A collection of thoughts and hand-drawn sketches that illustrate the value of looking closely at buildings and places. by Frank Harmon, FAIA
War Clouds a Garden On the morning of February 28, the Associated Press published a photograph of a grey-haired woman in pajamas standing on a flat roof as bombs fell on her city. Beside her was a well-tended roof garden. Rose bushes and tulips bloomed. Her face suggested horror. It was early spring in Tehran. One of the reasons we build gardens is to surround ourselves with peace and a sense of…
Bringing the Outside In It’s common to hear modern designers talk about how important it is to allow “nature to come inside.” When we built our modern house, we discovered that nature had its own ideas about coming indoors. When a local fifth grader visited once, his report later stated, “The Harmon house has twenty-seven windows, six doors, and one bat house.” You can see the bat house through…
Washington Report Have you noticed that the Supreme Court building in Washington DC is now partly hidden by a veil? Contractors renovating the marble monument have flung scaffolding and scrim over the walls, obscuring the august temple front. Cass Gilbert designed the Supreme Court building in 1929 in a splendid neoclassical style, a style that was thought to represent permanence, legitimacy, and…
An Unnamed Stream and an Angel In life we are sometimes lucky to have an angel. I’m thankful for a faithful Quaker who wore a rose in his lapel every day. Years before I was born, Arthur Kirby Moore built a park along an unnamed stream on the western edge of Greensboro, North Carolina. My childhood friends and I played in the park Mr. Moore built. We made dams in the rocky creek, launched toy…
Golden Crowns It’s late October in my garden and the leaves on the 100-year-old willow oak tree are turning yellow. When the early morning sun touches the top of the tree, I see a crown of gold. Another crown is in the news. On October 19 thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris to steal the Crown Jewels. And according to the New York Times, “The thieves dropped Empress Eugénie’s hugely valuable…
Labor Day It’s Labor Day, and folks are celebrating the end of the summer. Pumpkin spice is everywhere already, the drugstore’s put out Halloween decorations, and a friend is wearing flannel. But in my garden, the cicadas are singing their hearts out. The song goes something like this: “I’m a single green male, my hobbies include singing, flying, and looking for a life partner.” If all goes well,…
Evelyn As I said goodbye to my six-month-old granddaughter Evelyn on an April morning in London, my heart sank. Then I boarded a Boeing 777 bound for Raleigh, North Carolina. When I got home, I puttered about in the garden then went to bed thinking of London pubs and parks and Evelyn and her parents. At dawn the next day, a catbird sang outside my bedroom window. I decided to do what I aways do…
Lenten Roses in Snow It’s been a winter of political sound and fury. Scattered announcements, meant to knock us senseless, fly at us like the driven hail. But in my garden one February afternoon, a bowl-shaped flower opened about six inches above the snow. My first Lenten rose. But, hey, who cares about a small, grey-green plant in a frozen garden when the country seems to be crumbling, right?…
Thorncrown We left Fayetteville, Arkansas, at 10:30 one recent morning and drove northeast across rolling hills dotted with dairy farms. We were on our way to see a tiny wood and glass structure nestled in the Ozarks near Eureka Springs. At noon we arrived at our destination: Thorncrown Chapel, built in 1980 by a retired schoolteacher “to give visitors some inspiration,” he said. That…
An Epiphany at the Loading Dock The buildings on the campus where I teach stand in a picturesque setting of stately trees and lawns. But in my student days I thought this landscape was so staid that at night I planted moon vines among the hedges. Recently I’ve enjoyed walking through the jumble of service yards, emergency generators, and loading docks that serve the main campus. One afternoon, I…
Folding Napkins I wash and fold about 12 napkins a week. Some of them are batik from Indonesia. My friends and I use them every Saturday when we get together for coffee and conversations. Folding these little scarlet and mocha-colored napkins lets me reminisce about my companions and look forward to next Saturday’s gathering. The other napkins I fold are faded and a little frayed, like me. I don’t…
Fried Chicken Backs When my mom fried a chicken, she and her four children took most of the pieces as the platter went around the dinner table. My father served himself last. And he always chose the back, the piece with hardly any meat on it. He insisted that it was the “best part of the chicken.” My father left his family’s farm to go to college in 1924. Five years later, The Great Depression…
Mrs. Garringer’s Field I woke from a nightmare at 3 a.m. recently, and to calm myself, I went to Mrs. Garringer’s field. When I’m tired or depressed or anxious, I sometimes go to Mrs. Garringer‘s field and sit in the shade of tall sweet gum trees with five-pointed leaves that turn bright purple in the fall. I’ve played ball with my friends in Mrs. Garringer’s field, built forts, and scoured…
Leaving the Porch Light On A neighbor across the street sometimes leaves the light on in his second story window. I saw its glow one morning at 4 a.m. as I left for the airport. Why did I find a light in his window so moving? Am I as a moth who sees hope in the dark? Other people in my neighborhood leave their porch lights on at night. Each house is a different style and color, and no two families…
Sailing Alone Around the World Captain Joshua Slocum (1844 - 1909) was the first person to sail single-handedly around the globe. In August 1895 he left Boston harbor in the gaff rigged wooden sailboat Spray and returned three years later. Slocum navigated without a chronometer and used dead reckoning – also known as guessing – to sail the high seas. Spray was 36 feet 9 inches long and…
A Very Large Array The road to the Very Large Array goes past the Ponderosa restaurant in Magdalena (population 808) then out into the flat grasslands of New Mexico. Suddenly you see the first of 28 white-painted radio dishes pointing to the heavens, each taller than a 10-story building. You have arrived at the world’s largest radio telescope. My friends and I visited the VLA on a sunny April…
A Fire on the Hearth We had extremely cold weather here recently. Alligators froze in an icy swamp east of Raleigh. Children ice skated on a rarely frozen creek nearby. And at 7 a.m. this morning, my birdbath was a rock-solid disc of ice. On my way to the birdbath, hot water kettle in hand, I noticed that someone had raked the leaves on the edges of our garden. I soon spotted the obliging…
Big Bin Show me how you throw away your trash and I will describe your civilization. In Switzerland it’s really hard to find trash anywhere except in a trash can. But leave a receptacle of any kind uncovered on a street in New York City and New Yorkers will put trash in it. This includes a window box, a bicycle basket, or the bed of a pickup truck. The Swiss are a law-abiding people. New Yorkers…
The Bear Lady In her youth she had been a showgirl and dancer in Las Vegas. When I met her, she lived alone in a pine forest. Kay Grayson was tall, lithe, fifty-ish, and had no teeth. “I talk to the bears,” she said. They tell me they don’t like all this destruction and development goin’ on.” Kay lived in a rusty trailer near the Alligator River in Tyrell County, one of the last wild places in…
Moth The poet Baudelaire thought that genius was the ability to revisit childhood at will. Grammy award-winning artist and ethnobotanist Justin Robinson said recently that he always tried to do “What my 10-year-old self would be proud of.” What is the genius we have as children? At age 10, we have the strength and agility to do almost anything we desire, the language to express ourselves, and,…