merry christmas

Wishing you happiness, peace and love on this blessed day.

One of our recently completed homes lovingly rendered in gingerbread for a Christmas party.

creche course

Over the almost thirty years we’ve been in business, we’ve had the honor to be invited on a lot of inspired design journeys. We’ve run the design gamut, from grand estates to humble sheds. A request we received last year, however, was a first. The Episcopal Church of the Ascension here in Montgomery, Alabama asked us to design a Christmas creche to replace their well-worn model. This was a commission to replicate in miniature one of the most famous shelters in history! The project went to the capable hands of staff member Charlie Caldwell who, not only designed the seasonal tableau, but also built it.

Charlie’s thoughts on the design follow:

The major inspiration for the Ascension crèche comes from the crèches that are traditionally displayed in Italian churches. In our country the most widely known examples are the crèche at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and one displayed each year in the East Room of the White House, both are 18th Century Neapolitan.

Like those crèches, the Ascension Crèche references paintings and sculpture from the Renaissance in Italy and Germany. Many artists used the device of placing the stable in the ruins of a classical building. This symbolizes the triumph of a new order: the founding of a new empire of peace and love built on the ruins of Imperial Rome, the empire of fear and temporal power. Details from both Botticelli (1445 – 1510) and Durer (1471 – 1528) are used in this design.

The lower parts of the crèche reference the “Prisons” (Carceri), a series of engravings by Piranesi (1720 – 1778). The prison images in this context call to mind scriptural references which assure us that Christ frees us from the “prisons” of fear, sin and death.

In the Italian tradition, the Holy Family travel the nave to reach the tableaux on Christmas Eve attended by the Heavenly Hosts (represented in our crèche by a single adoring Angel) and a young shepherd boy and his flock. On Epiphany, the shepherd has returned to his field and the Magi visit the Holy Family with their traveling companions in tow consisting of two camels and an elephant. The guiding star shines brightly overhead.

We wish everyone a happy, peaceful and restful holiday season.

All photos by Kris Kendrick
All Content on this Site is the Property of McAlpine Tankersley Architecture. Copyright © 2012 McAlpine Tankersley Architecture, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

moving on

The home of Greg Tankersley and Mary Robin Jurkiewicz originally published in Veranda magazine, September/October 2005.

My family and I are in the process of selling and moving out of the 1914 Beaux Arts estate we’ve called home for the past eleven years. The reasons are twofold: planning for the future and a good dose of architectural ADD (given our history, our attention span is apparently a decade). My wife, who is also an architect and an avid amateur gardener, has been riding the emotional roller coaster of leaving a well worn and beloved nest. In addition to her many talents, she is also a poet. The following is a mourning soul bared, easily identified by anyone who’s suffered a haven loss:

Letting the House go

I’ve cultivated the ground
(I’m still cultivating the ground)
Inspired, by the selling process, to do more:
To cultivate me.

Historical, architectural gem,
Not without shortcomings,
But who isn’t?
It’s time to address mine now.

I’ve sold it in my mind
A hundred times;
Snatched it back just as many,
Ambivalence reigning supreme.

How can I let it go?
In all its compelling beauty,
Further coalesced by compliments
From friends and strangers alike.

But, it’s time to cultivate me.
Big gorgeous home, shared lovingly
With all who’ve entered in…
Been there, done that, check.

And check well done:
Excellent stewards of history we’ve been
Preserving for the next one.
Giving a garden, too, but that’s heartache dealt with another day.

As negotiations slink seriously nigh,
I know I’m ready.
“God Bless This House”
And God bless me.

Mary Robin Jurkiewicz

I feel pretty

Ask most contemporary architects what they think of decoration in architecture and you’re apt to elicit a diatribe of snobbery. As a matter of fact, the ornate branches of architecture are sometimes treated like a flamboyant uncle at the family reunion: fun to look at it for a bit but not to claim or take seriously. I think, however, that decoration and ornament have a distinct place in the building arts. After all, Architecture’s inspired roots have always been planted in the soils of the natural world. Even the staid classical orders and designs of the Greek and Romans were hymns mused of nature. One need only look around the garden, forest or ocean and know that Mother Nature is hardly a Shaker – she seems to shamelessly revel in the Baroque.

A true piece of Architecture that lacks some type of whimsical beauty is like a room without accessories: coldly bare and lacking something for the eye to caress; these rooms look unused. Similarly, buildings void of even the smallest decorative gesture lack a generous and habitable sensibility. Rooms without accessories look uninhabited and buildings without some sense of decoration look uninhabitable. I dare to mention the word “pretty” in terms of discussing architecture because “pretty” is seen as the F-word of architecture. But I’m complimented when one (of our houses or rooms) is pronounced as pretty; that means the eye of the describer has found something within which pleases the heart.