OUR ARCHITECT'S VISION

TWO years ago we were contacted by the Benedictine community in Valyermo, California known as Saint Andrew's Abbey. We were told that the monks were interviewing architects to design a new group of monastic buildings in the hills above the desert northeast of Los Angeles. A good friend, who turned out to be an oblate and long-time associate of the monks offered to take us there. Early one morning we found ourselves driving north, out of the city, up through the top of the San Fernando valley, through hills to the Pearblossom Highway, and along the desert's edge to a point where Pallett Creek winds up into a small valley in the foothills, a place where the creek opens into a wide and rocky wash. While the actual entry to the monastic site is the point along the main highway where a modest sign marks a narrow driveway, the more tangible sense of arrival occurs a bit further along, where an archaic and gnarled apple orchard gives onto a large grassy pasture ringed by giant willows, poplars, and cottonwoods. Here, a visitor becomes aware that he has arrived at the center of a scattered collection of simple ranch buildings informally detailed and much the color of the bleached desert landscape. Against this still and radiant setting, there exist the occasional movements of monks in black robes walking about singly and in small groups, and a kind of silence.

UPON reflection, this relative silence, and stillness, causes one both to be at ease and to consider the visual landscape with a heightened intensity. The subtlety of colors, the whiteness of sunlight which picks out the smallest shadow with precision, the enormity of the sky, and how its limits are serrated against the tops of very rocky peaks all become slowly absorbed. From the stillness emerges the possibility to consider a certain timelessness, a timelessness that seems real enough to cause one to question motion. Are the poplar leaves actually fluttering, or not? Is the occasional hawk drifting almost imperceptibly, or is it frozen still against the dome of the sky? To arrive here is to be unmoored by the usual dogmas of physical space and time, and one's bearings seem to easily drift into an interior state of procession, silence, and infinite time, which, of course, is not time at all as we think of it.

AND so it was deeply satisfying, yet in a way, problematic, to be asked to design a set of important buildings which for all their specific requirements, their liturgical content, and their long awaited upgrades, looked to be, in effect, desired improvements on a landscape which is not likely to be improved.

SO for more than a year we made occasional visits to the site, enjoyed ongoing conversations with the community, and reviewed alternative design strategies with the monks [...]

Design Statement, Scott Johnson, February 2003