|
|
Fiske
Kimball: A Biographical Sketch
|
Home of Fiske and Marie Kimball
Albemarle County, Virginia
The Design Process,
1935-1937
The Kimball's intention to
build a home near Charlottesville was published in the
Daily
Progress in May of
1935. Fiske's response, to his
local land agent, H. T. Van Nostrand, Jr., indicates his
chagrin over the article's implication that he was returning
to Charlottesville permanently. Throughout the rest of 1935
and all of 1936 he "played" with design ideas for his modern
house, testing alternatives and variations on the classical
Jeffersonian model. Ready to break ground by the Spring of
1937, Kimball hired R. E. Lee to begin excavation for the
house illustrated in the three drawings shown below.
March 1937:
"..suspend construction...have different plan"
All of a sudden in the second
week of March 1937, with excavation well underway, Fiske
contacted contractor R. E. Lee concerned that there was,
"too little house," to match the cost of the materials and
utilities he had specified. So, he redesigned and drew a
somewhat bigger house in a matter of weeks. This design
incorporated significant changes in the main entrance
portico and an octagonal plan based very closely on
prototypes he knew well at Monticello, Farmington, and
Poplar Forest. This final design of the house as built is
also very close to some of the ideas he had drawn during his
preliminary creative meanderings in 1935 and 1936.
A
Jeffersonian House Realized
Shack Mountain, completed in
the Summer of 1937, was first occupied by the Kimballs in
September. The dense hardwood forest surrounded the house on
three sides (West, South, and East), and Fiske consulted
with noted landscape architect Charles Gillette about
designing gardens; nothing ever came of this, nor of Fiske's
own site plans. During their lifetime, Marie and Fiske left
the exterior as natural woodland with only some American
boxwood planted at the edges of the flagstone terraces and
front walk. Fiske Kimball died in August of 1955, following
the March death of Marie, and bequeathed Shack Mountain
estate to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Soon after the
house was purchased from the Museum by a local architect, he
in turn sold it to Professor and Mrs. Bedford Moore.
In1992 Shack
Mountain was nominated as a National Historic
Landmark.
|
