Why Architects Should Care About The Al Purdy House

The following is a piece that I wrote some time ago about the Al Purdy House and its potential for architectural inspiration. I came across it shuffling through some old files today and thought that while old it is still worthy of tossing up here. Enjoy!

It looks like the house built by the poet Al Purdy may no longer be in danger of demolition.

Architects should rejoice at this news. Although it might not be apparent at first, this rather ramshackle A-frame shell has the potential to teach us a great deal about the very intimate relationship that a person can develop with their house, especially if they design and build it themselves, as in Purdy’s case. While this may seem antithetical to the practice of architecture, if we are interested in how our buildings frame people’s lives then we could stand to learn a great deal from paying close attention to artefacts such as this house which constitute intense sites of dwelling. The intensity of Purdy’s dwelling, by which I mean the specific emplacement of his life in Prince Edward County in Ontario, the sort of living that could not have occurred elsewhere, is revealed in his poetry, which makes frequent reference to the house.

In a way, Purdy was a real architect’s poet. A lot of his best work has to do with preparing the land and building things. In his poem ‘The Country North of Belleville’ he writes, And where the farms are / it’s as if a man stuck / both his thumbs in the earth and pulled / it apart / to make room /enough between the trees / for a wife / and maybe some cows and /room for some / of the more easily kept illusions, evincing his keen interest in settling, both making him pertinent to architects and making him a very Canadian poet. Canada remains a continuously settled territory. We currently accept around 250,000 new immigrants per year after all, each of whom must partake in some form of settling: of sticking their thumbs into the fabric of what is to make room for their new foundations.

In Purdy’s poetry there are two primary architectural themes: an old derelict mill, his Tintern Abbey, the carcass of which he returns to over and over again as a means of accessing the past, of accessing those who have come before; and his own house, built largely out of re-claimed materials on land that he cleared himself. He effectively plays these themes off of one another, one being a sign of the past and the other a gesture towards the future. In his poem, ‘An Arrogance’, he refers to building his house as changing the contour of the earth, and fencing-in, even abstracting a portion of the sky, a very grand, even hubristic declaration of his presence on earth. This subtle negotiation of the old and the new which runs throughout his life’s work should be a dance very familiar to architects.

And in this house, this peg on which to hang the ego, where, as he once wrote, the door knob was a handle he held onto the sky with, Purdy transitioned into being more than a mediocre poet, in fact in this house he became a great poet. Despite travelling all over the world and eventually moving to the west coast, the A-Frame is both where he wrote his best poetry and is the frame against which much of it is set. It rightly deserves to be a national monument. It was not so long ago, however, that the fate of this house was in jeopardy. After Purdy died in 2000, his wife, now in her mid-80’s, could only hang onto the place for a few more years before the ongoing battle to keep it from returning to the soil became too much. Fortunately her very threat of putting the property on the market, which would have inevitably led to the house’s destruction, caused such a wave of outrage from those of us interested in Canadian letters that it was quickly taken off of the market. This wave eventually built into a full-on formal campaign to save the house, obtain heritage designation, and turn it into a writer’s retreat for up-and-coming talent. This effort has resulted in a string of fundraisers as well as a recently-published monograph on the house containing drawings, photos, reminiscences and essays, the proceeds of which will go towards the house’s preservation and maintenance.

Let us hope that this fascinating architectural site remains accessible for many years to come, and also that it will continue to evolve in new and unexpected ways along with its new program as young writers encounter it and alter it through their own intense dwelling.

Anyone interested in the campaign to save the house can find out more by visiting the site, http://www.alpurdy.ca.