Bridging the Seasons with an Exploration of Architectural Hybrids: Houseboats and Covered Bridges

By Hetty Startup

In the mornings, I walk to stay healthy and witness a world that can feel fresh and new each day (how does nature do that?), though I also walk to ease anxieties about the upcoming mid-term elections, now under two months away. 

My walks are sometimes accompanied by a kind of free association, prompted by my surroundings. My mind turns almost by default to artwork–especially paintings–another source of attention derived from years of teaching art history, working in an art museum, and having parents and friends who are writers and artists. Lately, the paintings of Claude Monet’s houseboat surfaced. This Impressionist painter used a specially designed boat for painting expeditions on the Seine just outside Paris. Exploring his paintings of this subject, I wondered about other kinds of structures like this, part one thing and part another– architectural hybrids, if you will. A human-made version, perhaps, of the hybrid creatures of ancient myth, like centaurs and mermaids.

Houseboats and Studio Boats
First, a little more about the houseboat concept. Monet’s friend, Charles-François Daubigny, also an artist, apparently gave Monet the idea of a studio that could be rigged up inside the bow of a small boat. It allowed him to paint directly from the River Seine and could be moored at the river’s edge when not in use. Below we can see the artist and a fellow traveler “guzzling” from a large stoneware jar.

Another friend, fellow Impressionist Édouard Manet, painted Monet working on his houseboat. Was he also on a studio boat when he made this painting, or was he making oil sketches ‘en plein air’ intended for further work in a landlocked studio setting? By looking at this image below it is perhaps easier to see from the reconstruction how a boat could actually function as an art studio on water.

Houseboats and barges seemed to be rather romantic ways to find accommodation when I was in grad school; one friend even lived on a barge in north London and would tool around the Regent’s Canal, occasionally mooring up at one ‘basin’  or another for a change of scene. 

The houseboat is an ancient form of housing, with examples from the Bible (Noah’s Ark), ancient Egypt (where they were used on the Nile and continue to this day as dahabiyas), and ancient China, a country with a long tradition of junks and dragon boats. 

In eras closer to the present day, houseboats were the standard for colonial British families in places like Kashmir, near the Himalayas on Lake Dal. “[a] place…sourced by a spring called the Satadhara [and believed to be associated with the “goddess Parvati, suggesting that the lake was once considered sacred….” In the age of the Mughal rulers of India before British occupation, it was common for Mughals in the north to refuse outsiders permits to build on land here, hence the preponderance of houseboats. 

These houseboats are moored on the shore alongside historic floating gardens, and today the lake is known as the Lake of Flowers. The whole area today is contested territory by some and historically was under both Afghan and Sikh ownership. While the houseboats have always been temporary structures as the lake freezes in the winter, this amazing place now faces many environmental pressures, especially from eutrophication (the over-enrichment of a water body with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which leads to massive algae growth and oxygen depletion), as is the case with some of our own local lakes. Lake Dal is still on my bucket list.

Another place with a long tradition of houseboats (made famous by the movie Sleepless in Seattle) is Seattle, a West Coast seaport with an extensive archipelago and calm inland waters like Union Lake or Elliot Bay. Here, houseboats often began as floating bunk or cookhouses for workers in the local logging and lumber industries. They remained popular with workers who were associated with the IWW – the Wobblies as places of refuge after World War I, when progressives were hunted down in the Palmer Raids as a result of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Today, Lake Union features newer, fancier houseboats that are popular with architecture fans.

I couldn’t find historic houseboat settlements on the Connecticut River in the Valley, although several well-established marinas exist; older groups seem prevalent in Old Lyme and Old Saybrook, CT, in the summer months on South Cove. 

I grew up knowing about the floating homes moored at London’s Chelsea Pier (made famous in the etchings of the American artist J.M. Whistler and, more recently, featured prominently in the TV series The Chelsea Detective). As a housing option, they seemed both unconventional and affordable, although they are certainly beyond many people’s grasp these days. Like the sleeping booths on long-distance railroad trains, small loft spaces in apartments, and temporary summer cabins and huts, these modest dwellings have captured my attention over the decades. 

Covered Bridges 
In a similar category as the houseboat–to my way of thinking– is the covered bridge, which acts both as shelter – looking like a house or hut – from the elements as well as a safe thoroughfare across either a river or a railroad.

I have been wondering whether Hampshire County has any covered bridges, as they are a wonderful sight to see when traveling around western Massachusetts. 

While southern New Hampshire has many covered bridges, several are scattered around Franklin County in Massachusetts (in Conway, Ashfield, and Colrain), and I was surprised to learn that our county has only one, in Ware, connecting the town of Hardwick over the Ware River. It does have some considerable significance, though, as the structure literally connects Central and Western MA. 

The bridge, located in Ware’s small industrial village of Gilbertville, is near Rose 32 Bread (see also here), a European-style bakery. It is one of the first wooden lattice truss bridges patented by Ithiel Town, one of America’s first architects and civil engineers. All bridges like this are known today as Town Bridges. Born in Thompson, CT, Town trained with Asher Benjamin, whom I have mentioned in past columns in the Indy. Town also has the distinction of appearing in a famous painting, reclining on top of a colossal classical column in Thomas Cole’s painting The Architect’s Dream, that he commissioned in 1839.

I realize fall is still officially a week or so away but there is a nip in the air and we are just now experiencing memorial events associated with the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is a good time to think of a better future. In another kind of pause or bridge of sorts, September itself is like a bridge between two seasons – summer proper and fall proper – and it moves me to celebrate these examples of architecture that are a rich kind of infrastructure in our midst. Structures to cherish..