74 
House & Garden 
RELATING THE HOUSE TO ITS SITE 
True Relationship Comes from an Appreciation of the 
Importance of the Profile of the House 
MATLACK PRICE 
H APPY relationships of house and 
site do not come ready-made. They 
are the result of someone’s careful 
thought and study—of the owner’s or the 
architect’s, or of both in an intelligent meet¬ 
ing of minds. Too many builders start the 
house impatiently, or without due considera¬ 
tion of the site until it is too late. Not a 
few seek to impose on an unwilling site a 
preconceived choice of a certain kind of 
house, quite unsuitable, and wonder, after¬ 
ward, what is the matter. 
Most people are definitely conscious of 
the effect of a house that is well-related to 
its site, although the actual relationship 
eludes them and leaves them only with the 
feeling that there must be some inherent 
architectural magic in the house itself. 
If all building sites were alike, and all 
possible houses were alike, it would be sim¬ 
ple enough to evolve a formula, and a for¬ 
mula, unfortunately, is what a great many 
people seem to want. It lulls worry over 
doing the wrong thing—if you have enough 
faith in the formula. Fortunately the mat¬ 
ter is not so simple, because even a broad 
A thickly wooded hilltop site, which 
suggests a house that will rise 
above the trees and carry on the 
steep profile of the hill 
grouping of kinds of site would show a 
great variety, which, in combination with 
the also great variety of kinds of house, with 
all minor variations in both site and house 
taken into consideration, would result in a 
number of relationships to be computed 
only by higher mathematics. I believe they 
call it “permutations and combinations”, 
and a good hand at it can show you several 
thousand combinations evolved from four 
or five elements. 
Varied as are the possibilities in relation¬ 
ships of house and site, however, the matter 
is not impossibly complicated, and, like 
many other things, is fairly soluble by 
means of simple intelligence. 
Eight sketch illustrations were made for 
this article, not with any brash thought of 
thus portraying all the possible building 
sites imaginable, but rather with the inten¬ 
tion of isolating this small number for 
(Continued on page 140) 
An old village site, where vener¬ 
able elms and weathered gray 
stone walls direct the builder’s 
choice to a house that will be 
“true to type”. Sketches by Frank 
J. Forster, architect 
A house for the crest of a bare 
