Contributor
By Susanne Beck, Belmont Voice correspondent
Belmont resident and prize-winning architect Charlie Rose is known for an uncluttered aesthetic, meaning he has plenty of empty shelf space in his modernist home perched high on the town hill.
Chances are, though, his office is a bit more crowded now after the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) announced his firm was to receive two more of their annual design awards – the firm’s 29th and 30th from the Society over the years.
“[It’s] pretty amazing,” said Rose, who set out to be a physics major in college only to try an architecture course on a whim. “Honestly, I couldn’t believe how easy it was. So, I took the easier path. I thought physics was really hard.”
This year’s citations are for two residential projects that reflect the eponymous Charles Rose Architects’ commitment to energy conservation and what Rose describes as a clean, sculptural approach to building and landscape design.
“We’re very much about designing buildings that are in relationship to the surroundings, whether it’s the natural landscape or the urban grid of a city,” he said. “Each project is about form making and the interaction between that and light.”
A glance at the photographs of the recent award winners bears this out.
Konomore House, located on a rise above the harbor at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, just a stone’s throw from the beach, was commended “for teasing out the potential of the site by creating unexpected interior and exterior spaces – simply, modestly, and beautifully.”
When Rose first visited the lot, an existing structure was there that he recalls—with a laugh—was “kind of a train wreck.”
“It didn’t make the most of the site,” he recalled.
There was a beautiful stand of woodlands. The firm took advantage of this by raising the public rooms of the house – the dining room, the kitchen, and the living room – to the second floor of the residence.
“It really makes you feel like you’re in a tree house,” Rose said. “You’re right in the canopy of the woods, all deciduous. Just this lovely sea of green that you look out onto.”
The second project is Copperdrifts, an all-electric, energy-efficient home in Provincetown that received an Environmental Impact Advancement Commendation for its energy efficiency, regard for the landscape, and use of natural and durable materials.
Rose acknowledged that “permitting is always a nightmare these days, but this [home] is on a naturally occurring dune, so we had to take great care not to disturb the dune or the original landscape that includes a beautiful kind of oak shrub forest.”
“It’s a very quiet building,” he added. “You sort of weave your way up through the project and arrive at a very large terrace that overlooks that whole end of the Cape, attuned to all the different qualities of light there. And in the massing of the building, you can see the form of the land,” he said. When thinking about the best material for the exterior, he chose copper.
” It ages beautifully with a shifting patina,” he said.
Copper also frames his Belmont home, a wrapped Sears Roebuck kit house from the 1930s with a modern addition. Rose fell in love with the lot despite the house.
“You didn’t see the extent of the yard or have a connection to any part of it, so we demolished the garage that was there and built a new glass wing looking out to what is a beautiful, sloping site,” he said. “The addition steps with that topography.”
The renovations were distinct enough to earn the house a supporting role in Robert Downey Jr.’s 2014 movie “The Judge.”
“It’s a bit of a quirky house,” Rose said. “But it’s fun as hell to live in.”
Asked to identify some of his favorite structures in town, he quickly pointed to Town Hall and the building next door.
“We have a couple of really beautiful old brick buildings, as well,” he said. His preferred style, though, tends toward modern, sculptural creations from famous practitioners like Michael Van Valkenburgh and Dan Kiley, who made their names from a keen understanding of how landscape and light interact with architecture.
“There are so many buildings that I love, I don’t know where to begin,” Rose said. “In Bilbao, Spain, for example, I was blown away by the Gehry building. I ended up visiting for three solid days just so I could figure out how it all went together.”
