Looking to write a bestseller, craft a poem, or compose a symphony?
This is the new place for inspiration, silence, and devotion to ideas and brilliance. Come with me for a private visit.
Far from the hullabaloo of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the dramatic new Middlebrook Studios offer writers a quiet room of their own amid the solace of the California landscape.
Architect Cass Calder Smith’s concept: artful and green modern silhouettes for fostering creativity.
The studios are the first ground-up addition to the highly regarded Djerassi Resident Artists Program, founded in 1979 by Dr. Carl Djerassi, famous as one of the inventors of the contraceptive pill.
This summer, four fortunate and talented writers, jury selected, will settle into their chic new digs in the Santa Cruz Mountains for five weeks to work on their book, play, poetry, thesis, or film. No pressure.
The sleek new Middlebrook Studios--four cedar-clad cabins shaded and sheltered by a freestanding steel roof that carries solar panels—are arrayed along a hilltop to take best advantage of day-long sun and expansive views.
Each cabin, styled as a modernist take on the California farm-building vernacular, is an airy 340 square foot refuge that includes an 18 x 25 feet work/sleep living room with a sleeping alcove, a bathroom and a closet. Writers dine together with other residents at the central Artists’ Barn to foster a collegial and mutually encouraging atmosphere so no kitchen is provided.
“My aspiration was to create ‘micro places’ that would support and inspire individual writers and offer total privacy, yet would also be a cluster of residences with a sense of unity and purpose,” said architect Cass Calder Smith, whose twenty-two-year-old San Francisco firm CCS Architecture is known for rigorous modernist designs for residences as well as award-winning restaurants (LuLu, Perbacco, Terzo).
The interior of each cabin is designed for working and relaxing, with a writing desk aimed at the views. Behind this is a sleeping nook with a queen-size bed that can be curtained off. The floors are multi-colored carpet tiles that were an unmatched assortment handed off from the CCS sample room. The firm also yielded up an assortment of bathroom tiles.
The cost, $650,000, was raised from educational foundations and private individuals. The program has provided over 2,000 artist residencies, and currently serves more than one hundred artists each year.
The new studios are set on six hundred stunningly beautiful undeveloped ridgeline acres. On the western horizon the Pacific Ocean, a smudge of silver, is visible from the front windows and private terraces.
"These are the first new structures to have been purpose-built for the artists program. We had to make a significant statement and I’m happy with their modernity and compatibility," said filmmaker Dale Djerassi, son of Carl, and a founding trustee of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
Cedar siding on the walls and roof that is unfinished so it will age with time, like the other structures on the property.
The four cabins are covered by one continuous roof that symbolically links them. The roof emphasizes this accord and holds solar panels to establish a net zero electrical load for the buildings. The carbon foot print of zero.
The cabins are aimed at the views, but are slightly skewed a few degrees from each other so the arrangement has a looseness that deliberately contrasts to the linear rigidity of the canopy roof.
“I planned separate cabins to ensure the most acoustical and visual privacy possible, and this plays well to writers wanting monastic peace and quiet and privacy on their terrace, “said Calder Smith.
The galvanized steel canopy structure that sits on ten concrete piers shelters the pathways that lead to each entry.
Rectangular cutouts in the roof create patterns of sun and shadows onto the cabin roofs and the landscape. They also align with skylights in the cabins so the sky can be viewed from the live/work spaces.
When inspiration flags and muses fail, writers can hike on trails through ancient redwood forests or gather in the communal barn to commiserate with composers, visual artist, choreographers or musicians who are also part of this program.
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Architect Cass Calder Smith |
As it happens, Cass Calder Smith grew up in the seventies just east of the Djerassi retreat, near Woodside. His family moved from the East Coast to a determinedly self-sufficient hippie commune, the off-the-grid Star Hill Academy for Anything. It was situated on 1,800 wild acres in the Santa Cruz Mountain foothills. The other neighbor: Neil Young at his Broken Arrow Ranch.
It was at the commune, on the site of an abandoned timber mill, that Calder Smith picked up a hammer and nails and helped his family shape discarded off-cuts of wood and salvaged windows into their perfectly crafted cabin, a refuge from the world.
Smith’s knock-about carpentry and inspired adaptive use of old lumber also inspired his commitment to architecture and his drive to gain two architecture degrees at Berkeley, supporting himself with carpentry along the way.
It was also in that early landscape that Calder Smith, roaming the wilds, first met Dale Djerassi. A chance recent re-acqaintance with Djerassi, son of Carl Djerassi, lead to his selection as the architect for the studios program.
Venerable artists’ and writers’ retreats like MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire (which has inspired talents like Aaron Copeland and Carson McCullers) and Yaddo in upstate New York (Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein) were inspirations for Carl Djerassi when Diane Middlebrook (later his wife) first proposed the program more than thirty-four years ago.
The Djerassi program is now the largest and most prestigious artists and writers-in-residence retreat in the West.
Carl Djerassi planned the new studios as a memorial to Middlebrook, a noted biographer and Stanford professor emerita.
These new artist cottages will allow the program to increase its capacity to support and enhance the creativity of artists, by fifty per cent, said Dale Djerassi.
“The triumph is that these studios got built,” said Calder Smith, who worked closely with Tim Quayle at CCS Architecture, the project architect. “It was on a tight budget and there were many obstacles from county approval to funding. It was completed, thanks to Carl Djerassi who initiated it, and to Dale Djerassi and the board member George Wolfson, an architect, who kept their hands on the steering wheel throughout. The real test now will be how the writers who stay there and write will judge them. I hope they’re inspired.”
Credits:
Cass Calder Smith, AIA
www.ccs-architecture.com
Cass Calder Smith established the architectural firm that bears his name in 1990. Born in 1961, Smith earned his Bachelor and Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. A native of New York City, he has lived in California since 1972. As the son of an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and a California landscape painter and designer, his early years were influenced by both Greenwich Village intellectuals and rural California artisans.
Smith is recognized internationally for his architectural and interior design projects. Firmly based in the modernist idiom, Smith draws
inspiration from history’s great architects and cities as well as the epic filmmakers of the last century. Bold imagery and intricate detail are characteristic of his designs balanced with experience and common sense.
Smith and his work have won numerous awards and he has been recognized in The New York Times, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Architectural Digest, Dwell, Interior Design and Abitare, among others.
GREEN CRED:
CCS Architecture closely followed the Build It Green program's established GreenPoint Rating system, which is the standard for San Mateo County where the retreat is located. The system rates resource conservation, energy efficiency and healthy materials, among other considerations. While a minimum of 50 points is required for new construction in the county, the Middlebrook Studios exceed a rating of 100 points.
Photography:
All photography by Paul Dyer, San Francisco
www.dyerphoto.com
paul@dyerphoto.com
Phone 415-640-0810
All photography used with express permission of the photographer.
Djerassi Resident Artists Program