As an architect, Isabel Strauss often wonders about physical space. What is here now, and what came before it? What is still possible? Places tell stories — whether they are historical buildings or vacant lots — and she takes everything into consideration.
Last autumn, in her first semester of teaching at Smith College, the assistant professor’s fiery undergrads ignited her own creative spark — and she went looking for an outlet. The Gropius House, a stark rectangular prism preserved by Historic New England, was in need of a modern, modernist twist: a functional public bathroom that blended in with its flat-roofed main house in the town of Lincoln. (Anything would improve upon their midnight-blue portable toilet, ridiculously conspicuous against the stark white garage at the property’s entrance.)
Building intimacy
In November, the preservation organization put out a request for proposals for a “Bauhaus Bathroom,” designed in the spirit of the school of art founded by Walter Gropius, a German architect who fled the country shortly after the Nazis came to power. In 1937, he moved with his wife and daughter to the United States to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A year later, his home, eventually lauded as a minimalist masterpiece, was erected on a grassy rise a few miles from Walden Pond…