Hand of the Builder

In a recent book, CU glacier scientist Tad Pfeffer enshrines the old-fashioned simplicity of historic New England summer homes.

Tad Pfeffer is a big thinker. This spring, for instance, the CU-Boulder professor helped lead a research group that mapped nearly 200,000 glaciers around the world to better understand how much seas could rise as the planet warms.

A fellow at CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Pfeffer has visited glaciers and ice sheets from North America and the Arctic to Europe, Greenland and Antarctica. He was one of two key scientists featured in the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary “Chasing Ice,” which tells the story of photojournalist James Balog’s (MGeog’77) relentless effort to document disappearing glaciers and ice caps in Greenland, Alaska and Iceland

Pfeffer’s passion for glaciers is crystal clear. The built-world inspires him, too — especially the history and architecture of middle-class summer homes in New England in the decades just before and after 1900. His book, The Hand of the Small-Town Builder: Summer Homes in Northern New England, 1876-1930, published in April, harkens to a time when middle-class families with extended summer vacations — often the families of clergy, teachers and academics — began building small camps and cottages at scenic spots in rural New England.

A small house built to suit their particular needs was attractive and since these families generally were not rich, local craftsmen adapted their skills to simple but comfortable, attractive and highly imaginative vernacular architecture.

Vacations were then a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. The Industrial Revolution had created jobs that allowed one worker to be replaced by another temporarily, and shifting cultural values made an occasional period of rest and recreation more acceptable, Pfeffer says. By the 1870s and 1880s, a variety of summer vacation experiences had become attainable for many Americans.

Middle-class families often were attracted to nature and outdoor activities — hunting and fishing, for example, and the aesthetic experience of lakes, forests and mountains — but all were constrained to some degree by money. So they sometimes (but not always) built small — as small as 600 square feet.

“A small house built to suit their particular needs was attractive,” says Pfeffer, a professor in CU’s civil, environmental and architectural engineering department. “And since these families generally were not rich, local craftsmen adapted their skills to simple but comfortable, attractive and highly imaginative vernacular architecture.”

In a typical transaction, a customer first engaged a local master carpenter.

“Many of these men never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born,” says Pfeffer. “But they were very well read and could take elaborate architectural ideas and boil them down to something very simple and affordable.”

The carpenters drew on uniquely American styles like the Shingle Style used in larger, ornate buildings, often featuring rustic, continuous wooden shingles, roomy porches and asymmetrical design that blended into the landscape.

Pfeffer, who was raised outside of Boston, was part of a family that rented summer homes in Randolph, N.H., on the northern edge of the White Mountains, and usually stayed in a different one each year.

“I was always fascinated by how the houses were put together,” he says. “I had a strong sense of the effect these homes had on me, and how I felt when I was in them.”

As a child he marked time not by years, but by his summer stays in New England vacation homes.

“I believe we have the opportunity, even today, and in part through architecture, to follow the example of the small-town builders, to simplify and distill our lives, to identify and preserve essential elements and discard others,” Pfeffer writes in his book. “Like the houses, which became simpler without losing their aesthetic value, we can diminish our burdens without impoverishing our souls.”

Pfeffer became fascinated with craftsmen who plied their trade a century ago, including John Boothman, who built both modest summer homes and larger, year-round houses in Randolph. Working with a small crew, Boothman and builders like him could finish a house over one winter, often with nothing more than rudimentary drawings, and have it ready for occupancy in the spring. Simplicity, economy and lack of pretension marked all of them.

We have the opportunity, even today, and in part through architecture, to follow the example of the small-town builders, to simplify and distill our lives, to identify and preserve essential elements and discard others.

“These summer homes were not set up for entertaining, but were to be admired and enjoyed by people who lived in them, and not by people who happened by,” writes Pfeffer.

CU-Boulder geologist and professor Robert Anderson of INSTAAR attended graduate school with Pfeffer at the University of Washington in the 1980s.

“I knew the photography for his book would be spectacular,” he says, “because Tad knows the power of still images. But what I really loved was the way he was able to weave so much of the history of the region into the text. It is truly a scholarly book, with photographs and text that mirror the beauty of these small houses and infused with wisdom that comes from thinking hard about the lifestyle these houses themselves reflect.”

Pfeffer’s scientific message to the world is that the melting of small glaciers and ice caps, and not the melting of the great ice sheets, will dictate sea-level rise in the coming decades.

“It’s not like watching an old friend age,” Pfeffer told CNN last year in an interview about the decline of glaciers as Earth warms. “It’s like watching an old friend disappear.”

And so it is with his fond acquaintances, the middle-class summer homes in New England.

“I have returned to look at these houses again,” he writes, “perhaps to understand what makes them what they are to me, but at least to study them and fix them in my memory before they disappear, displaced by renovation and lost to memory — as a person on waking tells a dream before it slips out of consciousness, out of memory, simultaneously remembered and forgotten.”

Photography by Tad Pfeffer (houses); Ethan Welty (Tad Pfeffer portrait)