In this second post on the residential work of Charles Haertling, I wanted to highlight the most formally unconventional works that he executed in and around Boulder. These houses toss out any preconceptions of what a house might look like or function and each one grows out of its steep, unforgiving site to create strongly organic, self-contained worlds unto themselves.

Volsky House, 1964, as seen in Life Magazine

Haertling’s organic houses share a number of generative ideas while their forms spin off in their own geometric universes. The Volsky House is place on an incredibly steep slope, prompting a highly articulated design that eschews all signs of typical domestic design. The house is entered from below by slipping under the cantilevered form into a circular garden space before confronting the front door. Ascending up through the house, the curving living space, anchored by its massive swooping fireplace, juts out into space, like a massive rock outcrop, balancing between earth and sky.

Brenton House, 1971, from Atomix Charles Haertling website

Like the Volsky House, the Brenton House is located on a steeply sloped site. Haertling reportedly was inspired how barnacles resolutely bind themselves to ship’s hulls as he searched for solutions that would anchor this house to its rugged incline. The house is designed as a series of pods centered around a central interior garden space. Like Volsky, this house is a unified whole, not so much creating daily interaction with nature, as positing itself on the land as a part of the landscape.

Kahn House, 1968, from Atomix Charles Haertling website

Each of these houses, including especially the Kahn and Davis houses, are insistent, dramatic forms in the landscape. For all their grand, projecting elements, they house quite introverted and private spaces. Like the Usonian houses, they are focused not on the street and neighborhood, but rather on places the individual and family apart from society and as part of nature. The Kahn house’s monumental, dominant view over Boulder is more akin to a raptor nest in the Flatirons than any suburban front porch. Utilizing similar natural analogies, the Davis house presents its private, turtle-like shell to the street, protecting the family from neighbors, only opening up to the foothills beyond.

It is typical for most people to think of organic architecture as composed of curving, non-linear, non-repeating spaces. Haertling’s organic houses do play with those kind of curving, circular geometries, but their organic nature I believe is more derived from their intimate associations with their sites. Haertling’s explicit use of natural forms and processes, in the case of the barnacle-inspired Brenton house, convinces me that he looked to nature not to mimic its curving forms, but rather to replicate is processes.