In the Backfill piece that I wrote recently, The ‘Not So Successful’ Contractor, (May 2019) I promised to relate the story of how I was given this fun book. It happened while enjoying the honor of a visit to Karen North Wells’ Underground Art Gallery in Brewster, MA. The artist’s late husband, Malcolm Wells, was a renowned architect, author, illustrator, speaker, and activist, who was widely recognized as the father of modern earth-sheltered design.
As she showed me her around her studio and paintings, she pointed out the ten tree-trunk pillars buttressing a first-of-its-kind earth-supporting steel roof (above which grows an abundance of flowering plants and grasses). After proudly showing off a wood-burning stove that she had recently replaced, as well as the building’s well-hidden composting toilet, we entered a brightly lit room at the far end of the gallery. The space—mostly filled with picture-framing materials and boxes of books—she identified as her late husband’s architecture studio.
Standing in front of the great man’s drafting table, I shivered with excitement. Although I’d long known of the legendary man, who happened to live just up the road from me until his death in 2009, I’d never met actually met him. I’d read his books, The Earth-Sheltered House: An Architect’s Sketchbook and Recovering America: A More Gentle Way to Build, and I’d even seen Malcolm Wells a few times at my favorite coffee shop in a nearby town. But I’d never had the guts to introduce myself.
At the end of my visit to the gallery, Karen gave me a copy of her husband’s illustrated parody, The Successful Contractor (How to Make it Big in the Building Game), as a parting gift. The book is Wells’ answer to his own “painful experiences” with the inevitable bad apples one is bound to run into as an architect, builder, or homeowner. A mutual friend once described Wells as “a gentleman from another time,” which I can sense is very true. But this book also shows that he had one helluva sense of humor. When I read through the book, I laughed out loud and knew that I had to share it with my fellow contractors out there.
I never even shook his hand, but I miss Malcolm Wells so much.