily stalks and the pointy leaves of Arrowhead, with its spikes of white three-petaled flowers. A family of crows carouses noisily from tree to tree, almost as if they are following me, their garrulous cawing echoing across the water.
Back on Great Pond, I row toward a tiny cottage on the rim of the eastern shore. As I get closer, I see that the windows are blank sheets of bleached plywood - the house is closed-up, with no sign of occupation. There is a lilliputian fence, which I step over to look at a lilac-tinted Field Blewit growing improbably in the sand. The cottage is perched on a sliver of land separating Great Pond and the smallest of this family of ponds, Southeast Pond, whose surface is a patchwork of Waterlily pads on a background of algae-green water.
On my last day, my friend who lives in Wellfleet says it is likely the last day for swimming: rain is forecast, which will lower the water temperatures. After a short drive, we walk along a path through lichen encrusted trees, with bright red Russulas and rusty-colored Red-Capped Boletes growing in the springy grass, until we emerge through dunes to an open expanse of sand and sky - Balston Beach. To celebrate the end of my trip and the end of summer, we swim. We inch our way across the breakers and into the Atlantic, it is not cold at all. After rinsing off the sea-salt, we head to the almost perfect circle of Duck Pond. Along the path are Yellow Fly Agaric, more Boletes, and just before we reach the pond, a Beefsteak Polypore, sticking out of the mossy roots of a birch tree like an enormous tongue.
As evening purples the sky, we drive westward to the end of Bound Brook Island Road and walk onto the beach, where the dusky light reflected by the Bay has erased the line between sea and sky, creating a seamless luminous landscape. Behind us, tucked into the dunes, the Hatch House silently presides over another sunset.
My week in the Kugel-Gips House made me more aware of the two contrasting landscapes which are in proximity to the house, as well as how I experience these landscapes. There are the intimate, enclosed spaces of the pitch pine forests and the ponds which are encircled by them. Within the forest, the uniform verticals of the trees seem architectural, like columns, and evoke in one a sense of interiority, stillness and seclusion, as if in a sacred space.
At the edges of the land, where it meets the ocean on one side, and the Bay on the other, there is expansive, open space. Here, in contrast, the lines are horizontal, extending to a vanishing point. A white strip of sand stretching to left and right, the lip of the water ceaselessly advancing and retreating, frothy ribbons of surf atop the thick cerulean brush strokes of the sea, the pencil line of the horizon. And beyond this, the sky, an infinite expanse.
I wanted to try and convey in my music my impression of these landscapes, which, though very different, both possess a harmonious simplicity and calm (in profound contrast to the spaces most of us inhabit most of the time). My approach is minimal in both instrumentation and in structure, using simple motifs and linear repeated forms to create a mood of measured, quiet reflection, and using minor keys and unresolved, open harmony to evoke an atmosphere of immeasurable space.
CCMHT Kugel Gips House
Wellfleet, MA
James Royce, RLA
May 23, 2011
I arrived late Sunday afternoon after a cold ride out on the Triumph. Riding through the damp sea air it felt more like an earnest November ride than a carefree summer jaunt to the outer Cape. The smell of fires drifting through the Cape Cod air was familiar and comforting while my curiosity and excitement for a week at CCMHT kept me on the edge of my seat. The ride to the outer Cape is always enjoyable, especially aboard the ST, and I located the house with some help from a friendly local, a trait that proved to be characteristic of the area.
I quickly settled in and while having a glass of wine in the office space was immediately struck by the unique relationship between the site and architecture. The building’s slim form, openness and light stance upon the site create a special relationship which enables the landscape to activate and empower the interior spaces with an energy that could otherwise not be generated by the architecture itself. Gracefully perched above a pond with a view through the native scrub forest that is so emblematic of Cape Cod, it is the ability to reside in this place, within this structure, and in this relationship to nature that creates the synergy between landscape, architecture and life. If one of the goals of modernism was to provide a setting which fosters creativity, harmony with nature, and a lifestyle which can be personally enriching but marked by simplicity, then this could be measured as successful.
I was thrilled to be selected for the CCMHT scholar-in-residence program. My concept was to revisit the original ideals of modernism, consider how they could inform current design dialogue, and interpret them for the challenges facing today’s designers. But as soon as I dove further into the topic I realized there was such a wealth of information and so much study had been done it actually became a little daunting. How could I possibly contribute to this expansive body of work? What could I add that would be relevant?
Quickly realizing a week is not a long period of time and this should be more a journey of exploration, I had to relax my target fixated approach to become more open and holistic. A combination of selected reading, writing, reviewing earlier photography of modernist works in Berlin, and periodic breaks for photographing the Kugel Gips house and Cape Cod landscape became my formula. It took a few days to arrive at this and at least loosen, if not abandon, my production oriented mind set from the office.
It is such an unbelievably beautiful and calm place, it’s really a shame it took me several days to shake off the office mind set. It’s so quiet and the structure has such a close relationship to the place, it creates a tranquil and inspiring environment to be in. The challenge is to let go of anything that might prevent you from fully experiencing the simple but powerful energy of this place. After awhile one cannot help but surrender to the calming influence embodied here.
Once moving beyond the anxiety of my production oriented thinking, I had a wonderful time reading on the back deck overlooking the pond. After reading just a few hours I realized one could write an entire dissertation on the original goals and ideals of the Modernist movement, but for the purposes of my exploration I focused on some key quotes from Walter Gropius. They struck a chord with me and I was amazed at how relevant they still are. Since this was the basis of my concept at CCMHT it was a logical starting point for my journey;
(Excerpts from Masters of Modern Architecture by Edwin and Joy Hoag):
“I want a young architect to be able to find his way in whatever circumstances; I want him to independently to create true, genuine forms out of technical, economic and social conditions in which he finds himself, instead of imposing a learned formula onto surroundings which may call for an entirely different solution. It is not a ready-made dogma I wish to teach but an attitude toward the problems of our generation which is unbiased, original and elastic.”
“Act as if you were going to live forever and cast your plans way ahead. By this I mean that you must feel responsible without time limitation and the consideration whether you may be around to see the results should never enter your thoughts.”
“For whatever your profession, your inner deep devotion to the tasks you have set for yourself must be so deep that you can never be deflected from your aim. However often the thread may be torn out of your hands, you must develop enough patience to wind it up again and again”.
What was the ultimate goal of the Bauhaus: Fulfillment of a utopian vision, economic reform, social justice, rejection of oppression through class upheaval? The Bauhaus was certainly successful in revolutionizing design and highlighting many of the social issues they sought to address, but were they able to achieve a more fair and equitable society? If the Modernist movement is viewed as a failure by some, was it simply because it never received mainstream acceptance or was it because it failed to achieve their greater overarching goals of social reform through design and technology?
Minimalism in architectural form originally was intended to be a rejection of the things classicism came to represent: a bourgeois and capitalistic society with a stratified socioeconomic class. The elimination of architectural adornment with classically inspired forms was meant to strip away all it represented and create a new identity and way of life for the people. Today’s designers must also seek to address not only these same issues within today’s more complex society but also those of sustainability within the larger global framework.
I revel in the opportunity afforded to me by a week at the Kugel-Gips house (thank you Peter!) to take time to study more closely the original goals and ideals of the early modernists and reflect upon these to consider how they could inform design dialogue, highlight or address current issues, and be applied in a way that is relevant and practical to the problems we face today; not just ones of design but also of environment, society and economy. Can we address them through design and technology to achieve equality and real sustainability for the future?
My goal in this exercise is not to find a simple fixed answer but rather through a series of observations and conclusions develop a set of underlying principles upon which to reference and base future design. This is very much a personal journey to understand the history, goals, achievements, and failures of these visionaries who sought to make a better world for people through design, and how I might learn and benefit from their experience to pursue the same goal within my career and lifetime. I am very grateful to the CCMHT for this exceptional opportunity and look forward to working together in the future to explore these ideals and achieve common goals.
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