David, Rachel and I are spending the summer with one of the oldest houses in Marfa, Texas, which has been recently purchased by the Johnson family of Houston. The house will tell us what it was and what it wants to be, before we determine how to bring it back to life for another 100 years. Currently it stands as a shadow of a time, only remembered by passing trains and pick-ups driven by Marfa's oldest generation. The house is a two story adobe home, painfully neglected but still loved by all who know it and those who come upon it on a visit to this mystical, West Texas town. The house asks us to question our ways of building, our need to preserve and how we make decisions through listening to the experts, the local crafts-people, the fourth generation neighbors, the tall, weathered cowboys, the stories lost in photographs, the artifacts we uncover on site, the dry dust inside of cool morning air, and the walls constructed of the same dirt from which it stands upon.
Our work will find itself inside the verses of Walt Whitman.
All architecture is what you do when you look upon it;
Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or
the lines of the arches and cornices?
