Architect Turner Brooks is a big fan of the 17th-century church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Designed by Francesco Borromini, its alternating convex and concave interior walls seem to expand and contract, as if breathing. Brooks sees no contradiction between immobile structures and the s ensation of movement — that’s clear in his own buildings. A resident of New Haven, Conn., who taught for 40 years at the Yale School of Architecture, Brooks, 83, launched his career in the early 1970s in Vermont. He designed about 15 structures in the Green Mountains, most of them houses, and still summers in the Starksboro home he created for his family. That house is a modest 1,640-square-foot structure from the 1960s that he renovated and added to several times. Nest joined him there to tour it and some of his other Vermont houses in anticipation of Brooks’ forthcoming book, Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, due in October from New York Review Books. Brooks in the living room of the Brooks House in Starksboro Credit: Bear Cieri A collection of essays, one of which was previously published in the Paris Review, the book describes Brooks’ formative experiences of space — from playing inside his father’s overcoat to building projects at Yale. That’s where he studied art history as an undergrad and graduated from the architecture school in 1970. Other essays explore his experiments with shaping space. Some address his Vermont buildings that use wood-stud construction — an economical and elastic system that he learned while helping to build his early houses. Brooks was a witty and generous host despite managing the pain of sciatica. His double-height living room is a light-filled space resembling the prow of a ship; it compresses and narrows to a blunt end, as if heading toward the nearby pond. The house and a poorly heated structure across the road contained his office until he moved it to Burlington’s Pine Street in 1985 and finally to New Haven in 1996. For the architect, Vermont was “born out of the cozy womb of Grand Central Station,” he said. As a child growing up in New York City, Brooks and family would take the night train to North Ferrisburgh, where his parents’ college roommates, the children’s book illustrator-and-author couple Clement and Edith Thacher Hurd, would meet them at the station and take them to their house. (The Hurds later moved to Starksboro, where Brooks designed their son’s family house and lives on an adjacent property.) Brooks slept in a room papered with proofs of Clement’s illustrations for Goodnight Moon. “The tension between the supposed coziness of the interior and the vastness of the landscape and outer space” outside the window in the story “had a big influence on me,” Brooks recalled. He started to think of houses as vulnerable vessels confronting a larger emptiness, but less lonely for their ability to move — or appear to. He started to think of houses as vulnerable vessels confronting a larger emptiness. Brooks’ first Vermont house, for potter Caroline Glazebrook in Starksboro — who paid for the design fee mostly in pots — really did move. It incorporated a trestle that ran on a small track to carry pots between the studio and a kiln house. In an early boost to Brooks’ career, the influential architectural historian Vincent Scully featured Glazebrook House in his 1974 book, The Shingle Style Today: Or the Historian’s Revenge, which argued that recent architects were taking up the shingle-wrapped vernacular forms of the 1880s. (Brooks had taken a class with Scully at Yale and was friends with his son, Dan, also an architect.)  Glazebrook House then landed in the January 1978 Architectural Record, and the coverage continued: Numerous issues of AR as well as architecture magazines in Germany and Japan featured Brooks’ work over the next 25 years. In 1991, Architectural Digest included him in the special-edition The AD 100: Architects, its “exclusive guide to the world’s foremost architects.” Stylistically, what he was doing met the moment: inventing idiosyncratic spaces that were neither modernist nor truly postmodernist — both of which approaches he dislikes. Instead, Brooks “made poetry with very simple, vernacular systems — wood studs, gabled roofs, double-hung windows, clapboard, shingles,” according to architect Michael Wisniewski, 73, of Duncan Wisniewski Architecture in Winooski. That approach “fit comfortably in a 200-year tradition in Vermont,” he said. The Yellow House in Charlotte Credit: Courtesy of Turner Brooks Dave Sellers and other Yale-grad architects building homes at Prickly Mountain in the Mad River Valley also used wood, but, Wisniewski added, their aim was different: to create completely new forms that broke with the past. Though Sellers graduated five years before Brooks, they knew each other socially and would meet for impromptu hockey games in the Green Mountains, Brooks said.  The vernacular forms Brooks used in the McLane House, a short walk down the road from his Starksboro house, required the expert carpentry skills of Mike Burgess and Peter Laffin. Built in 1976 for Brooks’ sister, Joan McLane, the sherbert-orange creation has a humped back section and double chimneys rising from a promontory-like front; a gabled crow’s nest caps the whole. The house seems larger than its 1,620 square feet yet recalls a small structure pulling a vintage teardrop camper. “I’ve always thought of it as this vehicle that was crossing the meadow,” Brooks commented. “I had gotten very interested in trailers because, in motion, they didn’t look so isolated.”  McLane welcomed us into the house, where shelves of antique toys from her collection line a living room wall. We then headed up the dirt road to the home of John Flanagan and Amy Wild. It’s a carpenter-built structure from 2009 for which Brooks designed a spacious living-area addition in 2024. Steps run on both sides of a right angle that traces the original corner of the house. Flanagan and Wild work at the University of Vermont and Higher Ground, respectively, and play in the Wet Ones!, a surf-rock band. While Brooks settled into an armchair at the narrow end of the angled space — a version of his own living room — Flanagan recalled hearing about a Yale architecture professor who lived down the road a few years ago. When Flanagan got in touch with him, Brooks came up from Connecticut in a few days. The couple’s only requirement: “We didn’t want a box,” Wild said. Unusually, the project came in under budget. A small cardboard model Brooks made of the house and addition sits on the couple’s coffee table. According to Wisniewski, Brooks typically made 15 to 20 models for each project. Whenever they threatened to overwhelm his office, Brooks said, his Yale students would bring a pile of them to Vermont, and “we’d set them on fire like a Spanish armada.” Our next stop was the Peek House in Monkton, designed for Tim Peek and Meg Dennison in 1988. Its third owner is Ben Raphael, founder of Wooden Hammer, a custom woodworking shop in North Ferrisburgh. The barn-red house originally rested in a field that slopes down to a lake. Raphael built a studio beside it — which Brooks, who imagines his buildings as solitary travelers through their environments, finds regrettable. The Peek House, which was featured in architecture magazines internationally, looks different from every angle. A bedroom-and-bath tower on one end does not prepare visitors for the sweeping curve of the double-height living room wall on the lake side, which is capped with a long, sloping rectangular roof. Windows appear in graduated sizes to accommodate the roof, whose lowest corner, supported by thin steel columns, hangs over a deck. What kind of moving vehicle this assemblage evokes is anyone’s guess. From some aspects, it recalls the working coal plant of which Brooks made a series of charcoal drawings during grad school. The late architect Michael Cadwell — Brooks’ first employee, from Pittsford, who went on to direct the Knowlton School at Ohio State University — describes Brooks’ houses in an article in Log magazine as “shapeshifters that call forth lighthouses, power plants, ships, barns, covered bridges, Roman monuments, helicopters, coupes, trailers and trains.” As a group, Cadwell continued, they “drive forward, a migratory herd. Windows and doors slide off-center as if blindsided by the houses’ accelerations.”   Brooks’ defiance of linear regularity appears in his interiors, too. Walls take gently angled turns. Second-story elements project into first-story spaces, like houses inside of houses. Interior elements narrow as they extend, in a nod to forced-perspective baroque-era structures. “His buildings house a strange, quivering, bent space inside, shaped by torque, tension and pressure,” architect Ross Anderson comments in an afterword to the 1996 monograph Turner Brooks: Work. In Brooks’ only rectangular, timber-frame house, from 1982 — an old barn that was stripped down and moved to Thompson’s Point in Charlotte — he created an interior central stair that gets dramatically narrower as it rises. He also added a long, windowed porch that shrinks, Escher-like, as it travels toward an exaggeratedly small door at the far end. The roof of another Charlotte home, Yellow House, from 2000, narrows, rises and tilts to the side all at once, creating a series of constantly changing spaces inside. The architect’s sole Burlington structure, built in 1983 on the northeast corner of King and Battery streets, features a single column in front of a curved façade and one of those narrowing stairs inside.  Brooks’ inventory isn’t huge, but each of his buildings is “something completely unique and personal while fitting into recognizable, long-standing traditions, Wisniewski said. “I only wish there was more of it.” ➆ Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect by Turner Brooks, New York Review Books, 144 pages. $22.95. Available October 27. The original print version of this article was headlined “Design Built | With a forthcoming book, architect Turner Brooks revisits the Vermont houses from his early career” The post Turner Brooks Revisits the Vermont Houses of His Early Career appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less