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Sewickley Heights is one of those rarefied rustic communities found on the outer fringes of established U.S. cities. At the peak of industrialization, over a century ago, wealthy families tended to depart urban centers – in this case, Pittsburgh – with their clatter and crowding and environmental degradation and re-settle in surviving sectors of bucolic countryside where traces of agriculture still linger alongside facilities for elite recreational pursuits such as golf, tennis, and equestrianism. Thorne Residence is a robust haven in this ex-urban context.
Not unlike New Canaan (Connecticut), where Philip Johnson and several Harvard-educated colleagues built Modernist villas in the 1950s, or Potomac (Maryland), where first Charles Gwathmey and then Thomas Phifer have designed multiple structures for Glenstone – an elegant fusion of architecture, art, and landscape –, Sewickley Heights has now, amid the bespoke mansions and remnants of an earlier agrarian ideal, a striking contemporary intervention that expands the borough’s architectural heritage into our own era.
It is just about possible to spy the project from adjacent leafy roadways. A low-lying cluster including an opaque linear structure and a skinny tower is barely perceptible above the rolling topography. A third constituent part – a jauntily refurbished, barrel-vaulted barn – is clearly visible in silhouette against the sky. Now a satellite pavilion used for meetings, family celebrations, and guests, this is where the homeowners resided as the primary component of their residence was being built by a team led by Pittsburgh-based studio d’ARC architects.
Viewed from above – from a hang-glider, perhaps, or via a drone – the house is seen as a more unified design. The long east/west bar marking out the site between barn and tower is intersected on the perpendicular by lesser linear structures: a semi-interred axis with a...
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