RHA Memory House_Carillon Tower_Robert Hutchison.jpg

A tower for bells along the Wye River

Wye Landing Memory Houses by Robert Hutchison Robert Hutchison’s Memory Houses is a speculative project that investigates mortality and memory through the lens of architecture. Situated along the banks of the Wye River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, architectural typologies such as dwelling, chapel, lighthouse, and memorial weave together spatial narrative about loss and recollection. Distant as well as more recent architectural memories make cameo appearances in the Memory Houses: the stave churches of Norway and the Great Mosque of Córdoba that Hutchison experienced as a child; the lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay; the timber grain elevators of the Palouse; the Colosseum and the Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome. The project was significantly impacted by Hutchison’s experiences while a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from January through July 2017.

One of the nine projects that make up the Memory Houses.

The Carillon Tower is a building as well as an instrument. The building is played by a carillonneur through the use of a keyboard located inside a timber clad playing chamber, situated at the center of the tower, surrounded by the bells. Pivoting wood fins held within the steel frame of the tower structure provide the carillonneur the ability to tune the building’s acoustic properties, while balancing the sound of the bells with wind and weather patterns. The structure casts a minimal shadow on the landscape. The only way up or down is an extremely steep ladder.

“. . . thanks to the long reverberations of each bell, the music piled up on top of itself, stacking high into the sky and creating spectacular overtones and dissonances.”

– John Cage

Design: Robert Hutchison, 2017 - 2018
Drawings: Sharon Fung, Marika Meinen, Hillary Pritchett
Models: Xiaoxi Jiao, Jackie Hensy, David Hansen
Visualizations: Tristan Walker
Location: Wye River, Wye Mills MD

Sources: Trajan’s Column + Torre Asinelli (Bologna) + Scaffolding