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"View Slideshow\n\nDesigning a building with no intention of ever seeing it through construction has been the province, and prerogative, of \"paper architects\": theorists, academics, those who might set the design world ablaze through the sheer incandescence of their draftsmanship. Piranesi had little sway as an architect\u2014yet his etchings of romanticized interiors and vistas, displaying exquisite gifts for both fantasy and delineation, freed the imaginations of 18th-century builders. Le Corbusier's portfolio of early sketches made such a splash in the 1920s that subsequent unrealized projects, published internationally, were easily as influential as his built work.\n\nThe parallel universe of paper architecture aside, when an architect designs an actual building for an actual client and an actual site, and it does not reach completion, something more than just a seductive exercise is remaindered to the designer's archives. \"There is a definite sense of loss,\" architect Jaquelin T. Robertson acknowledges. \"It's easy to get caught up in the geometry, in the pattern on the page\u2014certainly, elevations and plans and sections have their own art. But you can't confuse drawings with the real thing.\n\n\"It's important to control the machine: to eliminate any bloat that compromises the beauty of traditional architecture.\"\n\n\"A house isn't really understandable until it settles into the site: until it's built, furnished and lived in for four or five years. The reality is not on paper but in how a building sits on the land\u2014how it relates to trees, to slopes, to water, to gardens.\"\n\nManhattan-based Cooper, Robertson Partners was retained to create a summer and weekend residence on an 18-acre former potato farm in Sagaponack, New York. Robertson, principal in charge, and project architect John R. Kirk designed the house around the programmatic specifications of a young family. When those requirements suddenly changed during design development, the house became emblematic of the family's altered course, and thus unbuildable in the mind of the client.\n\nThe property lies amid acres of agricultural reserves on eastern Long Island, whose topographic mien is mostly one of flat expanses and open fields. In their site plan, the architects fashioned an agrarian compound with a perimeter hedgerow to reinforce and enhance the larger setting\u2014and used the breadth of that landscape as a datum for the proportions and scale of the building. \"The house needed to hold the land,\" Kirk points out. \"A cottage on this property would look like a thumbtack.\"\n\nEncasing 18 rooms in 18,000 square feet, the structure is a T-shaped scheme with two main spaces (porte cochere and living room) in the central axis. The essence of the plan is the visual \"straight shot\" from the entrance hall through the living room and out past a wide wraparound porch to the lawn and wildflower meadow.\n\nThe elevations are defined by the massive Dutch gambrel roof and by three dormers on the southern side and the cutaway arch of the porte cochere\u2014under its own prominent gambrel roof\u2014on the northern, formal side. (The arch, in this rectilinear amalgam of Dutch colonial and Shingle styles, is an eye grabber from east and west vantage points as well.) Wood shingle cladding rolls seamlessly across the roof and deep overhangs and, in a banding pattern that echoes the window graphic, establishes a thematic element apart from the repetitive forms of the building itself.\n\nEach of the primary living spaces on the first floor opens directly onto the colonnaded porch, which is carved out of the body of the building and supports the overhead roof massing. The second floor is actually situated in the roof (\"A virtue of the gambrel shape,\" notes Kirk, \"is that it's habitable\"). Children's wings occupy gambrel dormers at either end of the house; the south-facing master suite commands the central, balconied dormer, which lies opposite the guest suite/playroom atop the porte cochere.\n\n\"Houses today must accommodate big programs and big desires,\" says Kirk. \"It's important to control the machine: to allow for all the modern functional imperatives while eliminating any bloat that compromises the beauty of traditional architecture.\" The rooms are arranged en suite, with no corridors, so that each area receives natural light and can work in various ways. \"Nowhere in the house would you feel like you're simply between two spaces,\" he says. \"You'd always be somewhere that has a quality all its own.\"\n\nFrank Lloyd Wright amassed some 200 unbuilt residential designs in his career and never pretended to be sanguine about the ones that got away (\"office tragedies\" was his characteristically vivid term). John Kirk, however, takes the longer view. \"Everything you do becomes repertoire,\" he explains. \"It's all about the architectural ordering systems and the relationship of one space to another. Maybe that relationship doesn't make its way back into another design verbatim, but it had its moment and will, in some iteration, have another.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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