Image Credit: Trent Bell
Maine’s craggy coastline of granite ledges and skinny pine trees, along with serene inland lakes and pastoral fields, have attracted artists’ residencies for decades. The best-known architectural example no doubt is Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1961. Here, 34 single-pitched cedar-shingled structures cascade dramatically down a hill toward Jericho Bay and beyond to the Atlantic Ocean. True, living accommodations for 50 to 80 at a time are basic, offering either dorm-style rooms or cottages with two to four beds. For Haystack, as for other such communities, shared baths are common, and the complexes are open only in the summer, without heating and air-conditioning.
Now the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (EBF) in Rockland, designed by Baird Architects, offers an alternative, albeit on a very small scale: a crisp, linear structure provides four artist’s apartments where painters, sculptors, photographers, performing artists, and composers can work and live for short terms year-round. While it adheres to Haystack’s modernist wood-frame vocabulary, EBF elevates the living standards (sorry, Haystack) by providing single-occupancy studios with attached bedrooms and baths, as well as a shared kitchen and living/dining area down the hall.
The foundation was formed in 2015 after its organizers—artists Joan Beauregard and David Ellis, who moved to Rockland from New York City in 1979—had died. At first, EBF rented space for four grantees at Lincoln Street Center, a former high school building that had been converted to over 40 studios. Even with sleeping modifications and the school’s unusual artistic claim to fame—sculptor Louise Nevelson had been a student and captain of the basketball team—the foundation’s executive director, Donna McNeil, envisioned a purpose-built enclave where selected artists could work and live more comfortably. She settled on a site next to the house that Ellis and Beauregard had built for themselves in the 1990s, which is now EBF’s headquarters. Adding to this complex meant tearing down two houses, obtaining city zoning approvals, and even buying a city street. Meanwhile, McNeil found her architect through an RFP process.
The principal of Baird Architects, Matthew Baird, is almost a Mainer himself. He had come up to Maine from the Philadelphia area as a boy and continued summering in the state while starting to design a number of houses there. During Covid, Baird and his family stayed—where the air is so pure, it should be bottled and sold—and Baird opened an office in Northeast Harbor to supplement the one in Manhattan.
McNeil was impressed by Baird’s Maine houses as well as the firm’s New York–based work, such as its renovation of The Kitchen, a legendary performance space, and a newly built townhouse with a weathering steel facade. “The architecture has a humble-chic quality,” McNeil notes. Most important, she adds about Baird and his team, “they listened to us.”
Baird and the lead associate-in-charge, Ines Gulbenkian, matched the dimensions of the Lincoln Street studios with 19-by-21-foot spaces and 12-foot-high ceilings, in a bar-shaped structure of cross-laminated timber (CLT) for walls, ceilings, and roof slabs. Heavy cedar planks delineate the exterior, inspired, according to Baird, by historic Finnish churches and the architecture of Alvar Aalto, in whose office he studied when it was run by Aalto’s widow, Elissa.
The studios are staggered in plan along one side, so that the artists’ spaces are entered through recessed front porches framed by weathering steel panels and cedar. At the same time, the walls of the bedrooms angle outward, allowing space for a glazed slot to bring daylight into the sleeping quarters.
On the opposite side of the building, a long narrow corridor, sheathed in polycarbonate glazing on the exterior and plywood on the inner wall, links the four studios to a common room. “We were thinking of Alison and Peter Smithson’s ‘streets in the sky’ housing,” says Baird. A band of clerestory windows, set back from the corridor, extends upward from the plywood wall and—together with four pyramidal skylights on the roof, rotated to face north—illuminates the studios. Solar panels clad the south sides of these prominent monitors, while the two other sides of the sawtooth structures are coated in copper panels.
At the north end of the bar-like structure, the common room features an abstractly planar but majestic fireplace with a curved herringbone-brick interior, which encourages residents to gather by the concrete-raised hearth on cold nights. Across the court, the architects wrapped an L-shaped gallery of CLT with space for artworks and performance pieces around the existing foundation house.
The architect’s choice of a CLT structure along with wood-fiber insulation meant that the 7,300-square-foot project sequesters 107 tons of carbon. In aiming for a goal of net zero energy for the all-electric housing, Baird received grants from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, which was founded by artist Helen Frankenthaler. As a result, those solar panels supply electricity for air-to-water heat pumps, which take in ambient outside warmth and convert it to radiant heating in the concrete floor slabs. A supplemental air-to-air heat pump system ensures that comfortable air can be distributed through the studios’ ducts and vents. To compensate for Rockland’s aging stormwater infrastructure, the team installed a green roof with low-maintenance planting to absorb rainfall. In addition, copper pipes, inserted in the staggered profile of the facade, divert surplus water to the ground.
Both architect and client agree that the artisanal precision of the construction, notably expressed in interlocking dovetail joints, owes much to the general contractor, Casey Hufnagel. McNeil adds, “We did not want a spectacle. We looked for refinement and a sense of skilled craftsmanship typical of Rockland, which has schools for furniture making and boat building.”
In its elegant mix of forms, materials, and the interplay of space and light, the residency raises Rockland’s artistic profile, already high because of the Farnsworth Museum and its paintings by Andrew Wyeth and family, as well as the recent Center for Maine Contemporary Art, designed in 2016 by Toshiko Mori. EBF sends an important message: that inventive architecture should be intrinsic to the creative process.